Does email make you less productive? Tim Ferris says yes and suggests checking your email a couple times a day.

In 2005, a psychiatrist at King’s College in London administered IQ tests to three groups: the first did nothing but perform the IQ test, the second was distracted by e-mail and ringing phones, and the third was stoned on marijuana. Not surprisingly, the first group did better than the other two by an average of 10 points. The e-mailers, on the other hands, did worse than the stoners by an average of 6 points.

I’m certain this is true. The first thing I used to with a new email set-up was to have it check for new mail every minute so I was never out of the loop. A loop being an apt description because all I was doing was spinning my wheels;

work -> read email -> back to work (what was I doing again?).

Have your email app check for mail once every hour or less. It’s hard enough to keep a bunch of method names and variables in your noggin without email getting in the way.

Now if I can just get my blog reading down to once a day I’ll be super productive :)

Mongrel being the four-legged variety, not the ruby server.

I heard about the dog food recall last night but it wasn’t until this morning that I checked the list (which is very long) and found that my dog’s wet food was on it. Thankfully once I checked the product codes his food was fine.

I recently started buying him natural food from Castor & Pollux and will be getting rid of the Eukanuba. During my googling I ran across iamscruelty.com (parent compnay of Eukanuba), nice, another reason to go with a different brand.

Be careful what you put in your mongrel! You never know what it’ll spit out :P

Castro doing the ‘Torpedo’ (he sleeps with all legs extended like a bear skin rug), he would be very offended to be called a mongrel as he’s a purebred Havanese.

As depressing as voting ‘irregularities’ are, don’t let it stop you from voting.

If you’re on the fence here are the congressmen who voted for and against Net Neutrality, a law that prevented broadband providers from treating some Internet sites differently from others (the ‘NOES’ are the bad guys). Here are the senators, as it was blocked in the house it never made it to them but the link shows their intent.

More shenanigans…

How to hack a voting machine.
Utah county has 947 registered voters, 4 more than the county’s entire population!
FBI looking into possible Va. voter intimidation
Robocalls calling people repeatedly day and night.

An Ohio woman, who did not leave her name, called The Washington Post in tears yesterday, saying she could not keep her phone line open to hospice workers caring for her terminally ill mother because of nonstop political robo-calls.

How hard is to build a voting machine that dosen’t crash as soon as you turn it on?

Voting Problems Crop Up on Election Day

I guess all the half-decent developers are doing web dev :P

Other than doctors or scientists I’d say there’s no other industry than web development that requires more continuous education. I probably spend about 25% of my work week either learning something new or looking something up (usually the latter!)

I used to make treks to the bookstore but lately I’ve been buying stuff online, the first online book I bought was the ever popular AWDwR, last weekend I bought Flexible Rails (which is very good, taught me some Flex things I didn’t know as well).

Today I found Peep Code which are looooooong screencasts on topics like RJS Templates and TextMate Basics for Rails, very focused stuff that might not make it to print but is very desirable for the right market i.e. me :)

One on demand service I didn’t like was Safari by O’reilly. You could only download five chapters a month and it felt like you where been nickled and dimed. I would buy from them if I could download a PDF of an entire book, one at a time without a subscription, but they force you to read everything on the site.

And that’s just one dude…

Danyel Molenaar, a project manager for the Dutch Independent Regulator of Post and Telecommunications, said the man had rented 35 servers for around 14,000 Australian dollars (US$10,493; euro8,256) each per month from a small Internet service provider in the Netherlands to carry out the alleged spam campaign.

So the spammer gets arrested but what happens to the hosting company that let him do it for years?

My web application planning usually includes the outline from the client proposal as a feature list and a series of hand drawn diagrams (with many eraser marks), sometimes the diagrams where converted to adobe illustrator documents if the app was complex enough that the client needed to see the app flow before we begin building. However actually designing an app diagram in illustrator rather than tracing one makes my head hurt.

In search of brain-pain free visual design process I fired up google to see what I could find. There’s a product called Inspiration which started out as a brain-storming tool but also makes good application flow diagrams. They had a free 30 day trial so I downloaded it and started plotting my app, the first time I launched the program it worked fine, the second time I had Photoshop open as well and Inspiration crashed itself and Photoshop (and I thought the days of conflicting apps where long gone with OS 9 extensions). From then on even with no other apps running Inspiration would crash on launch.

Back the drawing board.

Next I tried Visual Paradigm for the Unified Modeling Language (UML) it runs on OS X and Windows and unlike Inspiration is designed just for visual application design. There’s a free community edition which lets you have one type of diagram per project, and there are many types (Class Diagrams, Business Work flow, Deployment Diagrams, etc.). The diagram I used to design my app is the Business Work flow which is one of the more basic ones, you’re not focusing on classes yet just the overall flow of the app.

Even with such a basic diagram you start to see potential problems in the design of the app before you put any hackery to paper, and no more erasing :)

Google and TextMate come through again.

Found this post on using TextMate for coloring code in blog posts. Works great - except for a couple of tab issues, see post blow the comments should be aligned and the bottom ‘if’ statement is kinda wacky - I swear in my code it’s all indented properly! :P

Now I have to fix my earlier posts, thankfully the blog is only a few days old.

My initial exuberance with Django has been tempered a bit by trying to get it to run on a production server. Getting Rails to run was a snap compared to getting Django to run on a Plesk server.

Once I realized I had to install an earlier version of mod-python (3.1.4) and finally got it running I was confronted with the “The Dreaded Segmentation Fault” which crashed Apache.

Patching expat as described in the article was easy enough but I still had trouble running any pages that accessed the database. So I might have had both install issues at the bottom of the Django deployment page. Even when serving up non-dynamic pages the server resources where going throught the roof.
It seems mod_python and PHP just don’t want to play nice together, and there’s now way I can give uninstall PHP too many of our old sites use it. Maybe running Django under FastCGI is the way to go.