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One of these days, I’ll move to Python. Until then, here’s a video to keep me entertained. Thanks @netboss

In around 8 minutes, I understood the concept of Views 2 Relationships by watching this video. Relationships helps you connect relate (duh) nodes to other nodes. In short, it is probably most helpful to think about this as a SQL join.

Check out this video from drewish.com for the screencast:

http://drewish.com/node/127

If you took a lab in college like I did, you’d probably know how much your professors forced students to keep an engineering notebook. Well, it turns out that keeping an engineering notebook really pays off significantly. There’s a lot to gain by keeping a documented account of your work.

It helps you record your solutions and store it in one centralized location. How many times have you come across the same problem when working and not recall that pivotal eureka moment that let you arrive at your solution? Even if your solution is not made explicity in your notebook, even retracing  the steps taken to achieve your answer will help you jog your memory faster than anything else can.

Engineering notebooks can help you to reveal previous trends. The items that wasn’t so obvious when you are in the thick of it. Things such as individual workflow habits and the effort spent on each task.

Documents a history of work as evidence Working in a creative role, it is sometimes hard to quantify your level of effort against a certain task or group of tasks. When it comes to software development, it seems there are always items that have not been taken into account of in the official project plan. We’ve all been there. There’s always “that one other thing” you have to do before you get into the main task at hand. Before you know it , the level of effort it takes to accomplish the periphery tasks snowball out of control. Next thing you know, your boss is hovering over your desk demanding to know why a task that was slated for half a day has been unresolved for a week. An engineering notebook can help you persuade them by showing them exactly how much effort is going into finding a solution. (Of course, it’s your job to estimate tasks responsibly but that’s another topic altogether).

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My brothers and I decided to spend a week in New York city. We went out to Manhattan for a couple of days to soak in some of that “real” New York culture and do a bit of overdue sightseeing. I was really happy that we were going out but none of us really knew where anything was. My iPhone to the rescue…

Google Maps – whether it it is finding the best way to Junior’s cheesecake or figuring out where to get the next E train, Google Maps has earned a place on the first page of my iPhone after this trip. The fact that you can map driving, walking, and metro directions is still completely mind-boggling to me. The ability to swoop down and peek at some real panoramic street view photos is also really helpful when you want to verify that you’re headed to the right place.

Twitterific – Whether I want to broadcast where I was going next, get tips on what I should be checking out in the city, or sharing some quick pictures with my friends, Twitterific is the one tool I used to do it all. What I really liked was Twitterific’s camera feature which allows you to use the built-in iPhone camera interface to send photos right up to Twitpic.com. It also helped me to keep in touch with friends when I am on the go.

Safari – The best mobile browser on the market did not fail to disappoint. Safari proved it’s worth on my phone when I needed to find out phone numbers for the nearest Apple store or when I needed to take a break and check out the latest articles on dzone.com,

These iPhone apps made a huge difference in my nyc vacation. The time that I saved and that sense of security I felt knowing that any piece of information was available to me at anytime(except for when on the subway) really made me feel much more comfortable traversing Manhattan even though I was a complete stranger to it. Now if only I can get my cousins to admit the same thing.

With every Happy New Year comes the realization that I am going to be another year older on the 2nd of every January. Regardless of what all my friends seem to think about my 28 years of experience, I am very excited about the next year. I have got a lot of personal and professional goals that I have set for myself. Many people are going into 2009 apprehensive about the state of their job but for some reason I have got a very upbeat attitude about the entire thing.

I am learning to live in the present here and now. Here’s to a great year for all of us.

Here’s a tip for all those who want to siphon a little bit of that right-brain energy: At the top of every morning (preferably while you are still in bed), grab some paper and write. Just write. Whatever comes to mind. Three pages worth. The idea is that your right brain way of thinking will still be somewhat functional because the left-brain has not shifted into high gear just yet. Who knows? You may just get your next great idea before breakfast!!

It has taken several months of work on my Macbook Pro to realize that TextMate is my favorite text editor!

Here are some ways that you can use Textmate to help you with web development. Please note that all of these tips (and more) can be found in the most excellent book, Pragmatic TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac

Closing opening tags – One really important command in this bundle to open and close a tag. You can open and close a tag by typing ^+Shift+< when there is nothing to the left of your cursor. You will see a open tag and close tag appear. Type in whatever you want for your open tag and watch the close tag automatically mirror it for you. After you are done typing in the tag hit Tab and you’ll be able to place your cursor in between the open and close tag. This is great when creating pages full of HTML code. This works with XML documents as well.

Inserting a doctype – For anybody who cannot remember the syntax differences between the XHTML 1.0 Transitional and XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype element, type in the word doctype and hit Tab. This will bring up an option menu from where you can select the exact doctype that you want. It’s saved me an extra 30 seconds. Maybe it will for you too.

Validating your markup with the W3C – Every web developer is concerned with web standards. It helps ensure that all of their web pages work across multiple platforms and stays well formed so that it does not break tomorrow either. Now you can do this within Textmate by typing in ^+Shift+V.

Inserting color codes in CSS stylesheets – When you are creating your CSS stylesheets and you want to double-check the color of a particular hex value, type in Shift+Cmd+C. This will bring up Textmate’s color chooser and allow you make a choice. The color you selected will be transformed to a six digit hexadecimal value with a leading number sign.

When you start using these Textmate shortcuts to do your web development work, you are going to notice that your time to turn around web projects are going to be shorter. Combined with shortcuts, snippets, and command-line integration into Textmate, you are going to start wondering if you ever need to use any other tool for creating textual content.