Annoys/Amuses me that magazines for the iPad are +/- 600MB. Not one has content that you can read for more than an hour or two. Newsstand is far from perfect or even far from satisfactory. I spend 2 hours downloading a mag and 2 hours to read. None have the quality of a keepsake magazine. New Yorker has a few good issues.
I could be happy with this but the download is not progressive. Everyone has to endure the download where nothing else can happen. What’s the point of multitasking if when you really need it (for 2 hours) you cannot use it.
Mags like Wired, T3, Project, New Yorker work like this. When I upgraded the New Yorker mag I lost all previous editions of the New Yorker. Worked out to over 2GB of mags to re-download which I never bothered about.
Bloomberg Business week downloads quickly, you can be reading good enough content for a weekly in under 10 minutes. That’s mobile friendly if you have time while waiting for something to happen or on a train. You’d give up with the iPad Wired or the others mentioned above.
My suggestion is to make these mags reader friendly. The download must be instantaneous/ progressive. Multimedia content should be activated while reading. I could live with this.
Lastly make it possible to download these magazines in the background. Why should I wait 2 hours for it to download.
What excited me about cloud computing was that it perfectly resembles Adams Smith’s “Division of Labour”. The wide variety of specialist cloud computing businesses that focus in 1 market is indicative of the amount of effort required to deliver value and good reason the cloud is becoming a hive of activity for entrepreneurs in the technology space.
I founded Skystack because cloud computing interests me. Ever since I used to offer managed application hosting services to customers going back 7 years. At Skystack we are focusing on cloud delivery technology.
What is cloud delivery
It’s about running your applications on more than 1 cloud service provider. Our customers are strategically wanting to build relationships with as many cloud vendors* as possible. This can offer opportunities in cloud computing cost arbitrage and business continuity. Skystack offers the ability to run applications in multiple clouds. We take care of all the differences between these cloud services. So that you can easily migrate applications between clouds.
For example: Your CMS now runs in Amazon Ec2 and you realised that Rackspace offers the same hosting for half the price. What do you do? Well on Skystack its possible to re-deploy your CMS to Rackspace. Making cloud migrations fast and easy. Today its Amazon Ec2, tomorrow it could be Rackspace or any of the other cloud services.
Our ethos at Skystack is to develop new ways of solving some of the challenges faced by businesses migrating to the cloud. This process of weighing the cost of developing bespoke versus off the shelf is something that exists because of our heritage in software engineering and product development.
What is Division of Labour
Division of labor is the specialisation of cooperative labor in specific, circumscribed tasks and like roles.
Definitions
*Cloud Vendors : Are companies that offer cloud services. Categorically they can be separated into different sectors like Rackspace (IaaS), Amazon Ec2 (IaaS, PaaS).
I have always wanted to be more productive. I am pretty productive too I have a day job and in my free mornings and evenings I fit in my start-ups work. I have limited hours to get things done. So I need to organise my day in order to be more productive.
Looking back I discovered I spent far to much time researching methods of being more productive (probably a lot of over analysing too ). I think this search for a productivity boosting ‘silver bullet’ is typical and necessary. The danger is at this point you could have been forgiven for giving up and remaining a entry level planner.
I have done a lot of research on being more productive. Read blogs ( like Zenhabits, FourHourWorkWeek etc ). Some books.
- Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
- Getting Things Done
They all have great ideas which have helped me reach my goals but there is no one solution to everyone’s productivity goals. This is something personal, which you need to trial and error on our own. Recently I did discovered something about my planner. That one thing seemed to grow and multiply until 14 tasks out of 22 each day contained some element of it. This inspired the blog post.
So what is it.
If my goal is being productive. Then I should just do more tasks that result in “being more productive”. Clearly that phase is to open ended so I refined my day in order that I have 1 big goal (usually takes longer than a day) and a few lesser goals. Then to encourage completion I have evolved my planning so that my tasks encourage doing.
This is important to me because often its difficult to define what “being productive” is. I run a start up at night and freelance during my day. So being productive is important for me to get things done. Each and every day is probably a little different. I start the day in my planner where I define all the important to-dos for the day. Then at the end of each day I have a quick retrospective session.
Here is an idea of some of my retrospectives.
- Did I do a workout.
- Did I have my vitamins.
- Did I fast.
- Have I met an old acquaintance today.
- Have I contacted an acquaintance today.
- Did I meet anyone new today.
- Did I help someone today.
Here are some goal oriented to-dos.
- What did I do to move me towards my goals today.
- If I could what would I do differently.
Each one encourages an action. I did not plan this at all in fact I barely did much planning 3 months ago. It just seemed to happen once I began to work at it.
I try not to mention any chores, I simply have 1 task that says.
- Did I clear my active to-dos before any screwing around.
That one task encompasses all the chores I have that day.
Whats is being productive
To me its being able to do all the things I wanted to do. Quite simple. Have you ever said “I wish I had more time”. You will only ever get 24hours so using that time effectively will/should make you more productive.
About me
Am I an expert on productivity. I am blogging about productivity because I am learning about the process of blogging informatively. Productivity is important to me, I only get 24 hours to be as effective as possible.
Disclaimer
Planning is something personal, find your own way. The key take-away from this post is it works for me because my planning is focused around one big goal, and each to-do pushes me towards the goal.
All languages have extensions that implement the iconv library. Thats all quite easy but lets say you have hundreds of text files all encoded in a windows encoding like iso-8859. My first attempts to do the conversion in PHP failed. Mainly because the files had different encodings inside them.
1 | iconv -f iso-8859-15 -t utf-8 en_all.txt > en_utf8out.txt |
This worked really well and save lot of effort.
This one is so easy you probably wonder why you never thought about it. Tell you the truth I never really needed to know, my routes where simple and quite flat.
This will query the CakePHP core API and get the current route.
1 | pr(Router::requestRoute()) |
PHP automatically copies classes by reference for a while now, to test this feature here is some code. This is something I never really thought of and I must admit I never really design something to use references as it has not always been as clear with PHP.
read more…
Its not often that I deal with issues like this but when it hits you, it can take a while to work out what went wrong. I have just escaped such a issue.
Well the issue for me was the usage of the PHP function substr to shorten a string. It was difficult to debug because I initially thought the error was with the source data/file. Needless to say nothing (i.e debugging) was working. My development environment is clinically perfect in every-way. However by chance while converting the import script to use the functions from http://hsivonen.iki.fi/php-utf8/ I noticed the issue was the result of the substr function that was corrupting my input and character sets.
read more…
Agile practices are the reason so many small software teams are succeeding in punching above their weight, delivering the kind of software enterprises can only dream of. You only have to look at the sudden onslaught of start-ups to realise that true value is created in small teams that enjoy what they do. Smaller businesses are competing today because they can simply find the right people bring them together and let the magic happen.
Here are the reasons why I use agile at Skystack;
read more…
Bitcoins are taking the world by storm, it’s as disruptive as the internet and potentially dangerous to government establishments all over the world. Bitcoins are able to bypass regulation in a way that has been impossible for at least 5 decades. I believe bitcoins are a force for good in the same way the internet was a force for good.
About 3 years ago I joined a website called Marketocracy and created a few funds, all funds start off with US$1,000,000 and a Net Asset Value of US$10.
