Nick Carroll, PhD

I used to be someone that tried to ignore politics like the plague, but as I grow older I find that I am becoming more and more interested in it. I have a feeling that it is related to my growing interest in financial markets, and given that politics has a tremendous impact on economics and financial markets, then it is natural to extend that interest to politics as well.

When I read that Al Gore won the Nobel Peace prize for his contributions to raising awareness for man-made climate change I thought it was well deserved. He has done more good for this cause than dare I say Greenpeace. Take note hippies, wear a suit and your message on environmentalism might be taken more seriously. Not that I have anything against Greenpeace. I used to be affiliated with them a long time ago, and I think that their website is one of the best resources on environmentalism. I just don’t think that the actions taken by extreme environmentalists are that effective anymore, or if they ever were for that matter.

So what do I think environmentalists should invest their time and effort in? Well instead of nagging everyone on how to save the planet, like walk to work instead of drive and stuff like that, how about play the capitalist game and start up a green business like GoGet Car share. At least this way you are providing people with the convenience of a car within a community in a cost effective way, and reducing the number of cars on the road as a result.

One of the pain points of pair programming is having to use different IDEs, especially if your team doesn’t standardise on a particular IDE. On the last few projects that I worked on, I found myself constantly shifting between IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse, and switching between the different key mappings became annoying and sometimes disruptive.

In the end I discovered shortcuts in IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse that would make pair programming a lot easier. So instead of asking your pair what the shortcut is for a particular action in an IDE that you are not familiar with, you can just type Ctrl+Shift+A in IntelliJ IDEA or Ctrl+3 in Eclipse. Both of these commands will bring up a Mac-like Quicksilver prompt for you to type in an action that you want to launch.

For example, if you wanted to organise all your imports in a class, and you don’t know that it is either Ctrl+Shift+O in Eclipse or Ctrl+Alt+O in IntelliJ, then you can just bring up the action prompts and type in “import”, select the organise/optimise imports from the list of import options and hit enter, and magically your imports are reorganised.

The action prompt works for most commands that you want to do in both IDEs, so it makes it easier for you and your pair to switch between each other’s preferred IDEs without too much hassle.