The update to 3.0 was completely transparent.

The wordpress dashboard is more than a little cluttered.

The tagneticpoetry plugin still worked.

From Barrons/WSJ

Testing Time-Management Strategies - Barrons.com -- Sue Shellenbarger

[ http://online.barrons.com/article/SB10001424052748704538404574541590534797908...'s_Most_Popular ]

• FranklinCovey's Focus: This method, subtitled, "Achieving Your Highest Priorities," hits workaholics where it hurts—in their upside-down priorities. Created by FranklinCovey, Salt Lake City (franklincovey.com), Focus aims to help users jettison busywork and wasted time and devote themselves to their most valued pursuits. FranklinCovey has trained more than two million people in the method. Some of its concepts are widely known, such as "sharpening the saw," a metaphor for setting aside time to take care of your health so you can work (and play) with more vigor.

Found out from "just another tech blog" that NetBeans (now at version 6.7.1) was a full IDE for Python, Ruby, PHP and offers several server bundles if you want to write and test webapps locally. I picked the C/C++ bundle because I thought it might be fun to work with constant database CDB at some point.

Then, postponing the installation of a module for my beloved Ruby, I selected five plugins for 25 MB -- Python, Jython, P&Jsample projects, of course nbgit to integrate Git with netbeans and of course Ant. Better AntGeorge than JavaGeorge, I always say.

I click the checkbox that said "install in background" and eventually am rewarded with the Netbeans icon: an ugly silver cube. I prefer Smultron's wild strawberry. Both Netbeans and Smultron offer good ways of not filling your work editor's recently-used files list with garbage, when you have to work for a few moments on something else.

It turns out Netbeans is not bad for Python. You press F6 to run your code, and you can stop your programs by clicking an X at the very bottom right of the Netbeans window border.

..
..

If you are following PureMVC, you already know about this, since in this niche of the world the six degrees of freedom are at most two. The DarkStar PureMVC Roamer ... you could do worse for exploring all that is PureMVC. So, checkitout at http://darkstar.puremvc.org

I had to mail something at the Post Office, so (and here is that yak thought moment) I might as well mail something else, so I need to print a label for it, and a return label too.

I dust off the Brother QL-500 Label Printer, I change the paper. The software for it has been deleted. I download it from the brother website, it requires the computer to be restarted. After the restart, I install the new P-touch printing software and, after a little bit of fiddling with the paper size, it works perfectly for the first time in a year.

All this Yak Shaving could have been avoided with a suitable regimen of Yak Prep.

I'm very happy to have the label printer up and running again, though.


$ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | pbcopy


The one-liner above copies your public key to the Mac clipboard.

SourceForge.net: Tips and Tricks - skim-app
[ http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/skim-app/index.php?title=Tips_and_Trick... ]

Reading man pages in Skim

Everyone who uses the command line knows how tedious it can be to read a Unix man page in the terminal, especially for long man pages, such as for bash. However, man pages can also be pretty-printed in PostScript format, and Skim can read PostScript. The following line can be used to show the man page for bash in Skim (of course this works for any shell command).

man -t bash | open -f -a Skim

...

Definitely continuing with some yak prep here. Skim is a very nice program with the ability to annotate PDF documents in various ways -- and once you have the pdf in Skim, you can annotate it, and send it back out to a PDF bundle with your annotations.

A lot of people use Skim with Papers to keep track of their scientific PDF documents.

"And in the end, the yak you shave
is equal to the yak you prep."

By now everyone has heard of "Shaving the Yak", an unfortunate expression which denotes a cascade of unimportant activities completely unrelated to one's original intent. But if somehow you haven't heard, "Yak Shaving" is a sequence of "in-order-to" things that you find yourself doing when you REALLY need to be doing something else.

There does not seem to be any irony in the definition of 'yak shaving', however humorous you may find the term, or for that matter anything else involving yaks. Opportunities for irony abound here, e.g. "when you're up to your neck in alligators, it's easy to forget that the initial objective was to drain the swamp", "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic", and the famous "bike shedding" phenomenon, in which people argue about what color the bike shed should be painted before the house in front of the shed is even built.

But in spite of the punch line of yak shaving's creation myth, ("And the next thing you know, you're at the zoo, shaving a yak, all so you can wax your car"), 'shaving the yak' is not an expression of pessimism. Sometimes you just have to shave that yak. (e.g. "You know all that yak shaving I did last week? Well, it looks like it paid off".)

All that having been said (and of course it WAS necessary to say) it pays to be ready:

1. Maintain yak tools in tiptop shape, well cared for and ready to go.
2, Assure adequate supply of clean yaks.
3. Plan for use of excess yak hair
4. Plan for disposal of unused yak hair from step 3.

...

Today's episode:
In order to write something for #PragProWriMo, what better way to proceed than to push writing daily to a github repository. Including the writeup, setting this up should take no more than twenty minutes, making this a perfect procrastination piece and definitely an act of yak prep.

Because an SSH key is required for this, quickly we visit http://help.github.com/mac-key-setup/ and follow the instructions.

This has the amazing sequence

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | pbcopy

which puts the ssa key onto the mac clipboard. How cool is that? I have to admit it is really cool, but I sadly notice that I only have 3 minutes left to create a git archive of my writing, push the repository to github, go to the other computer, put git onto it, and check out the repository.

Instead, I copy my work files to a new folder on 32G USB stick, and quickly copy THIS snapshot of time to my email client, and send the results to post@yakprep.posterous.com.

Setting up github as a writing repository? That little bit of yak shaving will just have to wait.

In the meantime, welcome aboard the Yak Prep blog.

(No yaks were harmed before, during, after, or at any other time.)