productive.dk

I didn’t make it to the Preboot boat party this evening, but Thursday and Friday I’ll be at the conference. Unfortunately I’ll be without my new MacBook Pro—it’s in for repairs, but that’s another (sad) story. Luckily I’ve managed to loan an iBook, so I won’t be a complete outcast at the conference. Hope to see you there!

With the release of Oracle Portal 10.1.4, Oracle replaced the URL format
/portal/page?_pageid=6,3&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL

with the somewhat nicer
/portal/page/portal/TOPLEVELSITE/Navigator

On top of this you may add rewrite rules to your page groups, so that you can in fact end up with some fairly nice URLs, that are both speakable and search engine friendly. The URLs are constructed from the page group name and page name, so don’t forget to update the names of your pages and page groups, to remove spaces and other unwanted characters in the URLs.

Unfortunately my Edit Page bookmarklet didn’t work with the new URL format, so here’s an updated version that works with both 10.1.4 and older versions:

Bookmark this link: Edit Page, to add the updated bookmarklet.

My new MacBook Pro finally arrived last Friday. Here are my first experiences from life on the other side:

• Last Friday: Unpacking, installing essential software. Everything just works?!
• Saturday and Sunday: Installing more software, moving all my work-related files over. Had some great laughs with the famliy while playing with iSight and Photo Booth. Front Row rocks. No troubles yet—it just freakin’ works! I’m slowly realizing how much I’ve gotten used to software not working.
• Monday: First day working with the MBP. Had the old Windows laptop in the bag, just in case. Didn’t need it, though. OS X found the office network-printer all by itself, it just showed in the list of printers. Way to go!
• Tuesday: Left the Windows laptop at home. The co-workers might be a little tired by now of me showing something oh-so-cool, every 10 minutes. Frederik mentioned the MBP looks awfully nice together with the Fritz Hansen table and the Arne Jacobsen chairs in the conference room.
• Wednesday: I decided to retire my almost new and very buggy Windows Mobile powered Qtek phone, and replace it with a Sony Ericsson from Apple’s list of supported Bluetooth phones. Need I mention that Bluetooth syncing just works perfectly? Also today Apple released Boot Camp. I installed Windows XP and in an odd way it feelt like I did something terribly wrong, so I decided to only set aside 5 gigs of diskspace for Windows. I’d still prefer VMware or something similar, over dual booting.
• Thursday: I migrated over my Outlook calendar and contacts in preparations for completely retiring the Windows laptop. Finally figured out that there’s a prerelease build of Firefox 1.5.0.2 available as a universal binary know as Deer Park and it’s way faster than the PPC build of Firefox 1.5.0.1. I was actually a bit disappointed by the speed of the MBP, as I spend a great deal of time in Firefox, but not after installing Deer Park, yay!

• This Friday: Blogging about the past week…

Konkurrencestyrelsen skriver:

Nu er der hjælp at hente, når kommuner og andre offentlige myndigheder skal vurdere, om et indkøb skal sendes i EU-udbud. I en ny pjece sætter Konkurrencestyrelsen og Statens & Kommunernes Indkøbs Service (SKI) fokus på, hvordan udbydere skal beregne en kontraktværdi…

Læs hele pressemeddelsen eller download pjecen.

Yet another great Paul Graham essay. This time he’s writing about How to Do What You Love. From the essay:

I’m not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. They may have to be made to work on certain things. But if we make kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness is not the defining quality of work, and indeed that the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more interesting stuff later.

And about what not to do:

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.

I sure hope I’m on the right path here…

ThoughtWorker Obie Fernandez came up with the nifty new term Productivity Arbitrage:

Productivity Arbitrage is a strategy of statistical arbitrage which leverages innovative new technology to deliver solutions at the market price that is based on the historical price/value proposition of older, less-productive technology.

In software terms, it is the competitive advantage gained by delivering solutions at or slightly below market price, but incurring lower delivery cost due to early commercial use of a new, relatively unproven technology. Over time, the market’s price/value expectation aligns with reality to reflect a new status quo, in turn diminishing profitable opportunities for productivity arbitrage until innovation once again causes a productivity imbalance to arise.

Also a great story on how ThoughtWorks recently won a $800,000 bid with a Ruby on Rails powered system.

Here’s a quick little tip for Oracle Portal. If you’re tired of adding “&_mode=16” to the URL of pages without the standard “Edit Page” link, you can save yourself some keystrokes by adding the following bookmark in your browser:

javascript:location.href=location.href+’&_mode=16’
(bookmark this link: Edit Page, to create the bookmark)

Now, on any (Oracle Portal) page you simply select your bookmark, and the page reloads in edit mode. If you add the bookmark to your bookmarks toolbar, you can enter edit mode with just a single click.

Whether you’re an independent consultant, a footloose technology contractor or a freelancer, keeping track of time is vital to your business, which is why I started looking for a good time tracking solution when I began working on my own this month. I found a few options that looked good on the surface, and decided to give myHours.com a try. After using it for four weeks I can only say, that if you’re looking for an (online) application to keep track of your time, you should definitely try out myHours.com. For me it’s got just the right set of features. It did look a bit too simplistic to me in the beginning, but after using it for four weeks now, I’m very happy with the simple, non-bloated application and hope they’re going to keep it this way (adding a drop of AJAX wouldn’t hurt, though).

Finally, I just have to get this out: Boy am I happy not having to enter my time and expenses in some half-assed SAP implementation any more. What a relief it is!

Yes, I’ve taken the plunge and decided to work as a free agent / freelancer / independent contractor / whatever you want to call it. As of today I’m officially registered to do business under the name productive.dk.

This will be my much needed escape from the corporate rat race and should (fingers crossed) allow me to keep a better balance between working life and family life. Tough as it was deciding to quit a well-paying consulting job, I’m much looking forward to once again enjoying and being passionate about the work I do.

An export of my Firefox Adblock filters is available here.