Scaffolding

I've been trying to implement some of the ideas in Steve Pavlina's scaffolding exercise, which is designed to improve personal productivity. At present, my workflow at work is such that I'm not frantic with getting everything done; rather, I'm trying the exercise out on my personal life. That said, Pavlina's technique is really tuned for on-the-job productivity enhancement.

A personal productivity scaffold is like wearing braces. It's a way to redirect your time and energy back onto the "straight" course and away from the crooked one. Once you've set it up, it's fairly easy to maintain, although you may still regard it as a small sacrifice.

Perhaps the most important function your scaffolding must perform is keeping your attention focused on what you want and off of what you don’t want.

(Link via Lifehacker.)

Fonts for coders

The monospaced fonts that come with your Windows box (like Courier New) aren't particularly good at distinguishing capital O's from zeroes and semicolons from colons, and that can make debugging more difficult.

Andale Mono slashes 0's, so it's very helpful on that score. It was once freely available from Microsoft, but is now discontinued. There are undoubtedly some illicitly-available copies rattling around somewhere.

My preferred font now is Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, which does a better job of sorting out :'s from ;'s.

Read this comment thread for more options.

The Black Knight is learning Python

Mary Brandel recaps the top 10 dying computer skills. Number 1 is COBOL: I'm not sure whether the top slot means closest to dead or most likely to survive.

... you can actually learn Cobol at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, which according to Mary Sumner, a professor there, still offers a Cobol course. "Two of the major employers in the area still use Cobol, and for many of their entry-level jobs, they want to see that on the transcript," she says. "Until that changes, we'd be doing the students a disservice by not offering it."

All the same, it's probably worth deleting this bullet point from your resume.

(Link via kottke.org.)

Stone soup

Joel Spolsky takes a little time getting to the point, but it's a good one: A top-quality software product is achieved incrementally:

Commercial software—the kind you sell to other people—is a game of inches.

Every day you make a tiny bit of progress. You make one thing just a smidgen better. You make the alarm clock default to 7:00am instead of 12:00 midnight. A tiny improvement that will barely benefit anyone. One inch.

There are thousands and tens of thousands of these tiny things.

This past week I began contributing to the development team's wiki: a compendium of product management information that includes everything from profiles of our competitors, to product plans for the next year or so, to resources for software engineers like tips on debugging. Just a few pages, but they will make the wiki just a bit more useful, and therefore make it just a bit more likely that other people on the team will contribute and read. And ultimately, our product line will be just a bit better.

Why didn't I know that?

Via Lifehacker, ChuckOp points out that Ctrl-C can be used to copy the complete contents of a Windows message box to the clipboard: no text-selection required (or possible, of course). V. handy for grabbing an error code on the way to Googling a diagnosis.