Notes from Danny O'Brien's Life Hacks talk.
- Inspiration from Kent Beck, XP man, using index cards.
- Danny want to take habits of people and make himself better. So emailed a load of people and collated their hacks.
- Big list of people who he talked to but couldn't be bothered to write them down, but cool people.
- Showed some screenshots of peoples desktops. Spent a long time trying to get the png to display in osX! PLayed with expose a lot. Mainly seemed to be shells! Google employee blurred osme of his windows! Conclusion = people use shells. Most of the shells were to remote computers.
- Biggest organiser was todo.txt. Some people used it for everything, notepad, Word, emacs, BBEdit. Organising stuff needs to be quick, access and find text quick. Someone said that they weren't interested in adding metadata.
- Incremental search was the big pull. Mozilla, Panther etc.
- Another big pull was the fact that people trust text files. Ultra cross platform. Doesn't crash.
- Also use mail to everything, Cory, Danny etc. Because life is to short to learn another app.
- Some people use Excel for everything eg Joel Spolsky. Other people use postscript or something else they know about.
- People use closed blogs. Or plogs (project blogging). But now big apps trying to be like blogs.
- Private RSS feed (like us at REL). Including email
- People also use scripts but don't want people to see them because they are embrassed that they are too shoddy. Disosable scripts. http://simon-cozens.org/programmer/secret-software.html
- Scripts that everyone has..
- random sig generator
- netscape killer (kills apps that hang)
- ssh foo
- mail wrangling
- sync (usually very complicated, noone trusted apps, wrote their own)
- boiler plate stuff, code, letters etc.
- Aggregated views on stuff, eg. FileLight
- Not very much cross-app automation. Why? Because they're brittle. Perhaps the limit has been reached. Longhorn will be the big test because you can pipe objects between apps.
- Lots of webscraping. Hyper brittle but wirth the sacrifice. eg. RSS feed that doesn't exist.
- A lot of making stuff public, eg upload to web server. Becasue ideas rot if you don't do something, better to make them public. Publicising stuff forces you to clean it up. It gets better. And it makes people more prolific. You get better and more efficient too. ! Important point !
- Also everyone did backups, because people have lost stuff.
- Apps people want
- Email search, People using GMail as mail search. Weird sacrifice but people put up with it.
- Easy webscraping.
- Keyboard macros for Windows and Linux.
- Filepile for everyone. Sync files somewhere for public consumption.
- Read Test Driven Development by Kent Breck.
Questions / Comments
- Want to share RSS webscraping templates.
- Everything mentioned is async, do people use irc? Unsure but irc is different to IM, people run it in the background. Lots of companies have irc for sysadmins.
- Are we being unambitious using just text editors? (Didn't type answer and now forgotten)
