The Productive Mac Mindset
I have been using a set of productivity enhancement tools on my Mac for so long now that the standard, out-of-box OS X user experience seems challenging, crawling, cumbersome and somewhat convoluted.
So much so that it has become frustrating for me to use another person’s Mac.
In this post, I intend to outline how the limited set of productivity tools I use give me “ludicrous speed”. Note that I have invested the time to learn these tools and to create the productivity shortcuts they provide. Maybe it will help you with ideas to be more productive too.
C++11 on CentOS 6.6
As mentioned in previous articles, I write a lot of C++11 code on OS X but deploy it on CentOS Linux 6.6 servers. But CentOS 6.6 does not contain a C++11 development environment by default.
Here’s how to set one up.
Install a C++11 Compiler
We need to get the repo files for DevTools2, a Red Hat package that contains a supported C++11 compiler. As root, run the following command to retrieve the repo file:
In the Press: This Week's Hedge Fund Alert
I’m quoted in Hedge Fund Alert, Aug 5, 2015, reproduced without permission.
Muni-Bond Firm in Growth Mode
Municipal-bond investor Maritime Capital is adding staff and developing its own trading technology amid a sharp increase in assets under management.
The New York firm, whose assets ballooned from $150 million to $325 million in the past six months, hired Jarret Roth from Bank of America last month as head of strategy and risk management. His arrival coincided with the launch of an execution-management system Maritime built in-house after outgrowing vendor-supplied software it had been using.
Simple C++: From Makefiles to Xcode Builds
This post will present a step-by-step process to convert C++/C++11 Makefile-based projects to Xcode build tools. I use it all the time to set up, convert, build and debug Unix/Linux executables that I develop on my Macintosh.
Kindred-Family
Here’s to the nights that turn into mornings
and the friends that turn into family
Unknown - Unknown
Your kindred-family are the close, true friends that are your family when your real blood relatives live far far away.
Me - Now
Yesterday was Independence Day here in New York and a popular day to spend with family. But my family lives in Australia and my wife’s is in Japan. No blood relatives here but ourselves.
DuckDuckGo
Note: This is not an advertisement. I love what the folks at DuckDuckGo are doing and want to spread the word.
DuckDuckGo is my search engine of choice (and is the page that opens in all new Safari tabs for me). If you are not using it as your default search engine, I’d advise you to start now.
I started using DuckDuckGo well over two years ago. My initial impressions back then was that it was slow, the results were not nearly as good as Google’s and the name was stupid. None of those first impressions turned out to be true.
A simple Markdown Spotlight importer
Note: This is for Yosemite or before, for El Capitan or later, see A Yosemite Markdown Spotlight Importer.
I noticed recently that Spotlight on Yosemite was no longer indexing my Markdown files. Since all my notes are in Markdown format, and Spotlight is how I find my notes, this was a big problem. Reinstalling my current set of Markdown editors did not help.
This did. Huge thanks to Gereon Sommer for the idea in Mac OS X Spotlight Enhancement.
New Google Analytics for Status Board Server Edition
Last week, Google finally deprecated their non-Oauth APIs, which means that the Google Analytics for Status Board code I have been publishing stopped working. Fortunately for us, Github user erebusnz updated the PHP API to work with OAuth2 and we can access Google again. I have included it in a new version of the Server Edition Package.
Quick Install Instructions
- Download the statusboard.zip file.
- Expand it in the root of your web server. It creates a
statusboardfolder. - New: Register your application with Google Developers Console and get your Service Account email and P12 certificate file.
- New: Determine your profile ID (its the number after the ‘p’ in the URL generated for your analytics)
- **New:**Replace the 3 instances of <—-> in each PHP file with your service account, P12 file name and profile ID.
- The URL to use in Status Board is
http://<your-domain>/statusboard/analytics_<file>.php, replacing<your-domain>with your server domain name, and<file>with one ofviews(graph),hourly(graph) orpages(table).
You should get something like this (Yes, my follower count is still tiny. Yes, I live in New York, but I still use Celsius for weather. And awesome Inbox Zero!):
That last effin 20%
I love creating new products. I love shipping new products more. That last effin 20% of work to create a new product that takes 80% of all the development time kills me. I really want to ship, but it has to be right.
For those who do not know the 80/20 rule, it’s a variant of the misnamed Pareto Principal wherein Vilfredo Pareto created a mathematical formula in 1906 to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his country, observing that 20% of the people owned 80% of the wealth. This was then applied to other areas and seemed to hold true.
Rust hits 1.0
Rust is a project I have been observing for a while now, an attempt to create a new, fast, safe, systems programming language to replace C++, but with better memory safety and a bullet-proof concurrency model. Last week, Rust hit 1.0, and I think I may start testing it out for highly threaded, small and fast calculation tools that I would normally write and fight in C++. If any of you are using it, please let me know what for in the comments.