Jimmy Z

I just had to post this. Johnny Lee is doing amazing things with a Wii Remote. One of my favorites is the video on head tracking for desktop vr displays. It’s incredible! When you have a minute, it’s worth checking out.

[Wii Remote photo taken by Dave Minnich]

Tagged with: wii

Although I upgraded to Wordpress 2.3 over a month ago, I hadn’t taken the time to edit my template so that it would show the tags on each of my posts. I also wanted to add a tag cloud to the sidebar. It’s actually very easy to add tags to your template with Wordpress 2.3.The following two links will help you get all set up:

• the_tags: this method is used for displaying the tags of a single post. Use this within your Single Post template file.
• wp_tag_cloud: this method will build a tag cloud for you. Use this within your Sidebar template file.

It’s pretty simple. Just add those two methods to your single post and sidebar templates, and you’ll be ready to go.

Tagged with: blogging, tagging, wordpress

While I’m in the mood for promoting great services and products, I have to throw in a recommendation for Slimtimer. One way great businesses create meaning and a loyal following is by solving a pain better than anyone else. I believe Slimtimer has done that.

Slimtimer makes time tracking easy and painless and produces powerful reports. If the recording of your time isn’t made easy, then recording the time is usually put off to another day and the records will be mostly based off of memory and will be inaccurate. If the reports produced are not useful, then all of your effort in tracking your time will be in vain.

During my time as a web developer for BYU’s Creative Marketing department we used time sheets where we recorded how we spent our time in intervals of 15 minutes. This was usually a drab process that you “had to get done” at the end of the day. We did this on paper, and I’m not sure how well the information was actually used. It seemed like a waste of time.

In one startup company that I worked for, time tracking was completely neglected all together. This led to lots of wasted development time and left no good way for management to guide efforts in more productive tasks. It seemed that management had to make blind decisions.

Another startup I worked in tried to track time with a custom-built time tracking software, but it was so complex and difficult to use, that we often put off recording our time to the end of the week, which led to bad data. We ended up abandoning the practice of time tracking altogether.

In my current work as a freelancer, I’ve been empowered by Slimtimer’s simple time recording widget. It allows me to simply click on the task that I’m working on and the timer begins to track in the background. If I forget to start the timer, I can easily edit my entries in a beautiful time editing interface.

Slimtimer has very powerful reporting capabilities. Tasks can be tagged so you can segment your reports in the ways that you need them whether it be by ‘billable’ or ‘non-billable’, by client, or by project, or even by task. You can also share tasks and time entries with co-workers, so you can build reports for your entire team.

If you are tired of filling out timesheets, and would like to have a better understanding of how your team’s time is spent, I strongly recommend you check out Slimtimer.

[Note: I am NOT an affiliate marketer for Slimtimer.]

Tagged with: business, productivity, webApps

Buying screencasts at Peepcode is worth every penny. The quality of the tutorials is superb. The topics they cover will increase your Rails development productivity, systems reliability, and overall maintainability.

Go check out the screencasts that are available and actually buy one. You won’t be sorry.

[Note: This is NOT an affiliate marketing promotion. I honestly love the work these guys produce.]

Tagged with: rails, ruby, screencasts