At work, we operate on an open floor plan system, where developers work shoulder to shoulder, and each and every conversation is shared by each and every developer on the team. This is GREAT for engendering a sense of collaboration and communal creativity, but terrible SOMETIMES for getting work done. Enter the Bose noise canceling headphones.
I don’t code that well with tracks from my music collection playing in the background. ‘China Cat Sunflower’ somehow doesn’t inspire coherent analytical logic, and even Bach just gets on my nerves sometimes. The cool thing about noise canceling headphones is that you can put them on without connecting them to a music source. The noise canceling circuitry adds a little more suppression on top of the mechanical noise suppression of the headphones themselves.
On a related, technical issue:
I use the vim editor as my main editor here and in my personal development. vim creates .swp swap files for each file that you are working on. This is fine and all, they are dotfiles, so you don’t normally see them. HOWEVER, I use cvs update (specifically cvs -q up -Pd) to tell me which files I have modified and may need to commit. CVS unfortunately picks up all of these vim swap files, and some other permanent, though not version controlled files and displays them with a question mark in its output.
This is ANNOYING noise, in a very similar sense to the constant background noise at the office — and without the collaborative, creative benefits. It’s just noise.
The solution is a user level .cvsignore file. Here is a good article on how to do this. The jist of it is, put a .cvsignore file in your home directory with a list of files that you want, you guessed it, CVS to ignore.
.cvsignore
At work, we operate on an open floor plan system, where developers work shoulder to shoulder, and each and every conversation is shared by each and every developer on the team. This is GREAT for engendering a sense of collaboration and communal creativity, but terrible SOMETIMES for getting work done. Enter the Bose noise canceling headphones.
I don’t code that well with tracks from my music collection playing in the background. ‘China Cat Sunflower’ somehow doesn’t inspire coherent analytical logic, and even Bach just gets on my nerves sometimes. The cool thing about noise canceling headphones is that you can put them on without connecting them to a music source. The noise canceling circuitry adds a little more suppression on top of the mechanical noise suppression of the headphones themselves.
On a related, technical issue:
I use the vim editor as my main editor here and in my personal development. vim creates .swp swap files for each file that you are working on. This is fine and all, they are dotfiles, so you don’t normally see them. HOWEVER, I use cvs update (specifically cvs -q up -Pd) to tell me which files I have modified and may need to commit. CVS unfortunately picks up all of these vim swap files, and some other permanent, though not version controlled files and displays them with a question mark in its output.
This is ANNOYING noise, in a very similar sense to the constant background noise at the office — and without the collaborative, creative benefits. It’s just noise.
The solution is a user level .cvsignore file. Here is a good article on how to do this. The jist of it is, put a .cvsignore file in your home directory with a list of files that you want, you guessed it, CVS to ignore.