Tim Ferriss has received a hailstorm of praise and criticism alike since his release of the Four-Hour Workweek and subsequent rise to fame. There are people that believe Tim Ferriss is full of shit. I find the man fascinating.

Clearly a man who can work four hour workweeks inspires both envy and jealousy. I recently finished the 4HWW and it's clear that this isn't the case at all. He has simply re-defined his career so that "work" involves fun activities. He's also been able to maximize productivity by aggressively delegating time-consuming tasks. It's pretty clear that he used the techniques he advocates, like hiring a personal assistant, to write the book itself. 

Short-term

• Become a significantly faster reader. Like proper sex education, reading is one of the core skills that permeates a central aspect of your life. Unfortunately, neither culture nor the education system in the United States dictates the importance of these crucial life skills.

  I recently came across Spreeder, which is a nifty Web application that could potentially help improve reading speed and comprehension. It emphasizes subvocalization elimination, and although it has an option for chunking, I suspect it doesn't help with chunking in practice, due to the way lines are actually laid out and scanned.

• Reach prescribed weight levels (also known as "Rx") in Crossfit. I joined a local Crossfit gym nearly six months ago and I feel in better shape than I've felt in a long time. Regardless, it's highly intense, and I've barely reached the prescribed weight levels for women. Achieving men's Rx entails many things: 
  1. I'll be stronger than ever before.
  2. I'll have to maintain high levels of discipline.
  3. I'll have to maintain a better diet.
  4. I'll generally be pushing myself beyond my limits. 
• Research and follow a more Paleo-style diet. True Paleo is somewhat absurd. The diet disadvocates salt, for christ's sake! It's quite trendy as well, and I more or less believe that everything popular is wrong. Regardless, there are sound principles underlying the diet that have led to rave reviews among its followers. It's also the de facto diet of Crossfitters, so I'm inclined to follow it to keep up with the better athletes in the program. Additionally, following a diet is a great test of discipline.
• Solidify political viewpoints. I've made an effort to read a lot about economics and politics for the last two years, but I've barely touched the tip of the iceberg. On one hand, I've subconsciously sought to maintain a small identity to broadly consume facts and knowledge in an unbiased way, but on the other hand, people dish out respect based on how you to take a stance and defend it. 
• Volunteer regularly. As a child of Mexican immigrants, engineering and technology has been incredibly empowering for my family. It has truly given us access to the spoils of the wealthy world, whereas much of my extended family is without them. More families can gain control of their own destiny if they happen to encounter the right passion and learning tools in their lifetime. My ideal volunteer job would involve the HIspanic population and technology. I nearly achieved this at the National Hispanic University but due to last-minute changes in their curriculum I wasn't able to help out.
• Perfect my Spanish. Spanish is my first language, but it's pretty weak right now. It can be perfected in only a few months in a native Spanish-speaking country. 

Long-term

Source: The Oatmeal

The exception: you're esteemed enough (i.e., famous) that the mere fact that you are working on an idea will cause enough buzz to ruin your launch day. 

I recently had to password-protect a subdirectory of my site and found existing documentation on this to be wholly inadequate -- at least applied to sites utilizing Apache and Django. The problem is that to password-protect a subdirectory, one must write rules in an .htaccess file residing in the parent directory. Since Django projects use a hand-written URL dispatcher, the directory structure of the resulting Web site doesn't reflect the structure of the internal storage system.

Fortunately, the solution is simple. Instead of writing your Apache directives in an .htaccess site, write them where your Django configuration resides. This will typically be your httpd.conf or site-specific configuration files you've created in your Apache sites-available/ directory.

I made a copy of my existing configuration under the location "/subdirectory," and added the following directives.

 <Location "/subdirectory">
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "My Secret Site"
    AuthUserFile "/path/to/.htpasswd"
    Require user username
    ... 
</Location>

Be sure to use the "htpasswd" command on Unix to make an .htpasswd file in a directory on your server. Change the path in my sample above to where you store the file. Be sure that "username" matches the username you create using htpasswd.

That's it. If you know how to do this without duplicating my existing configuration, please post how to do so in the comments. That would be much appreciated.

(This is the third in a three-part series for programmers with tips on making the leap from Web to the iPhone)

Your interface and business logic need to be connected manually

Experienced Web developers can traverse up and down the DOM tree like wild monkeys. The iPhone SDK utilizes .xib files that are XML-based as well for the UI, but the Web model doesn't quite carry over. Imagine, instead, that for each DOM element that you access in your JavaScript code, you have to write special instructions indicating you want to access them. There are two steps for writing these instructions:

1. Define a property in your header file that serves as an "outlet." Here is an example:

   @property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet TextField *myTextField;
   

   (be sure to define this property under @interface in the header and file and to @synthesize it in your implementation file)

2. Open up your .xib file in Interface Builder, and make the connection. You can right-click on the view you want to become an outlet or on the File's Owner to accomplish this.

   Carefully remembering to do this will save you a lot of grief.

Do you have other relevant tips? Please post them!

(This is the second in a three-part series for programmers with tips on making the leap from Web to the iPhone)

As Web developers move from building static pages to rich Web apps, our browsers begin to buckle under the weight of heavy JavaScript. There's not a lot we can do about this beyond high-level optimizations aside from praying that V8 gains more market share rapidly. For those that haven't written production code in C, it can seem quite daunting. It shouldn't be. There's a fundamental rule that iPhone owners can follow from the time they write their first app (from the Apple Objective-C Memory Management Rules):

You take ownership of an object if you create it using a method whose name begins with “alloc” or “new” or contains “copy” (for example, alloc, newObject, or mutableCopy), or if you send it a retain message. You are responsible for relinquishing ownership of objects you own using release or autorelease. Any other time you receive an object, you must not release it.

This explains why many constructors for Foundation classes have a class method "counterpart." One example is NSString:

+ string
– init
+ stringWithCharacters:length:
– initWithCharacters:length:
+ stringWithString:
– initWithString:
+ stringWithCString:encoding:
– initWithCString:encoding:

The difference between the class methods and the traditional constructors is how memory is managed. For all classes prefixed with init, the caller is the owner. For all class methods, the callee determines ownership. This materializes like so in your code for the two types of constructors:

- (void)manipulateString:(NSString *)_string {
    NSString *newString = [[NSString alloc] 
        initWithString:@"Sample String"];
    // do stuff...
    [newString release];
 }
 

- (void)manipulateString:(NSString *)_string {
    NSString *newString = [NSString 
        stringWithString:@"Sample String"];
    // do stuff...
}
 

Additionally, if you are creating objects and returning them, use "autorelease":

- (NSString *)returnString {
    NSString *newString = [[[NSString alloc] 
        initWithString:@"Sample String"] autorelease];
    // can't release the string before returning it!
    return newString;
 }
 

I recommend reading the Memory Management Rules before beginning your first serious project. It will most certainly be a problem for amateur Objective-C developers. Practice makes perfect.

(Continue to part III...)

Having recently forayed into the world of iPhone development, I've had to adjust to the unique software stack that comprises the iPhone SDK. My first love is and always will be Web development, but the Apple platform is well-architected and produces beautiful software quite easily. Here are a few tips for new developers that come from the Web world. The followings tips should help guide you over the bumps of jumping from the world of Javascript and CSS to Objective-C and Cocoa.

Good Web developers and designers advocate flexibility above all else. Flexibility can be a blessing and a curse. HTML and CSS provide an inherently restricted toolset, intended to accommodate a widespread number of unknown use cases, giving the user maximum control. While Web designers become increasingly sophisticated and can build designs that are both aesthetically and flexible (see the CSS Zen Garden* for examples), it is a rare gift. Fortunately, for the rest of us, the iPhone/iPod is a single interface, with the iPad coming to stores soon. Having a limited number of devices on which our iPhone app can be viewed means that we know exactly how the app is being visualizing. 

The limitation materializes into more feedback about the visual attributes of Strings, for instance. One of my favorite code snippets is the ability to check the text size:

 // Calculate the expected size based on the font and
 // linebreak mode of your label
 
 CGSize maximumLabelSize = CGSizeMake(280, 9999);

// Use default system font (Helvetica) at size 16 for
 //     programmatically created label
 CGSize expectedLabelSize = [((UILabel *)instruction).text
                 sizeWithFont:[UIFont systemFontOfSize:16.0]
                 constrainedToSize:maximumLabelSize
                 lineBreakMode:UILineBreakModeWordWrap];

 // Create my label programmatically...

CGRect newFrame = myLabel.frame;
newFrame.size.height = expectedLabelSize.height;
myLabel.frame = newFrame;

(originally pulled from Stack Overflow)

(Continue to part II...)

Good companies pay you to learn.

Paul Buchheit, Startup School 2009

I made a broad generalization in last blog post, claiming that working at large companies will stifle the speed of your learning. This isn't necessarily true.

Industry experience at any company can provide a valuable educational experience.

I made that generalization, because, in my experience, I felt the bureaucracy of my employer was actually stifling my learning. Since I'm in the software business, a huge amount of resources are available at virtually no cost, through the Internet and open-source. Hence, a company better provide damn good resources for your education if they expect you to learn more effectively than self-education, which I would consider the alternative.

For certain individuals, the only way attain their educational goals is by working at a large company, like Google, Microsoft, Apple, or Amazon. Google, for instance, fosters a strong academic environment. There are projects that these companies are uniquely capable of producing. For individuals whose goals align very strongly with said companies, they will likely have good experiences there, in spite of the company's bureaucracy.