Living On Codes

Enabling vi keybindings on your favorite terminal

mozammel — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:35:02 +0000

Most of the bash terminals have the emacs keybinding by default. But I’m a vi kind of guy and first thing I change on a terminal I’m working with is to change its default behavior handeling line editing to a vi style keybinding. You can easily accomplish this by typing in (for bash):

set -o vi

You can save this on your ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile (for mac) so that you don’t need to repeat it each time you fire the terminal.

When editing a line in the terminal, you can hit [ESC] and you will be in vi. Now you can use most of the vi commands to edit you current line. Some familiar commands are:

- b to go back one word - 2b to go back two words - w to go forward one word - dw to delete a word after cursor - dd to delete entire line - d$ to delete from the current cursor position to the end of the line - d0 to delete from the current cursor position to the beginning of the line - cw to replace a word and go directly to insert mode, etc.

Want to stop procastinating? Try Pomodoro Technique

mozammel — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 09:13:54 +0000

At the age of Facebook, emails, SMSs, instant messages, phone calls, twitter, blogs, reddit and what not other distractions it is difficult of keep your mind focused at the task at hand. It may sound over disciplinary, but many times I wanted to track my focus on a certain job that I’m working at so that I can judge my performance later on. Sometimes I even started a stopwatch to keep myself on track so that my attention doesn’t deviate away from the task at hand. But recently I found myself falling back on a circle which kinda looks like this:

As I was reading my daily updates (another distraction?) at http://reddit.com/r/programming, I found this interesting technique from the reddit programming help page which I think can boost my productivity at lot if I follow this wisely. The technique is called Pomodoro. It’s basic concept is you break down a task to the level of completing it chunk by chunk basis. Each chunk called pomodoro will consist 25 minutes of full focused effort without any lengthy distractions. After each effort you must take a break of 3 to 5 minutes. You don’t allow any distractions when you are on a pomodoro, and if you are distracted for long enough (more than 15 seconds?) then you have to invalidate that pomodoro session and start again hoping next pomodoro will go better. You repeat it until the task is done and if you go on like this, the general rule is a task should not be too big that it takes more than 6/7 pomodoros. You are also suppose to take a 20-30 minutes break after each 4 sessions of pomodoro which will ensure a healthy work habit.

You start by creating an activity list. You fill up your daily to do list from your list of activities. One important improvement you can make if you follow up your daily tasks and record your pomodoros and estimates on your Recording Estimates chart as mentioned on the book available at the pomodoro site.

I really like this simple tool (MacOS based) named also pomodoro hosted at github. As I’m mostly comfortable using electronic notebooks I use excel sheets to keep my todo, activity, and recording estimate lists. So far it is proving really effective technique to improve my productivity and I hope it will sky rocket your productivity too if you follow it properly. I highly recommend reading the eBook provided at the pomodoro technique site to help you get started with your productivity boost.

Fresh start in 2010

mozammel — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 07:14:58 +0000

I have been blogging here and there for last 8/9 years but till now never consistently at a single site. As my new year’s resolution I am focusing on to start contributing to my long awaited personal blog site, ‘Living on Codes’. My plan is to make it useful for me, so that in future I can comeback to my site for guidance, thus helping others who are browsing through my site.