thrilling video: practical common lisp :-)

Hey, people tell me to refrain from caring about lisp. I wont!

Go watch this cool video... a Google-Tech-Talk by one of my heroes,
Peter Seibel (who authored a fantastic book on lisp...)

and, just in case somebody cares: have a look an Peters' computer...

Groovy or JRuby for your Java projects?

imho the answer must be given in relation to YOUR project - I'm currently in favor of Groovy, as keeps much closer to the core Java platform. JRuby, on the other side, has a rather large Ruby-community as backbone...

A small writeup of the topic, including some interesting comments, comes from Kimchy.

For you guys loving photos, an interesting stack:



(from http://img279.imageshack.us/img279/7933/556328734c0eba44ec2bw.jpg)

They forgot, what a shame, the fantastic Groovy-in-Action, one of the best programming books I devoured within the last year(s).

fantastic GTD workflow poster

instead of drawing my own... i found fantastic GTD workflow posters at Anabubula. For example their gorgious GTD-workflow poster (free download).



Sample 1:




Sample 2:




The whole site looks cool :-)

HUGE collection of GTD tools

Via LifeHacker I found this impressively huge collection of
GTD-Tools.


Update: A while ago Gina (from Lifehacker) blogged about ThinkingRock -
not pretty, but their 4-color-striped GTD overview is impressive.


Update 2: My favorite GTD-tool is kGTD, based on OmniOutliner. The reason why I stick to this in favor of the clean-and-shiny stuff is simple: The outliner lets me add notes to entries and is extremly flexible in moving things around...

Cut the Knot...

you like interesting, fact-ladden read on math- and technical topics?
Then try out Cut-The-Knot, which presents abstract concepts in concrete
language - really good.

I liked their piece on the RETE algorithm...

Contains many applets which illustrate or demonstrate stuff.

arc42: Version 2.1 released

Tonight I released version 2.1 of our arc42 architecture template.

We enhanced the architectural aspects (chapter 9/10) and corrected
several minor bugs. Thanx to all bug-reporters...

My personal markdown cheat-sheet

Markdown (by famous John Gruber of Daring Fireball) is a nice and clean markup language to facilitate writing for the web. As the original doc spans 19 pages (too much for lazy folks like me), I summarize the most important commands/tags here.

Markdown enthusiasts, please forgive me. This list is not ment to be complete. Errors are mine, all credit to John Gruber!

---

Headings

Preceed heading with 1-6 hashes (#). Example:

# This is H1

Note: Closing #’s are optional.

---

Lists

Begin a list item with an asterisk (*), a plus (+) or minus (-).

To enumerate list items, preceed item with a dotted number:

1. first item

2. second item

1. third item (yes - markdown can handle it...)

yields:

1. first item

2. second item

3. third item (yes - markdown can handle it…)

Note: Markdown cares for the correct numbering, your actual numbers are ignored.

---

Horizontal Lines

To draw a horizontal line, just put *** or === on a line by themselves.

---

Emphasized text

Enclose a word in * or _ (underscore) to emphasize - both are rendered into `` tags. You might use ** to make things especially important :-)
For example: `important` yields important.

---

Links

1. Trivial: Surround link with < and >, like this: <http://www.gernotstarke.de> yields http://www.gernotstarke.de.

2. Simple way: [an example](http://www.it-and-more.blogspot.com/ "My Blog") for inline links, results in “an example for inline links”.

3. Reference links (cool!): This is [an example][id] for reference links. Some lines later you define your link-label on a line by itself:

`[id]: http://it-and-more.blogspot.com/ (with a title)

Yields: an example

1. Even cooler, implicit name shortcuts: I get 10 times more traffic from [Google][] than from [Yahoo][] or [MSN][].

and the links defined as follows:

[google]: http://google.com/ (Google)

[yahoo]: http://search.yahoo.com/ (Yahoo Search)

[msn]: http://search.msn.com/ (MSN Search)

Yields: I get 10 times more traffic from Google than from Yahoo or MSN.

This options is way shorter to write.

---

Images

Similar to links, start with !(exclamation mark). Example: ![Fireball](/http://farm1.static.flickr.com/166/375786793_420d06879f_s.jpg "small fireball").

You might use reference id’s, as in links… very practical.

---

Code Blocks

Want to write source code on web pages? Geek, aren’t you? Just indent every line of the block four spaces or 1 tab.

Note: Markdown behaves nicely, it converts ugly & and Umlaut-stuff like ÜÖÄ into proper HTML entities.

Single lines of code (or even single words) are wrapped with backtick-characters `.

---

Tables, Footnotes,

Gotta use HTML for such kind of things.

Guard Certain Directories by Encryption

For one of my current customers I have to encrypt the complete projects' data on my drives. One option would be to activate Apple's own FileVault - but that's way too restrictive.

Another option is to create an encrypted disk image with the (standard) disk tool - no 3rd party tools needed, up-and-running in less than a minute...

A nice and full-featured description is available on Macworld.

Motion and Coordination Heroes

I was watching the gorgious Cologne Pole Vault Festival on Sunday. Those guys left me deeply impressed: With the (immensely heavy!) pole they sprint with 10m/sec (which is world-class in itself), hit the ground on the spot the size of a handkerchief and somehow turn into a perfectly balanced handstand in approx a split-second....

Whow! A short video sequence (quicktime) shows the complexity - enjoy!

And a detailed photo session..

Systematic way to an effective desktop...

I regularly invest significant effort to improve my personal effectiveness, keep re-reading GTD (originally explained here), evaluate the tools I'm using et cetera. Within this ongoing quest I found a gorgious article on systematically uncluttering your desktop. Although Ethan shows it on a mac, the fundamental ideas are easily portable:

* clean up, no mercy
* fight desktop entropy
* fine-tune capture and access to your digital assets
* cruelty can be kind (throw away, YAGNI)

Even before following his advice, I had a pretty clean desktop, compared to others. But now I keep only four folders on the desktop: my inbox, an action-folder, a smart folder containing everything I touched during the last 48 hours plus a link to my personal archive.

Here's a screenshot of Ethans version: