Practical – tutorials, tips

A few tips on taking photos at an event:

• Use the camera / smartphone from a high position. Try to raise your arms in the sky and photograph the audience like this.
• The most important take – the one which shows the number of participants plus the speaker.
• Another important shot is with zoom on the speaker, a close one.
• I use ex-Google’s Picasa for editing the photos.
• For promotional purposes, the most important task is tagging persons in the photos.
• When you add description to an album, add the link to your web site, so people can get easily from the photo to your web site.
• On Facebook, tag the location.
• People want speed – do live photos and a quick follow-up. It’s not much help if you put the photos 3 weeks later from the event.
• It’s fine to use live a wifi card, or photos from the smartphone.

Let’s say you have a folder with files, and you want to save the full list of files in a text file.

The solution is to open Command Prompt (Win + R, cmd, enter), and type this:

dir /s /O:GNE >output.txt

This will result in the full contents of “Olivian Breda” folder being listed in the file “output.txt”, which is created if it doesn’t exist, and overwritten in case it already exists.

Do you want just the current folder, not the subfolders? Just remove “/s”.

dir /O:GNE >output.txt

Do you want the listing to be displayed on the screen, as opposed to in a file? Remove “>output.txt”.

dir /s /O:GNE

Cheers!

Fractals of Change: Why a Great Programmer is Worth Fifty Good Ones:

If you’ve ever had a superstar working for you, you’re probably used to leaving him or her behind in the office when you go home – if you’re the CEO of a startup you don’t go home that early – and finding him or her in the office when you arrive.  If it’s a him, the stubble’s a giveaway; women cover up a little better.  A superstar prefers to work in at least twenty-four if not forty-eight or even seventy-two hour spurts.

Again, it’s the interfaces: it’s very expensive to put something down, go home, sleep, wake-up, and then recover all the loose ends. The first half of writing a program creates almost all loose ends; the second half is tying them back up.  Like surgery. If a programmer has the skill and physical stamina for marathon gulps of creativity, then there are many fewer times when the non-productive work of putting stuff away neatly (mentally) and picking it up again has to happen.  For similar reasons, one-person debugging is best done when you can crawl inside the code and stay there until you’re done.

Now, unfortunately, this kind of endurance is a young person’s game.

There is a saying which goes like this “Don’t answer quickly when you are nervous, postpone the reply”.

The basic idea is to think for a while, and postpone the answer, if you can forget about the hatred and despise, and don’t apply anger.

In an ideal world, you wouldn’t want revenge.

If it troubles you a lot, the fact that you are sitting and thinking, instead of answering – you only make things worse.

You have to set yourself for forgiveness if you want to do this: “I will not reply now, but tomorrow”.

It’s good to use a Mac Air, compared with other laptops:

• It’s a good Operating System (Mac OS), for those who know it.
• The laptop is very light, small, tiny, thus – very portable.
• It’s got a sleek design, and it’s a pleasure to carry around.

On the other hand, things can get wrong. I’ve seen people using Mac Airs a bit wrong:

• Not good with Mac OS, and their friends who install software aren’t good with Mac OS, so at times they don’t know how to do something on Mac, and have no one to ask help. Sure, there are solutions, it’s just that it’s a bit more complicated.
• The laptop is sometime used on a desk, all day. With the money you pay on a Mac Air you can easily buy a desktop PC with much bigger features & abilities.
• The laptop can heat a lot, especially if you use it all day long. Thus, not such-a-big pleasure to carry it around.

Talk about comparing apples to apples. :)