Productivity Roundup

Over the last months lots and lots of tools have crossed my way, all of them aiming to make one’s (my in this case ) life easier and more productive.

Social networking

I personally like last.fm not only because I love good music, but also because of its feature to listen to your “neighborhood”. You’ll always find new stuff that really deserves it to take a step out of the cloud and be recommended to the world. So, why not combining your well-maintained “loved tracks” with twitter by automatically posting updates on twitter when hitting the “love song”-button?
It really is easier than you might think to bring both services together – by using twitterfeed: create a twitterfeed account, allow access to your account on twitter, and plug the RSS of your loved tracks from last.fm right in it. That’s it.

Pushing your loved songs to twitter is great, but what’s with the twitter-like feature on other social networking platforms like facebook or studiVZ? I certainly log in very rarely to my accounts there to see what’s happening. But, on the other hand, I want my status on these platforms to be the same as on twitter – you know, just to keep my friends informed who reject to use twitter.

Get in the right mood

Join the stereomood community! As I mentioned in the previous paragraph: I love music, especially music that keeps me energetic, that helps me to relax, to think or “simply” digs me out of a hole of self-pity. That’s where stereomood is really good at. Give it a try.

Note taking and paperwork

Surely, it might never win a beauty-contest – but it’s damn useful. Xournal lets annotate PDFs on Windows and Linux in a very lightweight fashion. The big pro: The notes you take are stored separate from the original file; you “draw on” the content if you will. Just keep the *.xoj called file with your annotations, e.g. push it into a repository while omitting the (perhaps) binary file you’ve annotated.

Note taking via Xournal

Mendeley (thanks to Martin for the suggestion ) is an ambitious bibliography manager that automatically extracts the references, that lets you synchronize and/or share your library with the world (note: Mendeley gives you 200MB of free space for your library), and allows annotating PDFs (very appealing!). Plus: you get an online profile showing your research interests and activities (for example, my profile). A perfect place to be as a (young) scientist. The platform itself is currently in its beta-stadium, but already works well as I can say.

Mendeley Bibliography Manager

Taking a step back to the point where you have to write stuff to share (e.g. all kinds of papers). If you work on many different places on several different machines, of if you simply like it to back up your data, you might take a look at beanstalkapp.  beanstalkapp is a free Subversion hosting service, giving you 100MB of free space and – unless opensvn – it really is fast with nearly no downtimes.

Google is your friend

You might not use Google Mail, but if you have a Google account and still searching for a lightweight web-based todo-list manager, “Google Tasks” as part of Google Mail might be something you should take a look at. A link to it is located in Google Mail’s left sidebar, right above the integrated chat.

Tasks within Google Mail

Reading a lot of news, articles and blogs? Then use Google Reader. It has (as you might expect from Google) an interface that unifies the layout of the aggregates news, and it couldn’t be easier to use. Besides all of its useful features, posting articles you like on services like twitter, or simply sharing it on your personalized Google Reader site (for example, my site) are two of them I use most often.

Future stuff

Both inbox2 and Mozilla Raindrop (ars technica article) are ambitious projects, aiming to unify all kinds of streams that are currently out there, like twitter, facebook, mail and feeds. Interesting projects – simply mentioned here for the sake of completeness.

If you have more of those handy tools and services, then please leave a comment or write me an email (using the feedback tab). Thanks.

About the Cardinality of Sets

Even though it “only” was an assignment in Computational Models, it has a rather nice solution. The Problem:

Show that for every set it holds that .

A proof: The basic idea is to generalize Cantor’s diagonal argument. Assume that there is a set such that . Then there is a surjective mapping . Define some mappings:

• with otherwise
• 
• 

Then: for all . This means: There is no element such that

One amazing impact of that fact: There are problems that cannot be decided by a Turing Machine. How to see this? The set of all Turing Machines, denoted by , is enumerable, hence there is a surjection . But since the set of all languages is equal to , there are languages which are undecidable by Turing Machines. Stunning, eh?

A Delicious Experiment

Black Forest gateau

As I said several times before, I like to push myself in several areas. One of them, even one of the most relaxing areas, is cooking and baking. Besides the relaxing impact on me, cooking also contributes to my health as well as my quality of living and learning.

Well, obviously not every good one could cook or bake has positive impacts on one’s health. Anyhow, after my girlfriend mentioned that her housemate intents to bake a “Black Forest gateau”, I asked myself if I could do so, too, even if I had never baked a in some sense “fancy cake” in my life before. But, as you can see in the attached picture, the result was quite pleasing — and delicious, too.

By the way: Blogging about my cooking & baking experiment(s) is quite similar to what Julia Powell has done a few years ago. Her story even became a movie earlier this year.

The Blog’s Future

Even if it was rather quiet on my blog over the last few months, I had a really exciting time. Let’s dive quickly into a brief overview what’s happened:

• We, my girlfriend and I, renewed our relationship. Quite exciting since I never thought we would be back together again and that our bond could be much tighter than ever before. Gladly, I was wrong in both places.
• The project group AugNet II, a necessity of the examination regulations of Paderborn’s master course in computer science, is going very well. Frankly, I thought the project group would be a real “pain in the ass” after the experiences gained from the “Softwaretechnikpraktikum” in 2007.
• Lectures attended to: Computer Graphics II, Data- and Information-Visualization, Coding Theory I+II (data compression and error correction), Complexity Theory II. Exciting stuff, but especially the projects for the first ones were sort of costly in terms of labor. Anyway, all exams turned out very, very well for me.
• Student research assistant: After (successfully) talking about over an alternative characterization of the algebraic complexity classes VPe (arithmetic formulae) and VPs (skew arithmetic circuits), based on a paper by U. Flarup, P. Koiran and L. Lyaudet, I fueled my hopes and chances for a student research assistance in the field of algebraic complexity theory. It’s even more important keeping my graduation plans (Ph.D.) in mind, hopefully in exactly this field of research.

So, why does that matter, especially how is it related to the blog’s future? Each one of the items mentioned above contributes directly to my happiness, sense of fulfillment, my purpose in life, my dreams, hopes and wishes. And since my blog is all about that kind of stuff, that relates directly to it as well.

What to take from this summarization? Well, a few months ago my grades were excellent, but all of the other points, in summary my future both in private and professional life, were out of balance and a little fuzzy. Now, everything seems to work out very well for me.
Why? Because I continuously pushed myself (aside the other points, mentioned in Richard St. John’s TED Talk), never gave up and always reviewed how the world responded to my actions. Personal growth is essential to grow professionally, too, so don’t waste your time only pushing yourself professionally; also (especially) push yourself personally.

Be Your Best Within Your Capabilities

Jacek’s message amazed me. While he was working on the reanimation of the newspaper-business (well, not the whole business, but you get the idea) he observed that within your capabilities, despite of how restricted they seem to be, you can push yourself to a whole new level by thinking creatively and provide meaning(-full content). Outstanding statement.

Intelligent Procrastination

Time off is time off and working time is working time. Common sense, right? Consider a situation when your motivation is low, but you really wanna get the job done. What do you do to get your level of motivation back where it should be?

Wrong Approaches

Some things seem to help, but they don’t. I will give you a few examples.

Buying something nice. Since your brain is very smart it understands that this isn’t something which isn’t aligned with your life’s purpose as well as with your personal goals. Therefore it does neither contribute to your long lasting happiness, nor to your short-term motivation.

Going to the coffee-shop, meeting people and having a small-talk. There’s nothing bad about talking to people, of course. But talking about the weather (literally) won’t motivate you. Trust me. If you feel the desire to talk with people then please have an intelligent, an inspiring talk. It could be about the society we wanna live in, about strategies to be an even better tutor or something like this. Mainly, it should be a topic which causes you to think as well as emphasizes new opportunities. Don’t talk about problems, negative stuff or how cruel the world seems to be. It won’t help you. You are on this planet to make a difference, to make the world a more friendly place to live. Negative thoughts (and talks about negative thoughts even more) only bring you down instead of motivating you.

Motivational Podcasts. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a huge fan of motivational audio programs like produced by Steve Pavlina, Robin Sharma and others. But: They are only for these parts of your day which cannot be used productively, i.e. when you are on your way between A and B, while cooking or simply if you could not do anything else. The tendency of doing some chores just to have the feeling you had done something while you are listening is to high. You’ll just waste your time.

Be honest to yourself (by the way, that applies to all situations in your life): Do you want to waste your time, or do you want to get re-motivated, re-interested, re-focused to finish your task? I don’t know you, but I’m pretty sure you won’t choose the first one

Get in Touch With New Ideas

Last weekend I was really down on motivation. I tried to get into some proofs that I must understand for an upcoming oral examination, but my thoughts in my head were like a little child, running around an touching everything that came into reach. After hours I admited to myself my lack of motivation and focus (which is pretty hard for me since I’m really a workaholic). On my search on motivational content on the net I stumbled upon an insight (for me).

Motivation grows if you listen to people who speak passionately about a topic you are interested in.

Like the most insights it’s highly common sense, but to get it out of your mind and into a one-liner or even into a catchy phrase tends to be difficult. Anyway. Above I said you have to be interested in the speaker’s topic. I did not say you have to be an expert on the particular field! Pure interest is all you need. The second thing I mentioned is that the speaker has to be passionate about what he is gonna say. Why? Because interest is a very good foundation, but it’s not your (main) objective to learn while viewing inspirational content. You are there to become inspired, motivated, focused, touched, not to master a new topic. If you don’t feel a fire buring in the speaker’s heart, skip ‘em. [I'm not sure if that's a correct phrase in English language so please correct me if I'm wrong.] So, here a (very) short list of recommendations:

• TED: Ideas Worth Spreading (one of many awesome talks: Dan Gilbert talks about why we are happy)
• GoogleTechTalks

Remark: If you know more sites please leave a comment with a link. Thanks.

Dance Around

Seen the movie Elizabethtown? The main actor, Drew Baylor, dances in the woods to get in touch with the life again after designing a product which failed misserabely (it turns out his design has cost the company nearly 1 billion dollars). Of course, you should not do that in front of other people unless you want them to think of you as gone crazy But in your own room this is a wonderful and surprisingly easy thing to get your motivation kick-started. It’s hard to explain why it works so well (not only for me, be sure of that), so try it out and see if it works for you, too.

My Five Last Words

Zementblog initiated a new blog parade (blog carnival) with the following task:

Each attendee should think about the last five words he or she wants to say if he/she was aware of that these words would be their last.

For me it was a brain-teaser ’cause I would like to share so many insights, but since my word count is limited… here it is:

Share your experiences to thrive.

Understand the problem before aiming towards a solution

Of course, this really is quite common sense. But what do you do when the heat is on, when the stress seems to overpower you? I tell you what I (unfortunately) mostly do (since I can’t speak for you ): I try to get rid of each problem as fast as I can ’cause it seems to be the “best”, time-saving idea. Sometimes this approach produces good results, sometimes it fails miserably. “Well, that’s life”, might be the first thought, “you can’t be right all the time”. I don’t agree. As a logical-thinking person (due to my field of study) I’m like crazy to understand the problem in depth, to see the underlying principle of cause and effect .

Let me give you an example: Assume you have trouble with your job. You like it, it’s not bad, but… somewhere deep down in you, you feel a little uncomfortable and unsatisfied. But why? It could be the time for you for a career change since your interests have changed. Or you might have problems with your co-workers, your boss. Or you are in trouble with your significant other, you might struggle with the law, …

You get the picture? The first answer (the career changing opportunity) seems to be quite right in most cases, so why not stick with it and believe it? What’s the problem with this answer? First of all: Nothing’s wrong with it! What’s wrong is the question itself since it tries to present a solution before you know what the nature of the underlying problem might be. It does not suffice to ask for the solution first. There is no fast-track to a reasonable answer.

So, what should I do?

If you are familiar with the GTD-methodology you already know it: You should do an (unrestricted) mind sweep. The term “mind sweep” should be rather self-explanatory: Write all the thoughts, spinning around in your head, down and process it later. Processing means (if you don’t familiar with GTD) to extract the hidden actions from your notes. But that’s not our objective. For a more sophisticated introduction into “the art of GTD” I recommend 43 folders. Merlin’s awesome…

Back to the topic. I also emphasized that the mind sweep should be an unrestricted one. By this I mean that you should never interpret or judge your upcoming thoughts; just write ‘em down and come to them afterwards. If you internally cut back on your ideas, you’ll probably miss something to complete the whole picture. Even notes which seem irrelevant in the first place can become valuable later.

A conclusion

Before tackling the problem and get trapped by accepting the first appealing answer step back and make an unrestricted mind sweep. You don’t have to do it in one block, so take the time it need to collect all the thoughts in your head according to your problem. Everything. Only if you are sure you’ve got the whole dump you should start to process the whole stuff. Try to find pattern, connections between the notes you’ve taken. Now it’s time to interpret what you’ve written down and make conclusions ’cause you now can build your conclusion on a wide basis.

Concrete Complexity: Theorem Mindmap and Summary

Since my oral exam in concrete complexity theory is coming up very soon I’ve prepared a mindmap, showing the most important theorems and how they are connected. I will add the link very soon; An update in this post will you inform if the mindmap is on Furthermore I’m currently writing a summary, containing all the definitions and theorems with the addition of the most important steps to prove each of them. I hope you’ll find it as interesting and helpful as I do.

Update 1 (03/27/09): The concrete complexity mindmap is now available here.
Update 2 (04/08/09): A (more or less) final version of my script for Concrete Complexity Theory is now available. A link is placed right in the link directory. I hope you enjoy the notes as much as I do

Blog’s kickstart

You might wonder why there are so few posts and so little information about the blog’s purpose. To be honest: I’m way behind my own schedule for getting this “thing” a kickstart. But after my last exam for this semester (next friday about “concrete complexity theory”) I will add the missing parts very soon as well as start writing posts more often [sth. about 1-2 times per week].