This is an interesting idea. TimeSnapper takes screen captures of your desktop at a configurable interval, allowing you to play back a period of time to remind yourself what you worked on. The idea being to help you fill out timesheets, project notes, etc.

To answer the questions that jump to my mind, they claim it doesn’t impact performance, uses 1 to 5 meg of memory and allows you limit the space the images take up, either in total capacity or days usage.

“With TimeSnapper you can play back your week just like a movie. You can play it at any speed you like, and jump in at any time you like.

When it’s time to fill out that dreaded timesheet, TimeSnapper is a savior. No need to tear your hair out trying to remember where all the time went.”

I’ve been contemplating purchasing an IMac or a Mac Mini for the main floor of our house. I figure the Mac Mini would do fine, however, the clean sleek look of the IMac with everything built into the monitor seems sweet. As seen on LifeHacker, there’s a hack out.

“The MiniHitch allows you to mount your Mac Mini^®, on the back of your monitor, by making use of the 100mm or 75mm spacing VESA pattern mounting holes found on the back of many LCD monitors.“

This is a great read, thanks to Guy for the link. A big part of Mark and Bobby’s vision for CreationStep is this act of rescuing people from environment’s that aren’t allowing them to grow and thrive. They’ve done this successfully many times. In a lot of cases the environment they’re rescuing people from is a traditional corporate environment, however, it’s not the rule. I know of people who’ve tried running their own businesses only to return to an office where they’re able to excel and grow again.

Whether you’re in a large company or not, the ideas and suggestions in the above article are worth thinking about.

“My main purpose in life is to take your best, your brightest, most creative, hard-working and passionate employees and sneak them out the hallways of your large corporation so that they are free of the yoke of lethargy, oppression and resentment.”

This doesn’t happen everyday, or every year for that matter, a new version of vim is out.

“Once you have installed Vim 7.0 you can find details about the changes since Vim 6.4 with ‘:help version7′”

If you happen to be looking for some vi tips, I keep some for myself here.

When it comes to software development, I’m against documentation. At first read of that statement, most techies should assume me to be a caveman developer. It should outright scare most software management types as most processes are about providing management a means of controlling the development process. This relies on the development team documenting their work in a way management types can grasp. That’s obviously a real need but let’s put that aside and assume that your real goal isn’t to control the process from outside but instead from within.

The need for development documents is a symptom of communication issues within the dev team. They perform other tasks like force you to actually design what you’re going to build. If you had a team who did that without documenting it, would it matter that it wasn’t written down?

My ideal development team, a completely unattainable ideal, would have no need for documents and every character they type would be actual code. I’m not referring to requirements docs or functional specs from the business team. I’m referring to documentation within the dev team itself.

The ideal team would be a Stanley Cup winning hockey team. They wouldn’t have to talk, there’s no need for verbal communication, they just know what each other is thinking, what they’re about to do, where they’re going to skate next. When they started the season they made mistakes and passed to open ice where they thought their teammate would be. As a hack, they started yelling out “drop pass” or “go to the net”.

The point is that the documents should never be viewed as the end goal because they never were. The end goal is working software. Most teams will always need some overt communication, never able to completely abandon it but the best reach another level.

Instead of looking at a dev team’s documents as unavoidable paperwork, try looking at them as hacks. Think about what could be done, in terms of team structure and dynamics, to remove the need for them. It’s like the stop sign at the end of your street. Our goal should be to take that sign down as we all now have the common sense, compassion, etc to stop our cars at that point.

Ok, like I said, it’s an unrealistic ideal. Do I ever see myself being part of a development team with no dev docs? No, it’s not realistic nor is that my point. Can we learn how to improve our team and how we go about building software by analyzing these “signs”? I think so.

We don’t have an office. We all have our own offices and improvise when we need to meet, choosing to meet at one of our offices, rented space, a coffee shop or pub. It works and keeps things fresh.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s also something I wrestle with, would we be better off in a traditional office? Looking into coworking is about maintaining the positive aspects we possess today while gaining the good parts we’re missing from a traditional office space, hopefully leaving behind the annoying toxic parts.

“Teams work best when you get to know each other outside of work”

That’s key. Whether you have an office or an RV, that’s a big part of building a functional team. Having an office doesn’t guarantee you that and even without one I think we’re better at this than most offices I’ve worked in. Having an office can act as a crutch and leave you not explicitly focusing or working on this aspect. This should be our focus, not simply keeping up with the jones’ by getting back into the cube.

I reworked the shiftMode sidebar, adding a picture of moi, and a zoomcloud to provide another way to browse content. I’ve always cringed at the idea of adding a picture of myself. It strikes me as such a vain thing to do. I finally caved on this as I’ve come to realize that I want to know as soon as I browse to a page whether or not it’s written by an individual, a group of people, or a company. The fastest way to convey that a site belongs to an individual is to add a picture of yourself to the main page.

I apologize for putting you through the agony of seeing my mug but I swear, it’s just so new visitors know that this is just me not some shiftMode Inc.

Since I made reference to Flock not being there yet, I feel I should mention I’m using Flock almost exclusively now. The deal breaker was discovering how their search bar actually worked. While they don’t seem to detail it here, the search bar also searches your bookmarks and history. It does this not upon hitting enter but while you’re typing your search. The result is a fast, usable means of searching all relevant locations using only the keyboard.

So using the example I used in my previous post, I can now type “CTRL K tsn” then the down arrow once and enter to get to tsn.

Does this Globe & Mail piece count as plagerism?

“So she organized workshops that encourage managers to stop telling people what to do and, instead, ask thought-provoking questions of employees.”

I’m kidding and while I don’t pretend to pull any ideas out of thin air and we’re all just reinventing each other in the end, I’m sure glad I put that post up before today’s paper. Had I not, I would have hesitated in order to prevent the appearance of outright copy and paste. The G&M piece is a good read and details some specific steps to move forward with this approach.

If you’re using two monitors, give this a try. They offer a full functionality demo version. I’m using the trial and will be purchasing when my trial ends.