If you are as crazy as me spending a lot of time on putty terminal windows and like to drum the keyboard than drag the mouse this might interest you. Goosh is an unofficial Google shell that imitates working in a UNIX type shell environment and provides a command line based features that Google search engine offers. Not all of the features are available but the most important ones are already there. When you open the Goosh page, you feel like you have logged in into a shell environment. “Man” in *nix is the command for viewing the manual for any help. Similarly here if you type “man” or “help” or “h” or “?” you will get a list of commands that can be used Goosh. Here is the list of commands available.

The default is a search command; type anything and hit “enter” key, you get back the search results as you would perform on a typical Google search. Many of the commands have aliases as well and the alias is as simple as a single letter. For example “l youtube” takes you to the Youtube website. It is the equivalent as typing youtube in Google search page and pressing “I’m Feeling Lucky”. Try Goosh, am sure you will like it.

Thanks to my friend Rajesh Kannan for bringing Goosh to my notice.

RescueTime is a site that I came up recently through stumbling. There is a good and a bad side to me finding this site. The bad part first. One year ago this was my idea. But as you might know ideas are to be put into action soon, otherwise either it will not see the light or there will be someone else who will envision the same idea and probably would implement it. The second case was what happened to me. OK now the good part is this tool really helps me take a look at the time I spend everyday on the various applications on my laptop. I wish I had this tool ten years back so that my time management would have been much better. RescueTime has a desktop service that can be downloaded and sits on your computer tray. It constantly monitors the active applications you are in and keeps sending information to its website. The website aggregates this data and presents a graphical report on the dashboard. You can tag the applications you used, so that RescueTime can group the time under different categories. For example, I use work, learning, research etc. Another key feature is that you can set goals like how many productive hours you want to put everyday. RescueTime will tell you if you met that goals and sends a weekly report by email.

RescueTime comes in two flavors - a personal edition and team plus edition. Both of them are free except for team plus edition, up to 5 users it is free. A team plus edition will allow you to compare time with the group time which helps in setting team level benchmarks. What RescueTime will not know of course is your idle time or time that you were in meetings. But I am practicing to capture this as well. Since I use Google calendar for my schedule, before I go to the meeting I activate the Google calendar window. This gets captured by RescueTime and gets tagged under Meetings. It would be good if RescueTime can export this data in different formats that can be imported into Timesheet systems or if it can integrate with Timesheet systems. That would really save a lot of time or when people forget to fill the timesheets and later when they fill it is only approximate or partial just because they don’t remember what they did after a day (that’s natural). RescueTime is a fantastic product to take a look at how you spend your time, do better time management, set goals and cut down on time wasters like checking mail every now and then or on the instant messengers. Of course only if you would want to make better time management consciously; no tool would do that by black magic.

codefetch is a site that helps developers search for code for different programming/scripting languages that are given as examples in books. One can search for specific keywords and program examples related to that keyword from books on different programming/scripting languages.

Being an ardent fan of using mind maps regularly as well as using Wikipedia extensively for knowledge exploration I found WikiMindMap a useful site that combines the power of both. It is a good tool to search and navigate and explore between relevant Wikipedia pages.

Thanks to my friend Kanmani who sent me a link that has information how to be an effective programmer. In fact TechMasala’s foundation series of posts main objective is also to list down certain technical as well as soft skills to be an effective programmer. The document covers tips and best practices under the categories of personal and team skills for a beginner, intermediate and advanced programmer. “How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary” is a good read for every programmer.

If you practicing UML or using UML in your project then the “UML Quick Reference” could come handy. If you are totally new to UML the article in IBM Developerworks - “UML basics: An introduction to the Unified Modeling Language” will get you started.

PreciseJava has best practices documents on Java/J2EE technology components. These best practices could be an eye opener for writing quality code and creating a performance effective J2EE web application. Every organization has best practices document for the technologies they are working on. The documents available in PreciseJava could be a direct input to such documents and an organization can leverage them effectively.

If you are new to Rails application development then troubleshooting even the common mistakes and errors might be difficult. The Ruby on Rails Wiki has a “TroubleShooting Rails” page that has solutions for common starting trouble problems. Bookmark the page, just in case you are stuck.