Every project managers wet dream š
Month: April 2015
Late Night Links – Sunday April 26th, 2015
Welcome one and all to this weekās installment of late night links! Letās get going!
- Cyanide & Happiness #3902: Bear With Me
- Android Wearās Second Big Update is Coming
Interesting… - A Herd of Zebras Had a Great Time Taking a Trip Around Brussels
- Peer-To-Peer Pet Boarding Marketplace DogVacay Launches Daycare
Charlie goes to DogVacay when we go on human vacations. - Flip Flap Flop
- How to Combine Multiple Internet Connections Into One Super-Fast Pipe
This is interesting. I wonder if I can use the same technology on my home network to double the speed between my router and the switch? - Butterfly Wings Are the Key to Glare-Free Phone Displays
- Change Into Non-Work Clothes at the End of the Day If You Work Remotely
Clothes? These people clearly donāt work remotely in the same way I do. - Mexican Teen Sent to U.S. After Being Mistaken for American Girl
How does this happen? - Oreo Dunking Trick Shots
- TypeĀ āSend Directionsā Into Google to Navigate on Your Phone
This is cool. You can also typeĀ āNote to Self,ā as it turns out. - A Wetsuit Thatās An Actual Suit is the Most Stylish Thing to Happen to Surfing
- Dilbert: Timelines
And weāre done for another week! See you next time, folks. Same time, same place.
How to Recover From an Unproductive Day Like It Never Happened
There was one day last week where I accomplished more in the last hour of my day than I did in the previous 6ish. This happens to everyone from time to time: despite our best intentions, there are all sorts of things that can cause a workday to go sideways on us.
We all have unproductive days. Maybe an unexpected event throws your schedule for a loop. Maybe youāre not feeling well. Whatever the reason, it can be tough to get back on track. Hereās how to get past the dip in productivity and back into gear.
For me, key to recovering when a day turns unproductive is to find a way to reset and tackle the remainder of the day with a renewed focus. I spend 15 or 20 minutes at the start of every day composing a to-do list and defining my action plan for the day, and when I find myself unable to execute on that plan for whatever reason I repeat that exercise and re-define my action plan based on my new reality. I also find it helps a lot to have a change of scenery: if Iām in the office and my day isnāt going the way I wanted it to then Iāll go home and work the rest of the day from there. If Iām already home then I might head to my favourite coffee place and spend an hour or two working in that environment.
I also find that as part of redefining my to-do list itās important to be fully inclusive. My day consists of both big and small tasks, and itās tempting when putting a list together to omit the small ones and just do them immediately, but of course this only leaves the big tasks where Iām more reliant on others and unforeseen things are more likely to occur. When things donāt go to plan itās entirely possible to end up with a to-do list that has nothing checked off at the end of the day, and itās important to me not to finish my day that way ā Iād much rather spend my evening relaxing with at least a small sense of accomplishment than worrying about a perceived lack of achievement. If Iām only able to achieve smaller things that day then so be it, but thatās better than nothing and cause for correspondingly small celebration, but celebration nonetheless.
If youāre not able to recover your productivity within the working day? Well, that happens to the best of us and isnāt cause for panic. The article Iāve linked to above has some tips and tricks to help us get back on the metaphorical horse the following day.
How to Recover From an Unproductive Day Like It Never Happened
Late Night Links – Sunday April 19th, 2015
Letās get this whole late night links things done, OK? Thereās hockey to watch.
- Daimler is Using EVs and Ridesharing to Teach Teen Drivers
- The Margin for Error is Crazy Small in This Cool Wingsuit Video
- Thereās Two Sides to Every Story
- Apple Patents a System to Broadcast Your Availability for Calls
There are plenty of ways to do this already so I donāt know that a patent should be granted, but itās a cool idea – as long as works across all types of phone, of course. - Universal Record Gives All Your Music That Vinyl Sound
This is cool. - Cyanide & Happiness #3897
- Yup, Thereās a Sodastream for Cocktails
Hmmm… - Alcatel OneTouch Watch Review: No Beginnerās Luck Here
This is interesting. I like that there are cross-platform smartwatch options now, Iām just waiting for a standard. - Google SearchĀ āFind My Phoneā To Locate Your Missing Android
- See The Worldās Second Most Spoken Languages With This Interactive Map
This is interesting.
And weāre done! See you next time, folks.
Please find these so I can give you a high five
Please find these so I can give you a high five
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTgYHHKs0Zw?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]
Last year I shared a video called Conference Calls in Real Life, and this week the folks that made it have published a follow-up!
Presenting, for your viewing pleasure: Email in Real Life
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
SharePoint on a Domain Controller Revisited
On Tuesday I wrote about installing SharePoint Foundation
2010 on my home windows server, which also acts as a domain controller, and I
concluded by saying that Iād encountered performance issues as a result of that
(non-recommended) setup.
Turns out, the performance issues were a complete coincidence,
and everything is now running just fine.
The problem I was experiencing was that two of my three forward
DNS servers werenāt working correctly. Now that my
service provider has corrected their issue, everything is great.
For a small setup like mine, Iād say go ahead
and install SQL Server Express and SharePoint on the domain controller. It
works great!
Installing SharePoint Foundation on a Domain Controller
Itās been a long time since I blogged about SharePoint, and thatās
largely because I havenāt had a need to develop anything custom on top of the
platform for quite some time.
If youāve been following along for a long time, you may
recall that back at the start of last year I installed
SharePoint foundation on a Windows 7 Virtual Machine at home for testing
purposes and, while I didnāt blog about it explicitly, when I upgraded
my home server last August I replaced that Windows 7 virtual machine (which
ran on my laptop) with an always-on Windows 2008 R2 VM, again running
SharePoint foundation.
As my home network continued to evolve I turned that Windows
Server VM into a domain controller, and this broke my SharePoint installation ā
but by then it wasnāt all that important and I didnāt need it for work anymore,
so I simply uninstalled it.
Recently, Iāve been missing having SharePointās
functionality at home. In particular, I wanted a shared calendar for Flo and I,
and a place for shared documents. We can achieve much of this with Google
calendar and our existing shared folders (and I already have a tool deployed that makes our network shares
available from outside our home network), but it all feels a little kludged together
and itās lacking features like NTLM based SSO and an easy way to edit files
from the web-interface that SharePoint provides out of the box. I looked at a
couple of alternative
solutions and wasnāt satisfied.
Previously Iād deployed SharePoint foundation in standalone
mode. This installs and runs all the required components on a single machine.
Itās not recommended for a full-scale deployment, but itās perfect for our home
network. The problem is that this simply isnāt an option if you install it on a
domain controller, and instead you have to install a server farm. In googling
around, the consensus online seemed to be that it wasnāt possible to install
SharePoint on a single server if that server was also acting as the domain
controller.
Not so.
It is possible, and in fact itās pretty easy. I made a
couple of missteps by attempting to follow along with what some other people
had done, but the solution was actually extremely simple: first you need to
install SQL
Server 2008 R2 SP2 express (and it has to be at least this version), then
you install SharePoint
Foundation 2010. For all the discussion online, I actually didnāt have to do anything other than accept the default options to install SQL server. When I installed
SharePoint it doesnāt give me the option to install in Standalone mode, but I
simply pointed it to the SQL Server instance I had installed and that was all
there was to it.
That being said, things are not all that rosy. Just because
this setup is possible, doesnāt mean itās recommended ā and this is certainly
not Microsoftās recommended way of doing things.
Microsoft advocate for a separation of server duties, and
having different, unrelated services running on different machines. Now that Iāve
entirely eschewed that philosophy I can see why itās important: SharePoint is
running well and performance is snappy, but general internet performance on our
home network has suffered, and I believe the fact my single Windows server is
also the DNS server for the network is the problem ā DNS lookups are slow.
I may try and solve this by trying to install a slave DNS
server on the Linux server we have, but if not then I think SharePoint will
have to go away in the interests of DNS performance.
Or, maybe I just add a second physical server and move a few
of the VMs to that? Weāll see.