kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Tag Archives: productivity

Firefox Shortcuts for Bookmarks and Searching

It’s not new information, but since I just figured this out recently, I thought I’d punch it up here.  When you add a new bookmark in FireFox there are a few fields that you get prompted to fill out:

These fields are only a portion of the information that Firefox can keep for a particular bookmark. Among the most useful of these is the keyword field.

For people like me who prefer to use the keyboard over any form of pointing device, this is fantastic.  I can open a new tab and type in the keyword of the bookmark I want, in this case ‘kdm’ and firefox will load the bookmark in question.

Even though most browsers have a built-in search bar, that’s another toolbar that eats up real-estate in your browser. If you’re screen-space-challenged or you have a disdain for toolbars.  Take your bookmarks to the next level with a parameter.

By adding in the string %s you can create search bookmarks for your favourite searching sites. As a helper, I’ve included a few search links below which already contain the %s. Just right-click the links below and use the ‘Copy Link Location’ or ‘Copy Shortcut’ options.

Google (ca, au, de, jp)

Bing

Yahoo

Wikipedia (de, fr, pl, it)

Stack Overflow

Memory Alpha

Learning by Disaster

I was reading an article on Raymond Chen’s blog today really made me think. The story, for those who don’t care to read it, essentially is about a service (shell.windows.com) which was created by a Microsoft developer as a proof of concept. He ran it off a computer under his desk at first and that’s where it sat… until it stopped working one day. Now that service is run on proper infrastructure in a Microsoft data centre.

In the industry I’m in, this story really hits home. It’s very common for us to make decisions based on the short-term, tools which we don’t expect to be around for a long period of time. We should have learned over that this kind of “short-term gain” strategy almost always leads to long-term pain.

The lesson: Take some time to make sure that tools you build can be left unattended even after the cleaning crew vacuums under your desk.

The Solution Spiral

A mentor of mine in my early working years taught me a whole lot of very valuable lessons that have served me well, and that I’ve tried to carry forward as we bring new folks on to the team. This is one of those lessons.

Nearly everyone has had the experience of being confronted with a problem in either our personal or professional lives where we’ve needed to devise a solution. Your first instinct is often close to the truth, particularly when the problem is in an arena that you are familiar with. The key lies in the first steps you take to refine the solution: will you solve the problem or lead yourself down the solution spiral?

When we propose a solution to a problem, particularly in a group setting, humans have the tendency to get attached to that solution. As people try to help refine the proposed solution and question it we have a tendency to get defensive and force changes to your idea to plug the holes that other people are trying to poke in your idea.

im_an_idiot
Image credit xkcd

The key is being able to step back and look over the situation. Find the simple solution. Look at what you want to solve, and see if there’s a way to solve the problem quickly and easily. If you need to get from Vancouver to Los Angeles there’s many routes you can take. The best choice isn’t likely to travel by way of Boston.

The lesson: Find the solution that most closely resembles the solution you’re trying to solve.

Thanks to the FOG for this invaluable lesson.

Twitter Acquires Sandy and Stikkit

twitter logoHere’s a clip of a post I did over on the AGP Blog about the acquisition of Sandy & Stikkit by Twitter. It’s going to be very interesting to see what Twitter decides to do with the newly acquired technology, particularly in the wake of reduced services in nearl every country outside the US (read: no more SMS!!!).  Here’s a clip from the feature-length version:

Twitter has snapped up the IP behind a couple of popular Web 2.0 services.  I Want Sandy and Stikkit were both acquired by Twitter a few weeks ago.  The services were originally scheduled to go offline last week, but this window has been extended until the end of business (17:00 PT) this Friday, December 19th.

Check out the original post over on the AGP blog.

Time will tell…