I had heard of the technique before, as well as the Pragmatic Programmer book Pomodoro Technique Illustrated. Thanks to fellow geek Rachel Ober I was made aware of the free Pomodoro book, which I promply downloaded into the Books folder of my DropBox account making it seamlessly available on my work computer, laptop and iPhone without thinking.

I read through the first chapter to get a quick idea of how it’s done and gave it a try today. It went very well (I completed 8 pomodoros!) which I think is pretty good for my first stab. The experience didn’t come with out some revelations.

I had to curb my email checking

I had to shut off my email alerts. The little “ding” sound was just too distracting to hear every few minutes.  I could just close my email client but it’s Outlook and takes too much time to start up every time.

I had to curb my instant messaging

I had to shut off audio alerts for IM as well. Within 5 minutes of starting my first Pomodoro I got IMs from 5(!) people. It was really tempting to flip back to my IM client to see what people wanted but I managed to ignore them for another 20 minutes.

I could just shut off my IM client as well, but I do use it for work communication (as well as communicating with friends). I do have a work specific IM account, so I could always only allow co-workers to contact me through it.

I should make an effort to talk to people in person instead of IM. It does make me chuckle to think that I could potentially be interrupting somebody else’s Pomodoro though.

During my Pomodoros I set an away message mentioning that I was trying the Pomodoro Technique. In the future I might even link to the site.

I had to separate Pomodoro specific apps and sites from interruptive ones

For a brief period during the day I tried to keep my Pomodoro task and interruptive tasks on separate computers (my work desktop and my personal laptop) but security limitations of our wireless network made it impossible to only do work on my laptop.

Another approach to the above is to use Mac OS X’s Spaces feature to separate out the Pomodoro you’re working on from other interruptions. I used this today and it definitely helped keep me focused. I’m sure there’s a number of Windows equivalents.

Yet another little technique for separating out work from distractions is to use different browsers. In my case I was using Firefox for my Pomodoro work and Chrome for anything that would be interruptive but I didn’t want to close completely.

Questions

My experiment also left me with some questions, some which hopefully the rest of the free book will answer and others that I may find my own answers to over time:

• How do handle/categorize meetings? Track them? Ignore them? What if they’re more than 30 minutes long?
• How do you deal with dependencies? What happens when you can’t start your task until somebody completes something you’re relying on? Should you track this? I suspect that information could be useful.

After Effects

It’s funny how even throughout writing this blog post I was tempted by several interruptions but I found myself realizing they were all things that could wait a few minutes.

I used MacPorts to install Maven with the following:

sudo port install maven

I created a simple project using the following:

mvn archetype:create -DgroupId=org.spilth.rpgam -DartifactId=rpgam

And then tried to generate an Eclipse project file using:

cd rpgam
mvn eclipse:eclipse


The command failed with the following error in the output:

[WARNING] Unable to get resource ‘jline:jline:jar:0.9.1′ from repository central (http://repo1.maven.org/maven2): Specified destination directory cannot be created: /Users/brian/.m2/repository/jline/jline/0.9.1

It suggested I manually download and install jline. I was not down with this because, well, I thought Maven was supposed to take care of this stuff for me – I shouldn’t have to manually download and install stuff!

Upon looking in my ~/.m2/repository directory I noticed that some directories were owned by root and some by me. I’m not sure how or when this happened but I fixed it with the following:

sudo chown -R brian /Users/brian/.m2/

This fixed the problem and successfully created a .classpath and .project file for Eclipse.

I also started my own Maven cheat sheet.

Lastly, I learned that you an open a Finder window for the current directory from Terminal by using:

open .

Recently my friend Kim suggested we “do a project together” after talking about things like Make magazine and Arduino boards. We haven’t picked a project yet but we’ve started investing in learning about electronics in order to obtain the skills we need to build something.

I ended up ordering 3 books:

• Make: Electronics
• Programming Interactivity
• Getting Started with Arduino

Make: Electronics

In order to do the experiments in Chapter 1 of Make: Electronics I went to a store I haven’t voluntarily been to in years – Radio Shack. It was exciting to see all the various kinds of eletrical components and tools that I could potentially be playing with:

I ended up getting the majority of what I needed but the selection at the two Radio Shacks I went to were a little bit slim. I ordered what I was missing and much of the Chapter 2 items from the Radio Shack site instead. The Saturday night after X-mas I started trying out the experiments in the book. My Saturday nights are not normally this wild and crazy:

Today I re-created the above using the breadboard I got in my order. It’s definitely a lot easier than getting those little alligator clips to grab onto little wires:

I’m still learning and confused by a number of things, but hopefully more experimentation will bring things to light.

Programming Interactivity

I also started reading and skimming through Programming Interactivity which led me to the interactive multimedia language and environment called Processing. I soon realized that this language could possibly be used to implement another project I’ve been working on.

Continuous Integration is the practice of automatically compiling and testing code every time it changes. A Build Monitor presents the results of the compiling and testing, most simply with a Success or Failure message. These are often used as an information radiator, a way to casually inform people of the status of something. I’ve been wanting to build one to display the status of projects we’re running continuous integration builds with AntHill Pro at work. I’d like it to be generic enough to use with other CI tools like Hudson or CruiseControl.

I have a version I’ve been working on using Quartz Composer for the Mac:

But I realize it would be good to have a cross-platform solution that anybody could use. Thus I started putting together a version in Processing:

I finally also made the project publicly available by putting it up on GitHub: http://github.com/spilth/ci-build-monitor

Getting Started with Arduino

I flipped through this book a little bit but since I don’t have an Arduino yet, I can’t do too much with it. I want to make some progress with Make: Electronics before trying out any Arduino projects, if only to arm myself with knowledge so I don’t burn out the Arduino board.

Today I went back to the “ankle doctor” after 4 weeks of physical therapy. The last few weeks have been pretty good. I’m getting flexibility back in my ankle, I’ve started driving, I really only use the crutches for long walks and I’ve even been able to start going down stairs normally. At today’s appointment I finally got a copy of my x-rays:

The plates and screws are staying in me unless I start to find them uncomfortable. Then I can get them taken out if I want.

The thing I’m most excited about is the fact that the doctor said I could start biking! So at some point this weekend I’m going to get myself a mountain bike and do the first biking I’ve done in a long, long time. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Being able to drive has also allowed me to get back to one of my favorite activities: alternate side parking! My neighbor hood has alternate side parking every day of the work week. To add to the joy of moving my car, construction crews have been taking away even more parking spaces as part of the work they’re doing on some senior center at the end of the street. This is yet one more thing that makes me eager to leave this apartment and neighborhood.

Last weekend I picked up an HD Camcorder – the Canon Vixia HF S10. Since I can’t really afford to break myself again on a skateboard, I decided I’d try filming skateboarders and putting videos together. I figure it’s another way I can enjoy the sport and potentially contribute to it. I didn’t find any skateboarders this past weekend to film, so I may stop by the local skate shop and see if they are looking for people to help shoot their demos and such. I may also start taping our D&D games, meetup groups and other such events.

I did end up going back to Drop In Skatepark in Hilburn, NY, but the guy who gave me a lesson didn’t see the humour in me asking about who called me in to the ambulance as an “elderly gentleman”. Oh well.

Another nice benefit to not having to use crutches all the time and being able to go up and down stairs properly is the fact that I can now safely navigate the NYC subway. This has been a money saver as I no longer need to pay $15+ to get to meetup groups downtown. On Wednesday night I went to the New York XP & Agile Meetup where Pivotal Labs did a demo of their awesome web-based agile planning tool Pivotal Tracker. I’ve recently started using it on a project I’m working on with some friends and have really been enjoying it. The demo provided some more insights into how to use it and how it works.

So, in the spirit of my recent love for Meetup.com, I decided to start a meetup group with my co-worker Seth. Hopefully the broad audience of Meetup.com and the large number of tech companies in NYC will result in a better turn out than the group at work.  The first book we’ll be reading is The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas.

If you’re a software developer in New York City and you’d like to get together with other developers who are trying to be more pragmatic and agile, please check out the NYC Agile Developer Book Club.

I really like your site and the services it offers. I really love music and appreciate finding people with similar tastes, reading up on bands I like, expanding my own library by finding other bands through your site and just letting people know what I’ve been listening to.

But lately I’ve been experiencing a bug that’s been annoying the hell out of me: after scrobbling my latest songs I check my Recently Listened Tracks and find songs show up twice or more when I know I only listened to that song once at that time.

I thought maybe the problem was with the scrobbler so I updated to the latest version and took some screenshots of what it was doing. It showed each song only once so all looked well there.

When I checked my recent tracks on the web site I saw duplicate entries for a number of bands.

The biggest culprit seems to be Hammock. I’ve seen their tracks show up over 20 times on my playlist at the same exact minute.

The only thing I can offer about Hammock is that I fall asleep to them most every night, but definitely not on infinite loop. But this problem also happens with other bands, so I don’t think it’s Hammock specific.

So my questions for you are?

Are these songs showing up twice in the database table (or whatever) for my “song plays”?

When I try to delete one of the dupes, both/all entries end up getting deleted. I don’t see this until I refresh the page though. From poking around your code I see the following:

• The HTML for the dupes show the same exact JavaScript code for deleting the dupe tracks: rmrecenttrack(this, 21617457, 1238250572)
• The rmrecentrack method is defined as such: rmrecenttrack(link, trackid, listendate)

So both the trackid and listendate are the same. That explains why they both end up getting deleted – they are in fact the same entry. But if they have the same exact listendate… why are they showing up multiple times?

My only guess is that you have duplicate entries in your database, or whatever is feeding your view code is generating duplicate entries. I wonder where this is coming from if the scrobbler is showing a single entry for these songs. I’d love to help you figure this out.

Are these dupe entries also counting as duplicate plays towards the play count for that song/artist?

This is the only answer I really care about. I don’t want these dupe entries messing up my play counts, especially when a song can be duped up to 20 times. I suppose I could do some more digging on this but I’ve already spent an hour looking into this. It seems to be happening to others as I’ve found other people complaining about duplicate entries in the last.fm forums.

I know I don’t pay for your service (I’m sure you’re doing alright on ads, yea?) but would appreicate knowing if you’re aware of the problem and if you have figured out the cause and know how to fix.

I do wish I had gotten a bigger hard drive, though. I feel like I’m always close to filling up the 110GB I have. I find it funny that I’m worried that I only have 20GB free on it at this moment. The biggest culprit in that is the 20GB Windows XP virtual machine for VMWare Fusion (and now a 10GB Windowx 7 beta one). After that it’s the iMovie projects for SRD but I keep the majority of the assets for that on an external drive. Then mostly downloaded apps and such which I like to keep around for some reason…

Over the course of the past year I’ve:

• Switched form OpenOffice to iWork.
• Used iMovie like crazy and am very excited about iMovie ’09.
• Bought a lot more music using iTunes – something I used to be very hesitant to do.
• Used TextMate a whole lot for Rails development and taking notes.
• Cross-graded my Photoshop and Illustrator licenses from Windows to Mac.
• Used VMWare Fusion a lot for working in Windows when I need and used Spaces to switch back and forth.
• Bought a fair number of games for the Mac: Puzzle Quest, NWN2, Weird Worlds, DROD.
• Enjoyed a number of Windows games using CrossOver.
• Used the Terminal most every day.
• Made at least 16 different videos for Suburbia Roller Derby.
• Bought a lot of programming books on PDF as well as a physical copy.
• Never regretted buying a Mac.

The only problem I’m having right now is that the battery doesn’t last more than 30 or 40 minutes after charging, but I’m guessing this is somehow caused by the large dent the battery got when the laptop fell off my bedside table one day. I need to get myself to an Apple Store and get a replacement battery.

I guess my only other disappointment was MobileMe. Christine and I gave it a try for a while but it was always very flakey for us. I was excited by the prospect of having our calendars synced together but when we tried it it just didn’t work that well. Christine also wasn’t a fan of the web interface (she’s on a PC) and was always getting frustrated with it. But MobileMe is an optional service and doesn’t reflect on the MacBook Pro itself.

I don’t plan on buying a new desktop machine anytime soon (I say that now…) but when I do it will definitely be a Mac. I don’t feel like I need a PC for gaming anymore because I prefer gaming on the Xbox 360 these days. And there’s always VMWare Fusion if I need to run Windows for something.

We also recently got the cheapest Netflix plans there is which I upgraded to the next lowest today in order to be able to stream movies to our Xbox via the New Xbox Experience (which I got into the preview of this week).  We just watched King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and the quality was great.

Hulu.com and NBC.com cost nothing and get us access to a number of current shows and some of their past seasons.  We can use iTunes to purchase anything else we want to watch (nothing currently).  Netflix is $9 a month for the plan we’re on ($118 for the year) and gets us access to any new movies that come out which we can either stream or get the DVD of.  So dumping cable saves us about $840 a year after all the math.

I’ve been thinking about trying a service for video games similar to Netflix.  I recently bought Dead Space and was really disappointed with the game.  I brought it to GameStop to see how much the trade-in value was – $23.  A $60 game will be bought back at $23 and then sold Used for $55.  What a rip-off!  I become less and less of a fan of GameStop every time I go there.  I also wonder about the affect used game sales have on the video game industry.  I know there’s GameFly and GameSwap but I need to get over my need to own video games.  Maybe it’s worth going through my shelf of video games and thinking about which ones I wish I had rented and which ones I’m glad I own.

There are also similar services for programming books, mainly O’Reilly’s Safari site.  I looked into their plans again tonight after seeing an announcement for a Head First Rails book in “rough draft” format.  Unfortunately I found their advertisements and plans very misleading and just ended up canceling the account.  I may just purchase the book/pdf/draft option of the book and skip the whole Safari subscription.

I’ve been filming all the bouts with a Sony MiniDV camera and then importing the footage into iMovie 8. iMovie was a little weird to me at first but I’ve grown to really love it. It’s great for scanning through footage, grabbing the bits you like and quickly throwing together a video that looks great. Obviously it doesn’t do everything (like slow-mo clips, grrr!) but it does enough and does it fast enough that I like using it a lot.

I picked up Final Cut Express 4 a couple of months ago with the intention of doing some more interesting stuff but it’s definitely a much more complicated/involved application than iMovie. I’ve yet to actually generate anything with it. I need to look into iMovie 8′s ability to export to FCE4 after finding all the clips I want to use with iMovie.

I recently downloaded iMovie 6 to give that a try as well since it has the ability to do slow-mo clips which are perfect for really showing when the girls take a nasty hit/fall. They LOVE seeing that stuff in slow-mo. The last few bouts I’ve been using the project at Barney McNabb’s (the official afterparty bar) to play back the bout and some of the girls go nuts. I suppose the alcohol also plays a part in that…

I’ve also been making DVDs of the bouts for the teams to review. I keep those pretty basic and just put the core bout footage in an iMovie project, export it to iDVD, add chapter markers every 4 minutes and use the simplest theme so it’ll render fast. I’m glad I finally sorted out the choppy/stuttering DVD problem with iDVD and Perian.

For the most recent bout they were short a DJ so, in addition to my videotaping and PA duties, I also DJ’d the bout. What I did was create a dedicated roller derby account on my MacBook Pro, attached my 160GB AcomData mini Pal and copied all the music from my iPod (all legally obtained, mind you) back to the hard drive using Senuti. I bought a bunch of disco/funk songs (the event was called Flat Track Fever), put together a bunch of playlists for different parts of the bout (pre-bout, intros, period 1, intermission, period 2, post-bout) and used the free Remote iPhone app from Apple to control iTunes while videotaping. So it wasn’t DJing per se, but it was effective and got the job done.

Next time I’m definitely moving the computer and PA away from the announcers desk though. If you watch until the end of the Flat Track Fever footage you can see a girl crash into the announcer’s booth, sending a couple of beers flying and almost landing on my equipment (computer, external hard drive, mixer and amp). Next time I’m pushing that stuff far back. I’ve got long enough mic cables for it.

I’ve got one other project idea that I’m working on for SRD using the Mac but I’ll wait until after the Derby de los Muertos Championship Bout on Saturday September 6th to talk about it.