50 Ways To Increase Your Productivity - lifehack.org

I am quite adept to lists; this one (50 ways to increase your productivity) is, I believe, a really good one. Among the listed items, I have these ones that I really value since they work for me: take breaks, love what you do, use background music, complete most dreaded things in the morning, use a text editor like WriteRoom on the mac to avoid visual distractions, keep a notebook and pen handy, plan your meals, step away from the computer, write a daily to-do list, exercise, turn off TV, learn to say "No", use a calendar, get up real early, reward yourself, speed read, hibernate your Windows station.

What are your own best tricks to get organized? Have you read Allen's book "Getting Things Done?" and what's your opinions about a formal methodology? What are the tools you use personnaly that made a difference in your productivity?

Note Taking and Hands-Free Messaging

The whole world of information is getting better day after day. Try Jott.com, and you'll get a new very cool way to enter information, via a phone number. Speed dial yourself something important, and forget it. The transcribed message will get straight into your email mailbox, ready for processing. We love it!

So far the service is totally free --- till when?

Hivelogic - The Narrative - Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X

Hivelogic - The Narrative - Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X: This is a great alternative to the simplistic Locomotive. I see Locomotive as a quick way to run Rails applications you want to evaluate, but this tutorial goes much further. It walk you through the installation of each component, whiich will make you feel a tad smarter at the end. The installation took quite some time on my G5 but was a great insight. And I could upgrade to the latest just by using the curl -l ftp:/each_website/each_path/* wisely. Great springboard to Ruby on Rails. Also the usage of Textmate in this development environment is precious, but that'll likely be another blog entry.

Taking My Gmail Offline

Went through an interesting article about GMail email storage and privacy and security concerns. What's the best and most secure way to keep all your emails? Is it to leave them on the GMail server or take a local copy? Well, talking about my own experience, local copies are good as long as the hard disks last and we all know they don't.

But still, read on, it's goood stuff... Taking My Gmail Offline

Micro Persuasion: Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center

Micro Persuasion: Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center

Excellent article about the extensive usage of GMail. These last years have seen so many products becoming mature and moving users from pc-based data to internet-based data. That was a concept we were envisioning one decade ago as Sci-Fi when here and now, it is happening. Great stuff.

Apache - mod_rewrite not working

Here's a pretty trivial case I faced; the resolution is interesting:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteLogLevel 3
RewriteLog /path_to_log/rewrite.log
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /somestring
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://some.server.com/somestring/$1 [R]

If RewriteCond trigger /somestring conflicts with some tomcat JKMount setup (or other trigger like for instance WebLogic), make sure that the mod_rewrite library gets loaded AFTER mod_jk library.