OS X: How to programatically access your SMS messages (and a short bookkeeping story)

I tried various ways of keeping closer watch of my finances; at one point I had a quite interesting solution which I thought will evolve into something smooth and heavily automated. It involved parsing bank statement PDFs and scanning receipts with Wave Receipts.

Less cat tail, more less! (Why I stopped using the UNIX cat)

I've been using cat for ages to display contents of files. I used it very rarely to actually concatenate files together.

And I've been using tail -f to follow logs, since I started doing web development. I always had the problem that I wanted to scroll back but, as new items were added, it would automatically scroll me back to the end of the file.

At one point I stumbled upon a good alternative, namely using less +F. I loved that you can switch between examine (^C) and follow mode (⇧F).

I was still using cat until the final blow came and revealed that cat interprets escaped sequences. If you've been doing any kind of programming, you know how that can turn bad.

Cluj.rb: Speeding up your testflow

After a long hiatus, Cluj.rb brought together Thomas Morris of http://www.badassvim.com/ and myself to talk about our development setup. The discussions was, naturally, succeeded by beers.

Here's the demo app, and below, the slides.

6 mistakes I was making that were killing my productivity and my focus

1. Grinding the tabs

The problem: opening 34 new links as soon as you start working and start grinding through them.

The fix: Stay mindful. Do one thing at a time: see a link, open it, read it immediately, close it.

Not staying in control of my browsing activity. I use iGoogle to keep everything in one place (feeds, to do, bookmarks, email, weather). I also use Instapaper (with a sweet RSS feed to my iGoogle) to and Gimmebar (this is great for when you just want to quickly save snippets of text instead of bookmarking and tagging entire pages).

Coming back to iGoogle, naturally when I'm going through that huge list of headlines I would open everything that looked interesting in a new tab (if you've browsed Wikipedia, you've been there too, not surprisingly it's called the Wikipedia effect); wanting to go through everything and know everything about a certain subject.

If your mind is wandering, jumping one thought to the other and you can't seem to compose it to actually get something figured out, when you start surfing, it will lead you to "grinding the tabs".

2. Perfectionism

The problem: Getting lost in the details.

The fix:

Do not wait; the time will never be just right. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along."

Hill, Napoleon