book: The Speed Reading Course

by: Peter Shepherd & Gregory Unsworth-Michell
Very short. It teaches techniques:
  • to increase reading speed,
  • to more quickly grasp and digest information(key work highlight, MindMaps, visualization of information, pre-read survey, etc etc..),
  • to improve memory recall.

Useful tips in today's information overload.

book: The Power of less


How to do less while accomplishing more, learn how to limit yourself to what's important. Full of very practical advices.
"With the countless distractions that come from every corner of modern life, it’s amazing that we’re ever able to accomplish anything. The Power of Less demonstrates how to streamline your life by identifying the essential and eliminating the unnecessary — freeing you from everyday clutter and allowing you to focus on accomplishing the goals that can change your life for the better."
Thanks José Santos, for the suggestion.

book: Predictably Irrational



"Do you know why we sometimes find ourselves excitedly buying things we don’t really need?"

"Do you know why we still have a headache after taking a five-cent aspirin, but why that same headache vanishes when the aspirin costs 50 cents?"

"Do you know why people who have been asked to recall the Ten Commandments tend to be more honest (at least immediately afterward) than those who haven’t? Or why honor codes actually do reduce dishonesty in the workplace?"

"..We are pawns in a game whose forces we fail to understand..."
Is not in any way related to conspiracy theories and the like, is about simple every day things, the book clearly shows(by experiments) that everybody makes predictable mistakes, again and again, we just don't notice it most of the times, thus being aware of them is a first step on how to avoid them.

Viewpoints Research Institute - Alan Kay

An excruciating example of an area that needs more than incremental improvements is programming, both in the large and in the small. Code is too: large, complex, costly, buggy, insecure, segregated, and inexpressive. We have plans to attempt a qualitative reinvention of programming and to start one of the subprojects this year: to make a practical working mathematical model of a complete personal computer system.

promissing stuff here

Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

There's something magical about this introduction to ruby.
This is the book that got me started in the ruby language.

iCal as a GTD Tool

iCal

(image borrowed from appeinside.com)

Why?

  • See what GTD is all about. But basically its a set of guidelines that helps you be more organized and consequently more productive(they call it Getting Things Done), this is specially useful to check out if your work feels chaotic at the moment.
  • I don’t follow it too strictly, but i do use it a lot.

Tools

  • Before iCal I was using Things app, but it went recently into paid version. iCal in Leopard improved a lot so i decided to give it a try.
  • I did try and use for while other GTD apps: iGTD, Chandler, and couple more… but was not fully happy with them.
  • After a few months of using iCal, its working well for me.

iCal makes it simpler

  • Because I was already using iCal for the Calendar, doing the TODO list management inside iCal removes the need of having another app getting in the way.
  • Don’t have to worry more about sync problems between another app.
  • Create TODO’s directly from email, natively.
  • Is altogether more integrated into OS.

myCalendars in iCal

Work:

  • work-now
  • work-later

Personal:

  • house
  • others

Mail:

  • inbox-tasks

How i use them:

  • work-now and work-later are the ones that get more frequent daily use.
  • work-later is for TODO’s that I won’t do now. Either i’m waiting for something to be able to finish it or only needs to be done in some days.
  • Tasks that are not to be done right now go into the work-later, this way the work-now list gets less cluttered and I’m mostly looking at the work-now list.
  • When i have the work-now list empty I go into the list of work-later and move the ones with higher priority into the work-now list. Also check the ones in inbox-tasks.
  • I normally create a TODO item either directly into work-now calendar or from the Mail.app and these go into the inbox-tasks, that i review later on.
  • When creating TODO items, I use a name format like “proj1: todo1”, “proj1: todo2”, this enables to sort them by name, because sometimes is better to do in batch several tasks from same project.
  • When creating an item I also set its priority. Priority is another way to sort TODO items. This enables me to see what TODO’s need to done first.
  • Some TODO’s can’t be done now(thus should go into work-later), but because i want to remember them before deadline, I drag and drop them into the calendar, create a remember alarm and then move them into the work-later.
  • Use the TODO item “note:” to keep the relevant details about the TODO item. Basically the description of the TODO item exist here: description of the task, plan how to tackle the task, code repository revisions, URL’s to bug, etc etc..

  • I keep iCap app open all day and use it to guide my work: I look what’s on work-now list with higher priority, pick the first, check if other any tasks can be batched with it, do it and finally tick it off when done.

  • ICal Settings: un-tick the “Show all Completed Items”, so that when a task is done it disappears from the list.

2nd European Lisp Symposium 2009


Milan, Italy
May 27-29, 2009



And i'm very happy to say that in the organizing committee is professor António Leitão. My Scheme teacher from "introduction to programming" class in college.

Portugal

from: os externos
@Lisbon, 21 July 2006.

When i made this picture little did i know that almost 3 years later I would be blogging it from Estonia.

Not Lisp Again...

a first exposure to Lisp

"I was floored. Here we take the simple, straightforward definition of the derivative of a function. Type it in with essentially no modification and suddenly the computer knew how to do calculus! This was serious magic. I had never seen anything like it before."

Had similar feeling while watching recently SICP video lectures.

the Rosetta Code

Rosetta Code

The idea is to present solutions to the same task in as many different languages as possible. Rosetta Code currently has 264 tasks, and covers 128 languages. A variety of tasks are listed, and visitors to this site are invited to solve the tasks in the language of their choice. The tasks cover everything from the mundane Empty Program to the esoteric Towers of Hanoi.

for example the Monty Hall simulation
explained in wikipedia