Ayaz

Absolutely. I learned touch typing on my own during my O'Levels years when I bumped into a DOS-based touch typing tutor. It changed the way I looked at computers.

Sadly, yes. Out of the 400 people that work where I work, less than 30 know how to touch type. It deeply saddens me.

Definitely. Using a computer becomes easy when you can type fast without looking.

I use both shift keys. Left shift key when the other key I need to press is on the right side of the keyboard, and so on. I also use both of my thumbs to press the spacebar.

_The Book of Laughter and Forgetting_ by _Milan Kundera_.

I am taking a break from reading business/self-help/startup related books to read fiction. Milan Kundera is one of my favourite authors.

Although, ICU and emergency wards at most if not all hospitals are kept cooler than other places in part to slow the rate of growth of bacteria, viruses and other similar organisms that can spread infections.

Pictures taken from the point rain began look so ghostly and chilling they give me goosebumps. Beautiful journey, beautifully narrated.

Indeed. That's the reason I liked the 'braindump' idea of WeekPlan.net[0].

http://weekplan.net/online-course-time-management/braindumps...

No application I've ever tried has worked for me in the sense that I felt it an indispensable part of my life. In almost all instances, after a few days, I always kept forgetting to use the application. Plus, the overhead of using applications seemed to appear significant overtime.

I am now successfully down to a good fountain pen and a clear notebook. It is also part of my strategy to break my device-addiction, which is bordering on insanity. Where I used to take in my laptop to meetings and use mind maps and others for taking down notes and ideas discussed, I only simply carry my notebook -- my pen is usually in my shirt's front pocket.

I have rediscovered the love for handwriting, which I had all through my childhood and teenage years. I had a beautiful cursive handwriting and could write fast, which I gave up when I joined university in favour of a more mechanical style, and soon thereafter, gave up on writing completely. I have started writing in cursive again, and it makes for my ability to take down notes very fast in a handwriting that looks good.

The only real grievance I have is when I want my notes to be available to others. In those cases, I do wonder if it wouldn't have been better to have typed them down in the first place (I'm a fast typist). But, it is a small price I'm happily willing to pay.

That is an interesting observation. For me, closely observing would translate to nagging individuals several times a day about what they are doing as well as how they are doing something.

The end goal of standups, the way I understand it, is to figure out what people in your team are doing and what they are stuck at in order to:

* align people towards individual goals in the sprint that require collaboration; * remove impediments that are beyond the control of team members and that may cause delays; * improve task and load distribution, so that some members aren't overburdened while others are slacking off (if you run a short sprint and give team member autonomy to work, tasks that require collaboration from several team members can tend to become bottlenecks, as I have experienced).

I suppose you could well call it micro-managing if these standups were used to manage individuals instead of the process. In my view however, standups help you gather data to manage and improve the process, so as to make things favourable for the team.

iOS devices sold in UAE don't have iMessage and FaceTime support. I can't remember whether I was able to use iMessage the last time I was there with an iPhone I purchased elsewhere.

Is it really micro-managing? Isn't it the point of standups in Scrum, to find out what an individual in a team has been working on and what issues they are facing in order to make more efficient use of their time and skills as well as to clear impediments in their way? The end goal is to improve the team's performance.

If I was telling them what to do, what results to expect _and_ how to do it, then I would be micro-managing.

I understand what you mean. However, if you personally have to ask every individual every day 1) what they did, 2) what they will do next, 3) and what impediments they have, and you can't get them to do it without your having to ask (in my experience, they'd do it for a few days, slow down, and then stop again), the more efficient way seems to me is to automate it.

Of course, in my case, I didn't wake up on the first day and put this in place. I spent a few months trying to get people to send in their standups every day, but realised that I can't possibly do it everyday with an expanding team and it didn't make for the best use of my time. Because filling in your standup is a quick part (quick because it shouldn't take you longer than five to ten minutes to fill it up) of the process that needs to be followed, the most efficient alternative was to create a bot to remind those who can't remember to do. Plus, the number one reason I got from people who failed to do it was that they simply forgot.

This is very cool! We use HipChat (migrating to Slack soon) and Assembla (which has a standup module). We have coded a bot which checks who has not added their standup in Assembla and reminds them on HipChat.

Standups, when done with discipline, bring in a lot of insight and prove helpful for everybody in the team. I use Assembla at work which offers a standup module, which asks the three customary questions. My problem is getting my team to regularly fill those up. I have personally reminded them several times. I have created an automated bot which checks who hasn't added a standup for the day and reminds them on HipChat. Despite that, people just don't do it with regularity. I should think this is a common enough problem that most teams/organisations face. I'm interested in what they use to tackle it.

I never liked nano. The only time I used it for a stretch was when for a year I used a non-GUI, X-less only environment for everything only old ThinkPad running Slackware. I was in University then. That was when I used Pine for email and Slrn for Usenet (and elinks for browser). While I remember using nano to edit emails in Pine (and later moving over to Emacs), I can't remember which editor I used inside Slrn.

I am a thorough Vim believer. I have been for a long time. If I ever accidentally find myself on a nix system with nano or pico as the default editor, I exit and install Vim.

However, in my almost 15 years using nix of all flavours, I have spent considerable time using Emacs as well, both on the GUI and the command line. Eventually, I gave up Emacs in favour of Vim. I've stuck to it since.

It is beautiful, to say the least.

Until some months ago, I had a factory unlocked iPhone 5 which I used for 2+ years. I had no reason to switch to a more recent model, other than the (at times) nagging need for the finger-print lock. Then, out of the blue, the battery on my iPhone began to malfunction, in that, it would only let the phone stay on for a couple of minutes unless it was plugged constantly to a power source.

I bought an iPhone 6S, space gray, factory unlocked at around $650 (excluding tax). I sent my iPhone 5 back to Apple for a recycle. They gave me $200 in iTunes gift money. So, all in all, I got a new iPhone 6S for $450 (excluding tax).

I wholeheartedly agree. I find 3D touch very helpful. But it really begs the question if you consider that unless I am consciously aware of 3D touch every time I interact with my phone, I am very likely to forget that it exists and go back to performing actions the way I am used to.

This is breathtaking!

I'd imagine so. I also like the approach that Amazon has taken with its recently launched AWS Certificate Manager. You can create as many SSL certificates as you like free of cost, even wild-card ones (which if I am correct Let's Encrypt does not support yet), and the AWS Certificate Manager takes care of the rest. The only restrictions, off the top of what I've read, are: 1) You have to be using the AWS infrastructure; b) You'd have to use their load balancer or CDN solutions, against which the certificates are placed.

I never realized this so clearly, but it's true. The biggest hindrance to security until LE was that certs were expensive and hard to install. I don't think it was so much the former as the latter. I'd gladly pay 10% more for my cert if it meant my server could renew automatically without me touching it at all.

Absolutely! Every time I had to create a CSR and install an SSL certificate on a server (having done it before in the past), I felt repeatedly terribly painful the process was.

Not only the amount of work, technology and thought that have gone into this, but also how well this has been implemented is mind-blowing.

As recently as two days ago I finished reading Porter Erisman's "Alibaba's World" in which he described his and Alibaba's run in with both Meg Whitman and Henry Gomez, who were then working on eBay China. What I read Erisman describe as his bitter experiences with Gomez then, and I read described in the article today, came as no surprise to me really.

Thanks for the break-down. It looks interesting. At work, we have been testing Skyline for a number of different metrics coming in from a large distributed network. I'm interested in seeing how Banshee performs in there.

I am interested in how it compares with Etsy's Skyline project: https://github.com/etsy/skyline

Reading this, I could not help but feel an incredible longing for a proper threaded UseNet client, a good UseNet subscription that contained most of the important channels, refraining from top-posting, using fixed-width fonts, and in general, spending a good part of my time as a youth learning one too many things and interacting with fascinating people. For someone who was (and still is) quite pedantic about word-wrapping and fonts and proper indentation levels while quoting, Google Groups never came close.

They certainly appear to have been working on it, judging from the updates being released. I feel they have a long way to go, though.

Would you mind giving some examples of what are more useful integrations for you that Slack does not support? I am curious because we--at work--have been using HipChat for around two years and have integrated HipChat into our processes, yet now that we are exploring and using Slack (for another project), we find the integrations and APIs so much better to work with.

We have been using HipChat for the last two years for one of our two major products at work and have very recently moved to Slack for the other. While notifications on HipChat work most of the time, they are still very patchy. I personally use the Mac client, while others in my company use the web, Windows, and Linux clients and we've all been bitten by missed notifications on applications one too many times to actually become a nuisance for us. Until the very last update to the Mac client, I became used to frequently finding the client freezing up on me. The windows clients, on the other hand, is even more infamous for this. Plus, the iOS app isn't something I really look forward to using (judging by the fact that I've had it installed on my iPhone for far longer than the Slack app, yet I leave it signed out almost completely, while I enjoy using the Slack app).