according to Heather Robinson, a U.P.S. spokeswoman, the software helped the company shave 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes, which has resulted in savings of roughly three million gallons of gas and has reduced CO2 emissions by 31,000 metric tons. So what can Brown do for you? We can’t speak to how good or bad they are in the parcel-delivery world, but they won’t be clogging up the left-hand lane while they do their business.

Technorati Tags: economics, environment, software development

Studies now show that self-control is a limited resource that may be strengthened by the foods we eat. Laughter and conjuring up powerful memories may also help boost a person’s self-control. And, some research suggests, we can improve self-control through practice, testing ourselves on small tasks in order to strengthen our willpower for bigger challenges.

In order to improve our self-control, the authors suggest working on smaller easily attainable goals. Obtaining small success will help improve your will-power making more difficult goals easier.

Technorati Tags: Lifehack, psychology, self-help, productivity

At that point, I switched to an alternate music player, JRiver’s MediaCenter. While this software served my purpose, I recently had a need to move back to iTunes. The only challenge for me was how to move my song ratings into iTunes. No big deal you say? Well, for me, song ratings are the key to all of my playlists (a subject of another post). If I had to start from scratch, rating my 5000+ song library, I would be working straight through the new year.

My initial thought was to do it with some software. However, thinking about it some more, I came away with a better solution – playlists.

The idea I have is to create playlists based on song ratings inside of MediaCenter. These are “Smart Lists”
that automatically update as songs are rated. MediaCenter allows you to export these playlists into various formats. One of them M3U is supported by iTunes. Here is what I did:

1. Imported all of my songs into iTunes. This took some time.
2. Created the following playlists in JRiver MediaCenter
• 1 Star
• 2 Star
• 3 Star
• 4 Star
3. Exported each playlists as an M3U file
4. Start iTunes
5. Select File->Import and open the playlists you just saved. When you do, iTunes will
   import the playlist and display it under the iTunes playlists.
6. Click the newly created playlist
7. Highlight all of the songs in the playlist
8. Right mouse click over the songs and rate them
9. Repeat the import process for each of your playlists

Since iTunes can import M3U files, migrating your song ratings will work with any other player that also support M3U playlists. Most do.

There are a couple of caveats to this tutorial which are rooted in the M3U file format. The M3U file stores both the filename and the path to the file. There are two (at least) potential problems.

1. If you want to move from Windows to OSX
2. If your music file locations have changed

If you have either of these problems then a little Script-Fu should do the trick. It wouldn’t be too hard to write a quick parser in Perl/Python/Ruby which changes the path and filename to the new locations.

Technorati Tags: iTunes, iPod, Productivity, Tips

Today, for example, I need to track some time spent on a one-off task for a client. It’s pretty close-ended, I’ll do the work, send the hours spent to accounting and I’m done. Creating a Basecamp project for this would be overkill.

As a software nerd, the thought of just using a stop watch seems sacrilegious so I opted to search for an appropriate piece of software that would allow me to time unbounded tasks.

Enter SlimTimer. SlimTimer is a web application which allows you to quickly create time bounded tasks. Sign-up is quick and (as near as I can tell) free.

Once you create an account, you can begin creating tasks in a tiny (think Slim) pop-up window. When tasks are activated, a timer starts. Close the window, the timer stops. So far this seems to do exactly what I need.

If that was all the application could do then all I did was find a web 2.0 stop watch. The really cool thing is the reporting. SlimTimer allows you to generate invoices, timesheets or more generic reports showing the time spent on a series of tasks.

You can then take these reports, and print them or export them to CSV, handy if you need to send this to someone else.

If you need a quick way to time tasks, give SlimTimer a test drive.

Technorati Tags: productivity, project management, web2.0

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website that makes excellent usage of tags to group your bookmarks so that you and others can easily find interesting links. My venture into tagging initial was very successful, however, over time, as with the filename and hierarchy my tagging has become a jumbled mess so that recall is difficult.

After spending a year tagging my bookmarks I realized that the thing I am missing most is consistency. For example, I have links that are tagged software:development, development, programming, and software. In all cases, The link www.djangoproject.com could be categorized under each of those tags.

I’m working on a new approach to tagging that I hope will work better for me, classifying things in a hierarchy that goes from least to most granular. I’ll explain by way of a few examples.

Django is a web application framework written in python. The home page for this project is at djangoproject.com. Upon discovering it, I want to tag it so I can find it again. A suitable set of tags for me would be Development, Web, Frameworks, Python, django.

As I learn more about Django, I will be search and tagging various articles on the web. Once such article is Django Templates: The Power of Inheritance from JeffCroft.com. I’ve tagged this as django tutorial templates. I could include the additional tags above but since this is a django specific tutorial, Django is the most obvious top level tag.

Another example is Metacritic. Metacritic is a music/movie/book review site that takes reviews from print and web and assigns creates a meta review. I have this tagged this book mark as entertainment reviews movies music

This method is by no means perfect for everybody. The key to an organized tagging structure is consistency. I have a post-it note on my PC with a sample tag to help me recall my system.

I hope this post was useful, feel free to share your ideas on tagging in the comments.

Technorati Tags: Productivity, Tutorial, tagging, bookmarks, delicious

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There are a number of tools available to do this, however, Windows comes with a free command line utility which is described here. The program, netstat, displays active network connections into and out of your box. To turn it into a network logger, follow the steps below.

Make sure, if you are running this that you close any known network applications like Firefox or your favorite web browser. Otherwise your log could fill with unwanted information.

1. Open a command prompt, click Start->Run and type

   cmd.exe

2. type netstat -b 2 > netlog.txt
3. Let this run overnight then open the log file in notepad.

The command line option -b tells netstat to display the name of the programs initiating the network connection. The number tells netstat to dump to the log every 2 seconds.

What you will see in the netlog.txt is a list of all network connections with the name of the program making those connections in brackets []. If you see something you don’t recognize, you can use a website like File.net to identify it and see if it is a virus or malware program.

Technorati Tags: windows, productivity, tips

The define keyword allows you to check Google for the definition of a word. To use it, simply type define:wordname and click Google Search. You are then presented with definitions from various internet sources.

So, the next time you are at a loss for words, fire up Google. It’s better than your English teacher.

Technorati Tags: Google, Search, Productivity, Tips