Increasing Productivity

Increasing Productivity–Templates!!!

Innovation at its best would give you immense power!!! Not just for you to go places in your career but to start with give you ways to get the best out of you. Raise your hand if you are victimized by the huge number of emails sent out each day…I say each one of us has to do our share…I send out loads of emails every week…Some of them are well decided! So how do you get the most out of this boring task of sending out report, emails?

Simple – Templates!!!

Yes, you heard it right…I won’t dictate which templates you would want to use but the freedom lies with you…You decide which templates you are looking for…If its an email that you have to send out week after week then have a word template created for yourself which you can send out as an email

Send out Word Template as an Email

Here are a couple of links which I found useful while learning about word templates

You can search for a lot of existing templates here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/

Daily reports to be sent out? Create an outlook recursive calendar appointment and have links to all that you need to fill in the report. Like have the links to the folders you have the reports in, you can have the links to places where you have to upload, you can also have the email templates using Mailto tag…I agree that forming the Email Template using Mailto tag might be a little kinky but once you have the template formed its really useful and quick!

Here is one example of using Mailto for Email Template:

Email Template

Here is the mailto tag used above, just replace emails, subject and body

mailto:someemail@somedomain.com?subject=Buggy%20-%20Report%20%3cDate%3e&cc=someone@somedomain.com&body=BOdy_Text_here

TIP: To get newlines in the Body of the email, you can include “%0D” in the body text

mailto:someemail@somedomain.com?subject=Buggy%20-%20Report%20%3cDate%3e&cc=someone@somedomain.com&body=BOdy_Text_here%0DThanks,%0DSomeName

You can also introduce other characters using ASCII – here is a link to help you with that http://www.asciitable.com/

Keep your mind free by creating as many reminders for as many tasks you can on your outlook…Keep all the useful links together in the meeting request so that you don’t have to spend time in looking for files and data!

wget error–“zsh: parse error near &”

There is no doubt that I prefer wget way over any other type of downloads… Syntax: wget <DOWNLOAD_URL> If you get this error “ zsh: parse error near & ” then its probably because your download URL has a “&” so you should try giving your DOWNLOAD_URL in double quotes wget “<DOWNLOAD_URL>” If you are trying to download from a site which needs you to give your credentials then you can try giving it this way wget --http-user=<UserName> --http-password=<Password> “<DOWNLOAD_URL>” Hope this helps

How to Unpack a tar file on Windows?

On Windows: You can download a simple command line tool to do this. You can download the tool from here Usage can be found on the website but pasting it here too for convenience: C:\>TarTool.exe Usage : C:\>TarTool.exe sourceFile destinationDirectory C:\>TarTool.exe D:\sample.tar.gz ./ C:\>TarTool.exe sample.tgz temp C:\>TarTool.exe -x sample.tar temp TarTool 2.0 Beta supports bzip2 decompression for files with extensions like tar.bz2 and .bz2 . TarTool -xj sample.tar.bz2 temp or TarTool -j sample.bz2 Download TarTool 2.0 Beta from here Unpack a .txz file on Windows Use the 7zip tool to unpack a .txz file on windows On Linux: You can use the bzip2 and tar combined to do this… for ex: bzip2 –cd <tar.bz_fileName> | tar –xvf - This will unpack the contents of the tar.bz file Happy Un-Tar-ing

Apache Commons StringUtils.isEmpty() vs Java String.isEmpty()

You might want to test for if a String is empty many a times. Before we jump onto the numerous solutions available let us take a look at how we define “Empty String” The difference in the two methods given by Apache and Java are dependent on how we define an empty string. Java String.isEmpty returns a boolean true if the string’s length is zero. If the string has null it throws NullPointerException Apache StringUtils.isEmpty returns a boolean true if the string is either null or has length is zero Thus its purely dependent on how you are defining “empty string” in your program which will decide which function to use…BTW if you want to skip using Apache Commons funciton and would want to stick to java then you can have your own function like this: public static boolean isEmptyOrNull(String strStringToTest) { return strStringToTest == null || strStringToTest.trim().isEmpty(); }

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