Running from an external drive is not supported in the trial version of yaTimer, it is enabled when you enter your activation code after buying a license. yaTimer - my time tracking application, can run from a portable drive, it can run from anything with a drive-like interface, a USB flash drive, a memory card, a digital camera, an iPod or an external hard disk. All of the application’s features work when running from a portable drive except for auto-update. To run from a portable drive: Run yaTimer. Open the main menu. ...

Anyone thinking about starting a software company (or already in the process of starting one) should watch this, several times. http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/97862/DHH_Talk__Startup_School_2008 I couldn’t agree more with this talk.

I needed a way to test if a background color is light or dark in order to choose an appropriate text color (black on light colors and white on dark colors), you can find yourself in the same problem if you try to convert an image to grayscale. I found many approaches that didn’t work well, I’ll describe them and the problems I discovered below – but first – the successful solution. I finally found a solution that actually works on this web page the formula is: brightness  =  sqrt( .241 R2 + .691 G2 + .068 B2 ) Or, in C# using the...

Humans are most productive when working for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. If you work more than that you actually getting less done, not only you could spend the extra time with your family or doing something fun – you actually get less work done by working more. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution researchers have been studying worker’s productivity, a lot of this research went into finding the optimal length for the work day, studies were done all over the world and for different industries from factory work to information technology and they all came up with...

Let’s say you are trying to get organized, you made a task list and prioritized it by importance, now what? You have several projects you have to work on, none of them is more impotent then the others, how can you make progress on all of them? One way I already talked about is to track how much time we spend on each project and take corrective action when some work is left behind. Another way is to plan ahead, decide before you start working how much time you are going to spend on each project, prepare a weekly time budget: ...