Find data faster.

Stop wasting time and automate repetitive task. Automation increases your productivity and lessens your work load. Here are some few methods to do so.

Photo by: Nathan Eal Photography
Photo by: Nathan Eal Photography

Launching Programs :

The first improvement you can make is to use the keyboard over the mouse. Operating a mouse requires more concentration and time than hitting a keyboard shortcut and typing in the name of the program.
The easiest way is to use “Launchy”, a open source keystroke launcher. With Launchy, to open up a program like Firefox, you hit “alt” + “space” to bring up Launchy, then you type in “fox” and it auto completes for your and enter.
– Jump Directory ( Make a folder within side start menu for quick access to essential tools)
– Shortcuts

Finding Files

– Everything, (super fast searching).
– Spacemonger or WinDirStat (data storage visualization)
– Q-dir or xplorer2 (dual file manager)

Automation

Autoit (Windows OS Task automation)
Chickenfoot (firefox plugin for web automation)

More time saving tips

Regular Expression Tools: (Searching Through Text)
Poweroff ( schedule your computer to power off after events )
In conclusion, there are dozens of programs and other techniques that you can learn to save time. To take this a step forward, I suggest reading The Productive Programmer by Neal Ford.

Javascript release for Quine-McCluskeyJS

After having too much trouble with simplifying long Boolean expressions by hand, I decided to write a script for it. So with a day or two of coding and testing, Quine-McCluskeyJS was formed.
Quine-McCluskeyJS is a Javascript version of the Quine Mccluskey algorithm for Boolean algebra reduction.

Take a look here for more information.
Link: http://code.google.com/p/quine-mccluskeyjs/

Chickenfoot mixed with jQuery.

Chickenfoot is a Firefox extension design for website automation.

Chickenfoot is a Firefox extension that puts a programming environment in the browser’s sidebar so you can write scripts to manipulate web pages and automate web browsing. In Chickenfoot, scripts are written in a superset of Javascript that includes special functions specific to web tasks.

Basically, it let’s you take control of Firefox and simulate a user. The API is fill with basic operation, like go(url), append(content), onClick( function, window) and etc. You can get more power and functionality by including other JavaScript libraries and frameworks. That’s when the fun begins.

Since the goal in website automation is a lot of HTML manipulations then, jQuery is the best framework for the job. jQuery can be easily included with a simple fix here.
Here are some examples of Chickenfoot scripts. Once Chickenfoot is installed hit f8, press the “New” tab, then insert one of the following scripts.

Downloading a URL

include( "fileio.js" ); //Enables the write and read commands.
var url = "http://google.com",
content = read( url ),
filename = desktopDir().path + "\\google.html";

write( filename, content );

Clean up craigslist.org

include( "http://bateru.com/js/jquery-1.4.2-mod.js" );
$ = window.$;
var url = "http://houston.craigslist.org/sss/";
go( url, true ); //Refresh the page to the url
sleep(2); // So you can see the different.
var cleanHTML = $(document.body).html().toLowerCase();
cleanHTML = cleanHTML.replace( /[$\*!]{2}|[~\*]/gi, "");
$( document.body ).html( cleanHTML );

Overall, Chickenfoot is a great extension to have. These few examples shown here only scratch the surface of what it’s capable of.

Chickenfoot 1.0.7 link
jQuery link