Software History

We all get stuck from time to time. A mental block, a change in plans or the proverbial brick wall. Dealing with such impasses is challenging and can create periods of stress and low productivity. They are nothing to be ashamed of and in fact we often find that when we overcome these sorts of issues we are rewarded with valuable skills and experience that benefit us from that point on. In this post I’d like to share a few methods I use that can help you deal with these sorts of scenarios. Not all are applicable on every occasion, but hopefully there are at least a couple that can be applied to a particular situation.

For some time now there have been techniques around for having a set of slides that loop at the start of your PowerPoint presentation. These generally involve hiding your main presentation slides, adding an invisible button to each of the visible slides (that allows you to jump to your first hidden slide), setting those slides to auto advance and then setting your presentation to loop continuously. But what if you want to add more loops and/or want to control everything from a presentation remote? Last year I was working on a webinar where we wanted to have a couple of looped sets of slides and I needed an alternative - ideally one that didn’t involve having to break out and run a separate presentation. Fortunately it wasn’t too hard to come up with a solution.

When I’m not working, sat at a computer creating things or spending time with my family I can usually be found helping people with their studies of the martial art of Jiu Jitsu. I’ve been doing this for well over a decade and like to think I have developed at least some modicum of aptitude in helping people develop the a range of physical, mental and emotional skills to allow them to advance in their studies. But no matter how much teaching I do and how many techniques, approaches and lessons I develop myself it is the lessons of my first instructors that I come back to time and again as being some of the simplest and most useful. Like many lessons in the martial arts there is a deep wisdom to be found in them that is applicable beyond the confines of a dojo and equally as relevant in the walls of an office. I’d like to share one of these with you today.

Outside of my work I spend several hours each week volunteering as a teacher. I have some modest skills and experiences that people seem to be interested in learning about and developing themselves and that’s something that gives me great pride to be able to do. One of the most important lessons I try and teach my students is about the awesome power of mistakes.

We all have things that we want from people and of course there are things they want from us. Recently I was thinking about what this actually meant and I think I managed to boil it down to just three things - things that I think we all look for from each other.

In several of the template Excel spreadsheets I use in my work there are references to clients and version numbers that are included. This is for reference purposes, particularly if the spreadsheet might be printed or exported as a soft copy (e.g. PDF). Whilst it is possible to maintain this information manually I decided that this should be something that could be improved by virtue of the file name containing such information (as these are the very basis of file management on projects). I’d referenced the file path and elements of it in the past and I thought that this would be something that should be relatively straight forward to achieve; and here’s how I got on ….

If you work with computer aided presentations on Windows, then you probably know PowerPoint has options to show blank screens. Pressing “B” will give you a black screen and “W” will give you a white screen. These are useful options when you want to focus people’s attention on what you’re saying and away from any slides you might have up. For example if you need to discuss a point for which you don’t have a slide or if you want to tease something.

When you think of productivity I’m guessing that for most people the first word that springs to mind probably isn’t “lazy”, but for me it’s been like that from the start. It’s my mind-set.

Recently I was updating a rather complex DOS batch file that we track the changes on. Each time we update it, we update a comment in the batch file for the version number. Since we sometimes get logs sent to us about the script’s operation I figured it would be useful to add the version number to the log file.

Recently I spotted a number of people I’m connected with on LinkedIn and a number of people I follow on Twitter sharing an image about Tips for Running Effective Meetings. Since I’m always interested in ways to improve what I do I gave it a read through. I was surprised to find that as I read it through I found myself having an issue with almost every point given. In this post I’m going to describe why I have issues with the suggestions and what I’d offer up as alternatives.

There’s an acronym in computer science that holds true in many areas of business including that of HCM - GIGO. It stands for “Garbage In, Garbage Out” and refers to the fact that computers will process things literally and if you enter data that is no good you’ll end up with data that is no good. Even when you put an intelligent human in the mix and give them poor quality data you’re more than likely to end up with rubbish results.

A little while ago I received a request for the installation of Spotify on a work computer. I’d not heard of it at this point so I did some research and discovered that it was a piece of software that linked you to a massive library of music on the Internet. After a bit of discussion in trying to ascertain what the business case was for installing this to a work computer it faded away.

Recently I was carrying out a bit of house keeping on my work laptop’s hard drive. I have a folder in Windows that contains daily folders of temp files and every so often I compress them and archive them off to free up some space. Usually it just takes me a few minutes to run through the folders and compress them into archive files. Unfortunately over the past year I’d not gotten around to doing it so I had rather a lot of folders to archive and I decided to quickly put together a little script to help me.

A little while ago I spent some time outside of work struggling with a particular application on my Samsung Omnia i900 mobile phone.  It seemed like it just didn’t work properly and I almost reported it to the developers as a bug.  Just before I did I came across another piece of mobile software and noted a very similar problem and this time something clicked and I realised what the issue really was.

A little while back I spent a bit of time investigating some domain names for a project I was working on. As you may know, you can see all sorts of useful information about a domain by looking up it’s Who Is record. In order to save time I came up with a couple of TextExpander snippets to help with that.

Twitter seems to have become really big in the UK all of a sudden.  Stephen Fry has been leading the way for some time, but lately there have been a whole slew of celebrities tweeting away raising the awareness and popularity of the system.

There are many options these days for carrying out ad hoc calculations. Personally I ditched the desktop calculator as soon as I got a personal computer for my day to day work - after all a computer is a very capable calculator. But that left me with various options of how to carry out a calculation. On the Mac there’s the calculator app and following in the steps of launchers like Alfred even Spotlight allows you to carry out quick calculations. If you have a browser open you could even tap into the calculation potential of engines such as Google search of Wolfram-Alpha. However in order to retain my clipboard and tap into something that allowed for some more complex calculations I created a TextExpander snippet to help with this.

Like many of us, the Internet is my go to place for immediate access information. It allows me to quickly research topics via my web browser, but for more involved topics it can be difficult for me to get enough detail in a single sitting, or I may need to pass on some details elsewhere (e.g. a reference list for a document/post/article). But when I have several tabs open (potentially across several windows) it can be a pain to manually list out the links and pages. To that end I created an AppleScript based TextExpander snippet to produce such a list.

It’s the new year so once again it’s time to review the past 12 months and see what’s been going on at thoughtasylum.com and with me.

Late last year I was eagerly awaiting the release of a new iOS application that promised a new level of automation. Whilst I do like using Launch Center Pro, Drafts and Pythonista, Workflow promised something a little different and something that could complement these other tools nicely. I’m sure I’ll be sharing numerous workflows on this site as time goes by, but the first one I thought I’d share is one that you could say is a little bit meta. A workflow for duplicating workflows.

Whilst experimenting and answering occasional Twitter questions relating to date manipulation in the iOS Workflow app I’ve created a few example workflows. These workflows are not intended to be stand alone workflows with a practical purpose, but simply as ways that the dates can be manipulated. Date manipulation is a common requirement. You may need to extract elements of a date (e.g. the month) or rearrange to another format. You can use them for queries, web site links, file names and a myriad of other things. So getting an idea of how to do some manipulations in Workflow could potentially prove quite useful.

I’ve been experimenting a lot recently with the iOS Workflow application and whilst it is an initial release it has a lot of power and a vast amount of potential. Whilst there are a number of features I’m hoping will be included in upcoming releases I have a few workflows that are already saving me some time and one of those relates to a site called jaymantri.com. The site offers up a set of photographs for download each week and when the e-mail comes to let me know they’re available I dutifully went to the site to download each of them from. But now with Workflow I can grab them from across the site with the push of a button.

It’s amazing how many computers we all work with these days. Our phones, our tablets, work computers, personal computers, remote servers, Raspberry Pis; the list goes on. I frequently find myself wanting to action things on a computer other than the one in front of me and I now have another tool in my arsenal to do this … the iOS app Workflow.

I continue to find great personal uses for the iOS app Workflow. One of the ones I’ve been experimenting with recently relates to quickly taking contextual notes and adding them into Evernote.

Continuing with my little spate of sharing workflows for the iOS app known as Workflow, I’ve decided to share another simple action extension workflow that allows you to save web pages as a simplified style PDF Whilst I personally use Evernote as my snap shot repository and page cleaner of choice, sometimes I want to be able to send other people a snap shot of a page and Workflow provides a relatively easy way to do this.

TextExpander is one of my most frequently used Mac utilities and I have all sorts of snippets that help me with all sorts of tasks. From correcting my seldom perfect typing and inserting standard sets of boilerplate text through to more advanced ones that produce fill-in forms and carry out conversions of clipboard text. This focus of this post certainly falls into the latter, but does so in doing something surprisingly simple. It takes plain text and simply adds HTML paragraph tags in at the appropriate locations.

During my career I’ve encountered dozens of processes, agreements, work packages, projects and changes that have, for one reason or another, failed. Whilst the contributing factors varied, there was one that has almost always appeared somewhere in the chain of events responsible for the failure. A deficiency in communication.

In Q1 of 2015, Nakisa released the latest iteration of their visualisation suite (VSN) of applications - version 4.3. With 4.2 being an interim release for Nakisa’s Performance and Goals product or perhaps an internal working version, 4.3 can probably be considered an upgrade from the 4.1 SP2 release. As well as rolling in various bug fixes and general performance improvements, version 4.3 includes some great feature enhancements.

Smile Software have just released a new update to their TextExpander product that brought a particularly interesting new feature. The option to run JavaScript based snippets. At first this may appear unremarkable given that the previous OS X snippets could take advantage of AppleScript, or shell script based options such as BASH, Perl and Python (to name just a few). The exciting thing to me however was that the JavaScript based snippets could also run on the iOS version; whereas AppleScript and shell script based snippets cannot. As an initial foray into using JavaScript snippets on my iOS devices I decided I’d try recreating one of my existing snippet groups.