Scott Mebberson

I’m always looking for ways to improve my productivity; the more I get done at work, the less work I have to wrestle with to stop from creeping into my family life.

I’ve been using the Pomodoro Technique for a few weeks now, and I’m pretty happy with the results. the Pomodoro Technique promotes working to a specific unit of time (25 minutes) with a 5 minute break in between sessions. During a session you’re supposed to avoid all interruptions to try and achieve a list of tasks (one task per session).

Two important things I learnt almost immediately are:

1. make sure you break down your tasks into steps that are achievable within 30 – 40 minutes; you’ll be surprised how much extra work you can complete with 25 minute bursts of pure focus
2. take the scheduled breaks (and when you do, get away from the computer and walk around, refresh your body, eyes and your mind), if you don’t you’ll be super tired at the end of the day

A positive side affect I’ve noticed is that your team can usually resolve any issues they have during the 25 minutes without your intervention (but that’s a blog post for another day).

I’ve started a side project with Gavin Keech, our creative director at Enpresiv to create a pomodoro timer, helping to implement the Pomodoro Technique called Focus Booster. We’ve had almost 1000 downloads since its launch (a couple of weeks ago) and we’ve had two official releases.

We built it using Flex 3, Air 1.5, the Mate FrameworkM, Degrafa, AS3CoreLib and BendPixels (for integration Pixel Bender filters) libraries. I’m going to write a series of blog posts on some of my learning’s along the way.

I really do love motionbox.com. A little while ago I bought an AVCHD camcorder (a Canon HF10 to be precise). While I’ve been very happy with the camera itself, I unknowingly stepped into brave new world of dealing with AVCHD (mts) files; a world that is definitely in its infancy, to say the least.

I’m a big fan of archiving original video content (and photos, using Flickr) despite what you might edit the video into. You never know when you’re going to want that original source file. However, dealing with the huge mts files, having enough room to store them and back them up, well it’s nothing short of a pain in the arse.

I also need to share them, with limited fuss (if possible), via the web. I have family interstate and like to keep them in the loop.

After much searching (thanks for all your help Gav) and trials of a few different video sharing sites, I’ve finally settled on motionbox.com. I even paid premium memberships with another well-known video sharing site, only to be disappointed (primarily with the video quality).

Motionbox can natively handle AVCHD (mts) files. No transcoding and exporting prior to uploading, just upload your mts files and motionbox takes care of the rest. Perfect for archiving your original camcorder files.

Its easy to manage permissions, share videos and importantly, the quality of the final video that appears on motionbox is awesome. Apparently they use higher bit rates to encode your videos (in H264) than other sites, and I really did notice a massive difference in quality. And their price is unbeatable at $US30 per year for unlimited hosting.

Despite their under-whelming features page, you should really chec out motionbox if you’re looking for a fantastic online video, sharing site.

Well all love Flex’s data binding feature (despite some of the performance problems you can run into). But its so frustrating the humble TextInput component doesn’t support two-way data binding (like the DataGrid does). There are a number of ways to do it, but they all involve a fair bit of typing.

Today, I stumbled across what seems to be a very elegant solution for achieving two-way data binding using TextInput. Strictly, it isn’t data binding but rather, a clever response to built in events. It still achieves the same result, and probably does it with less memory overhead?

I can’t wait for Flex 4 and the two-way data binding shorthand!

I’ve been playing around in the Clouds again, this time I’ve been giving the Amazon EC2 Railo instance a run.

Following a great tutorial on getting an EC2 instance up and running, I had a publicly accessible website and the developer version of Railo running in about 20 minutes.

After tweeting about my instance, I returned to the website overnight to find my developer version of Railo had outgrown its maximum 10 ip limit.

The initial experience in getting Railo up and running in the cloud was a good one. As I struggled to upgrade my developer version of Railo to the community edition and contacting Railo support, I realised it wasn’t going to be that easy.

I’ve decided to install Railo locally and investigate it a bit more in the comfort of my hard drive. I’ll stick to experimenting in the Stax cloud at the moment, which I’ve found to be a more streamlined process.

I’ve just stumbled across cybersquatting on Twitter.

I was Googling ‘Twitter market research’, and came across this page and realised it was a form of cybersquatting.

I looked at a bunch of well known brand names on Twitter and realised cybersquatting on Twitter is rife!

• American Express
• Nike
• Adidas
• Telstra

A few more searches on Google and I realised the practice of Twitter cybersquatting has been going on for quite some time. I feel like I’ve been sitting under a rock somewhere!

My New Years Resolution was to try and Twitter more. So far, I’ve succeeded in Twittering regularly. It is a really odd and unusual website/service – but I’m actually getting used to it. As such, I’ve decided to add ‘blogging more often’ to my New Years Resolution.

I’ve resisted the urge to use FarCry and NearCry, and have opted to simply revamp the look and feel of my WordPress.com blog. I tend to waste too much time tinkering with the code when I use open source blogging software such as BlogCFC and NearCry.