Dominic writes, "How in the world do they (Java bloggers) not lose their mind doing all these non-work related projects/activities such as: writing books, opensource development, consulting, etc." Since I do a lot of non-work related activity, I left a comment on his site, basically saying that I have no time-management skills and that the only way I get stuff done is to stretch the bounds of my relationship with my wife. This is because usually I tell her "I have to work tonight" and I get on the computer around 7 PM and join her in bed around midnight or 1. Then I get up at 4 and head into the office, only to do it again the next night (if necessary). I find this really sucks, particularly if I'm working a 40-hour week in 4 days. Since I have a new deadline looming (edit/return Wrox Chapters by Monday), I'm going to try something a bit different. I'm going to work an hour and a 1/2 at night (5:30-7), and then again in the morning (4-5:30) . I'll work an 8 hour day, getting off at 3, then I'll hit the gym and be home by 5. That's just this week, we'll see how it goes. In reality, I've found that the following things work the best for "getting things done."
- Quit blogging and reading blogs. Same goes for e-mail - this can save 1-3 hours a day for me.
- Plan your day and leave your computer/location when you say you're going to.
- If you're reading a book or writing a paper - take it to the library. Go early and stay all day.
- For me, working on Windows is a good 2-3 times faster than working on my Mac or Linux. Stay with the OS that you're most productive on.
- When something small comes up that you need to do, just do it.
OK, now I'm going to follow a bit of my own advice and close Outlook and Phoenix.
I'm amazed at how easy it is to sort an HTML table with the DOM and JavaScript. I whipped up a quick modification of Porter's Sort Table Rows demo. The basic enhancements I
made where removing the <a>'s from the table headers, and just adding an onclick
handler to the <th>'s. I also added indicators to display the the current
column/direction that's sorted. Seems to work in most of the browsers too! On Windows
2000, this includes IE6, IE5.5, Opera 7 and Phoenix 0.5. On OS X, the latest versions of
Safari, Chimera, IE, Mozilla and Netscape. It doesn't work on OmniWeb, and the
cursor: pointer doesn't work on the <th>'s in IE/Mac and IE5.5/Win.
Anyway, you can checkout the
demo or download with
the relevant HTML, .gif and .js files. I've also included it below for your convenience.
I'd love to add this sort of capability to the display tag library.
Cool - there's a new site for all the Struts documentation in Russian. I actually got a degree in Russian, and I dig Struts, so of course - this interests me. Beautiful country, awesome culture and a very rich history. Too bad I gave up Russian after graduating to learn all this computer stuff instead. Now I can barely understand a full sentence - and I was pretty close to fluent my senior year. One question I have for non-English programmers - do you write Java/JavaScript/CSS/HTML in your native language or in English? I've always wondered...
Ted Husted made a post last Friday to the struts-user mailing list. It looks like a good post for rookie struts users. I haven't read it, but hopefully by bookmarking it here, I'll read it soon.
Haven't quite decided where to use this, and it didn't seem like the best time to squeeze something new into the docs =:0), so I thought I'd post it here for now, in case it were of interest to some.
WHITHER ACTION MAPPINGS?
We write applications to do things for people. We might say, for example, that we want the appication to create a mail-merge job for us. Some developers call these top-level tasks "client stories". In practice, to do a big job like this, an application will need to take several smaller steps. We'll need to obtain the information from the user about which mail-merge job to create. We'll need to find the items to merge. We'll need to put the items together with a template, and we'll need to present the result back to the user. Some developers call these smaller tasks "use cases". To complete a client story, we usually chain several use cases together. A chain of use cases is sometimes called a workflow.
Before doing any thing for us, most applications wait to be asked. When we ask the application to do something, we usually need to provide a variety of details. If we ask the application to store a name and address, we need to provide the name and address to go along with the request. [read more...]
