http://www.pbell.com/index.cfm A series of occasional musings on architecting, securing, optimizing and generating web based applications. By Peter Bell. en-us Fri, 24 May 2013 20:29:18 -0400 Wed, 09 Jan 2008 04:56:00 -0400 BlogCFC http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss test@test.com test@test.com http://www.pbell.com/index.cfm/2008/1/9/In-Praise-of-Little-Efficiencies Most knowledge workers spend a lot of time dealing with text and while I'm not nearly as efficient as I'd like to be I try to take a little time each week to learn small improvements in document handling that'll allow me to knock a few seconds off of common tasks. I was just munging some data from Excel into a web page to document a data structure. Started by cutting and pasting into Textmate and replacing tabs with the HTML I wanted to show there using find and replace. Then I wanted to add a break to the end of each line. A couple of seconds Googling came up with <a href="http://osdir.com/ml/editors.textmate.general/2005-06/msg00226.html">this</a>. Anyone with textmate should give it a try - it's very cool to see your keystrokes being replicated over fifty lines - brought the sorcerers apprentice to mind (maybe I'm just too easily amused)! What else do you do to improve your general efficiency? I'm thinking I really owe it to myself to make more use of grep and similar Unix tools, to learn RegEx's properly for everyday text search and replacements and to check out the Automator capabilities on a Mac (lots of <a href="http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/">scripts</a> available. What are the little productivity tweaks you've made that add up to useful savings over the months and the years? Efficiency Misc Wed, 09 Jan 2008 04:56:00 -0400 http://www.pbell.com/index.cfm/2008/1/9/In-Praise-of-Little-Efficiencies