Todo-list management hack

I’m warming milk, so this will be a short one…

I get most of my “todo” stuff from clients via email. So I created a special email account todo@… and just forward all such mals to that account.

This has few advantages:

1. Email is still the main way I communicate with my clients. So this hack make sense here.
2. All emails in todo@ account are stored in chronological order, so the ones on the top should be done first
3. When I open one todo@ email, it’s marked as read, so I better get it done

It works for me.

Oops, the milk’s hot…

The Blogazine Wave

The new thing on the rise – blogazines.

Apart from dressing your writings in different clothes, it offers nothing new.

A search on Google shows 800.000 hits for “blogazine” from where I’m sitting.

Why?

Opera Web Browser

This is not a review. There’s been enough of those.

I like it. It’s blazingly faster compared to Firefox and the Speeddial is superb.

You might like it: www.opera.com.

How To Secure Financial Future?

A question like this one should be asked far more often than it is. When I talk with people about financial future, their answer is usualy “ehh, I’ve got a job and that’s allright with me”.

How typical.

Almost all of my iniciatives to start digging deeper on the question of securing financial future, they ended up pretty badly. At first I thought I was speaking Marsian but later I got it… Majority of people does not want to talk about their future and even less about financial part of it.

How come?

Money is, sadly, one thing that makes 99% of population to get up on the cold and rainy November morning, leaving their warm bed and go out on the cold to make some money. They do it every single morning. And yet, when subject turns to getting rid of this “I must do this because of money” nobody want’s to talk about it.

It seems like people have lost any hope for brighter future. I asked them what do they think about when they see rich people. Most of them are skeptic about the origins of rich people riches. In times, they’re right.

Lacking to talk about financial future is the same as denying to learn how to read, stating “I don’t need it”. Sure, you can live your life without knowing how to read, but learning to read opens so many doors to us. Learning how to read is considered basic knowledge and we all learn it in school.

Why is then learning how to secure out financial future not at least as essential as learning how to read? After all, we spend money on a daily basis for the greatest part of our lives. Why are we ignoring knowledge about it? Why aren’t we learning how to trat money so it works for us?

To me this seems like not being able to read. Even worse… In time of current recession, people have no idea what to do. So they are, quite naturally, afraid of recessions per se. That’s downright stupid if you ask me. But it’s so common… Why is that? The same reason as before: People don’t know how to handle their money.

Money being such an important thing in our lives, a smart person would learn all it could about it as soon as possible. Stocks, mutual funds, banks, loans, … These are the tools to work with money. How many people know how to use these tools?

Working with money can be learned. It’s just like with all other tools. It’s just like learning how to read or how to ride a bycicle. Sure, you will fail first few times, but then you’ll learn and became good at it.

People don’t mind spending time and money to learn new tools – just look at colleges. Years and thousands of dollars spent for what? Better education? Great, but what good is better education if you can’t get a job? Countless MBA’s and even P.h.D.’s are out on the streets looking for a job.

Would those people spend money and time on things that actually matter, they would be far better off then they are now. Would they learn how to deal with money, they would know how to secure their (and their family) financial future. But no, they spend it on meaningless titles…

What current recession is showing us is nothing but rotten core of our systems. People with high-paying jobs that were there just because someone invented it are now on the streets thinking about how to get another one of those jobs. To them it does not matter what they do, as long as their paychek is regular and fat.

Now, fastforward 30 years. Those same people are turning 70. They can’t work anymore and are relying on their pensions. Only they found out recession eat up all their savings. Now what. They can’t work and they lost all their savings. Tough one if you ask me. What to do? They can and are complaining, but that will not get them anywhere.

I don’t know for sure but I bet they’re thinking about how to make some money. At 70 that’s a hard goal to achieve. Even worse… Those people will live another 15-20 years. How will they survive? Not on their own, I’m sure. They will rely on their children and grandchildren to support them.

Only one problem with this model…

Their children and grandchildren got effected by recession too. They too are out of money and many are facing foreclosure. Beside that, since there’s no money in federal reserves, governments will likely rise prices of goods. So they end up paying more for things, have no steady income AND have to take care of their parents.

But for some people, reality is quite different…

They are making even more money then before and can’t wait for another recession to come (in case you did not notice, recessions come every 20-25 years). How come?

Simply because they know how to deal with money.

Learn how to secure your own financial future by taking things into your own hands. Here’s free guide on securing financial future:

How To Secure Your Financial Future

Respect life, go vege

Few days ago I twitted that I’m going vege. Again.

Last year I did a test – 3 months without any meat, eggs or any kind of animal milk. Results were spectacular. My digestion improved, skin was soft and smooth, my mood was better, I kept my focus without any probles and the best of all, I was happy because I knew I was doing something for myself.

Now, I’m going down this road again and I think I ain’t comming back.

Recent events that led me to this decision lined up all to perfectly. Among others, there was (maybe still is) a nasty salmonela infection I’ve got because I was eating too many egg-based foods. I’ve lost 7 pounds in just three days due to frequent visits to restroom…

Then I saw this shocking post on Steve’s blog. I’ve lost my appetite and I felt a bit guilty about being one of the many who are blindingly ignoring large parts of todays way of living. Yeah, ignorance is bliss.

Looking away from how things are being done today in order to deliver what we take for granted has become unacceptable for me. It just doesn’t feel right anymore.

While dropping all meat, eggs and animal milk based products I am maybe taking a rather large first step. Maybe I should start small and work my way through, letting my body to adjust to new diet slowly.

The problem is, I can’t stand to take another bite of chicken wings, a hamburger or even a sip of banana milk shake. It just feels plain wrong.

I know this is right for me. It feels good. Even if this is a big step, it’s not hard. I know it’ll be hard for the next 15 to 20 days because my body is used to meat food. After that it gets easier and everything start changing. For the better.

Today is day 4.

Why I use vim editor for programming

Ever since I ditched “joe” editor, I use “vim” as my main programming editor. Here’s some recent screenshot of developing Rails application.

What I particularly like is the windowing system inside vim. It’s all so close to my fingertips…

Ok, back to coding…

Importing Outlook.nk2 files into Zimbra

I’ve just spent 7 hours  trying to import Outlook .nk2 files into Zimbra contacts. It took me great deal of nerves and some unix hackery to get it done. Looking back, it’s seems so simple…

Here’s how I did it:

I used free program called NK2 to get .csv from .nk2.

• I’ve made two Zimbra accounts and send one test email from one account to another. This way I had one person in my contact list
• Next I exported this Zimbra contact list (of just one person) into a .csv file (this got me proper .csv structure I knew Zimbra would eat back up)
• I used NK2 proggy to convert all my Outlook.NK2 files into .csv

Now I had one .csv file from Zimbra and few from Outlook.NK2 files.

All I did was match structure of Outlook’s .csv files with Zimbra one. I wrote small ruby script to do this for me, but you can easily use shell or maybe even Windows batch scripting to do this mundane task for you.

The proper Zimbra .csv file format for importing contacts is this:

“email”,”firstName”,”fullName”,”lastName”,”middleName”

This must be on the first line of your new .csv file (the one you will feed Zimbra with). Below this line is data, structured to match first line description.

I’ve imported 4.500 contacts from 10 different Outlook.nk2 files in about 3 minutes using Zimbra Desktop client.

While I was thinking about how to solve this problem (good 7 hours) my friend was importing .pst files into one Zimbra (open source version) server from 14 different Windows computers – simultaniously.

From what I just saw tonight, I must say kudos to Zimbra! In the last 10 hours it has proved itself as a rock solid platform to host emails on.

And the best part – it just works! Keep pushing, Zimbra team!

I hope I saved you some time with this post. It’s 4.30 am here, I’m off.

Why use Smalltalk?

Even if this was written by someone who is (perhaps too) deeply involved in Smalltalk world, it still got some points that should make you think.

Now, if you are of that kind and don’t want to take your head out of… the sand, then simply ignore this. For everybody else, no matter how skeptical you might be, at least some of this should get your curiosity juices flowing:

Top Ten Reasons to Use Smalltalk

How To Win The Search Engines

You don’t.

If you happen to find a crack in the system and play the search engines, shooting you on the top of the search results, mark my words: enjoy while it lasts – it never does.

Whatever you do or come up with, at the end, they will tune the rules against you and throw you off the throne. You’ll be at the beginning again, battling your way up. What’s the point?

The only way to win the search engines is to avoid them. Don’t play by their rules. How, you might ask. Aaaa… I won’t tell ya… But ask yourself this question:

Why do I want to be at the top of the search results?

And when you find the answer, ask yourself another question:

Is there another way?

And the answer is YES! Far easier and quicker. You just have to open your eyes, like I did. It hurts when you realize, you’ve been blinded. But it feels really good to be able to see through the fog. It’s so simple, yet mysterious.

One of the best tools in web development

While developing web pages, I always check how they look in different browsers. I used to check regularly, after every new addition or change, but found out that it’s a waste of time. Now I develop web page to look great in Firefox and only after that is done, I check how it looks in Safari, Opera and IE. Since I’m developing on Linux, my biggest problem was finding out how my pages looks in various versions of IE.

The far leader in difficulty of proper design is clearly IE. Seems like Opera and Safari are paying more attention to RFC’s, like FF is. One of the tools I find indispensable is this web site: http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php

What this site allows you to do, is to check in almost real time, how does your web page look like in various versions of IE – from IE 5.5 to IE 8. Just paste your URL at the top of the page and hit Render button. Few seconds later you’ll have your page displayed as it’s seen in IE. This is freaking awsome, if you ask me!

Oh, and the best part – it’s FREE!