Quotes from Crucibles of Leadership by Robert J. Thomas

"During the question and answer period following the class, I’d asked Tharp what was to her mind the biggest difference between practice and performance. She looked at me quizzically, as if I’d asked a truly boneheaded question. But then, patiently, she explained that practice and performance were part of the same thing . . . that when a dancer practices she thinks about the performance and when she performs she notices the things she ought to practice more. In fact, Tharp added, the key is to practice while you perform, and vice versa. I told Bennis that I thought the same thing ought to apply to leaders. He leaned forward over the remnants of our breakfast and fixed me with his steely eyes. “Kid,” he said, “you’ve got something there. Build on it.”"


"While experience matters, what matters more is what one makes of experience: how a person comes to recognize in a crucible experience that something new or important is happening, to see beyond the discomfort, perhaps even the pain, of new and unexpected information and to incorporate that information as useful knowledge, not just about the world but, as likely, about oneself."


"Rather than wait for the right moment to arrive, they discover and exploit learning opportunities. Rather than partition their lives into periods of action and periods of reflection, they do both, often on a daily basis, sometimes in precisely the same moment. Rather than complain about the scarcity of time to learn, they make time. Like accomplished performers in sports or music or the arts, they practice as strenuously as they perform. And when, as often happens to organizational leaders, they find themselves onstage much of the time, they learn how to practice while they perform—not simply to learn by doing, but to learn while doing."


"Rupp said his leader’s words had such an effect on him that he wrote them down. “That situation taught me a great lesson: that I should not be so focused on myself and look at situations only as how they affect me.”

"Second, the more frequent experience of new territory among leaders at the beginning and toward the end of their careers suggests that they share something in common. In Geeks and Geezers, Warren Bennis and I drew attention to neoteny: a characteristic of older leaders who’d remained active and vital across eras and organizations. Neoteny, we argued, is the quality of retaining youthful habits and behaviors, like curiosity, and openness to experience, and surprise, well into one’s later years. The collection of crucibles seems to suggest that those who continue to explore new territory as they age are likely to remain vital and active as leaders. This was borne out in the interviews with people like Walter Sondheim, John Wooden, Sidney Harman, Warren Bennis, and Frances Hesselbein, who recounted for us new territory crucibles they had experienced over the past ten years."

"Like a stretched rubber band, a crucible embodies potential energy—energy that can be released productively or unproductively. In the following sections, we’ll consider examples of each type of crucible, first in the context of lessons they have to teach about leadership and then through the lens of lessons that each type has to teach about learning."

How to list tasks from your project

rake -T

• Use Rakefile for tasks that operate on the plugin’s source files, such as special testing or documentation. These must be run from the plugin’s directory.
• Use tasks/*.rake for tasks that are part of the development or deployment of the application in which the plugin is installed. These will be shown in the output of rake ,ÄìT, the list of all Rake tasks for this application.
  
  
  
  

How to extend a class

class Symbol
  def %(arg)
    ...
  end
end

The above code does what you need, but leaves no hint that you've made a change to Symbol. An alternative solution is to define a module and include that module in Symbol.

module SymbolExtension
  def %(arg)
    ...
  end
end

Symbol.send :include, SymbolExtension

Granted, this isn't a huge hint, but if you check Symbol.ancestors you'll find the following list.

Symbol
SymbolExtension
Object
Kernel

extracted from: http://blog.jayfields.com/2007/01/class-reopening-hints.html

plugins on rails 3.0

How to install it?

rails plugin install URL

How to remove it?

rails plugin remove plugin_name
How to create your own plugin?
rails generate plugin my_plugin
The files that are required are:
init.rb
and directory in the plugin called lib

A few special variables are available to your code in init.rb:
name The name of your plugin ('my_plugin' in our simple example).
path The directory in which the plugin exists, which is useful in case you need to read or write nonstandard files in your plugin’s directory. 
config The configuration object created in environment.rb. (See Chapter 1, “Rails Environments and Configuration,” as well as the online API docs for Rails::Configuration to learn more about what’s available via config.)

How to setup your Git environment from scratch

SERVER SIDE
sudo apt-get install git-core git-doc gitweb git-gui gitk git-email
git-svn git-daemon-run
git init
git add .
git commit
git clone --bare ./menucook menucook.git

get the repo
git clone ssh://inguansoftsvn/home/inguanzo/depo/menucook.git

How to create a remote branch
git push origin origin:refs/heads/web

workflow to deploy into the server
git rebase origin/web

prompt for snowleopard:
parse_git_branch() {
  git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/(\1)/'
}
PS1="\[\e[01;31m\]\w \$(parse_git_branch): \[\e[00m\]"

prompt for linux:
if [ "\$(type -t __git_ps1)" ]; then
    PS1="\w \$(__git_ps1 '(%s)$ ')"
fi

clean apps from iPhone simulator

to clear out old iPhone simulator's applications :

• delete the folder called iPhone Simulator from the Application Support folder contained in your home directory's Library folder. 
• or selecting iOS Simulator --> Reset Content and Settings...

eval is evil

eval for any objective should not be used, even for parsing JSON

passing strings to setInterval(), setTimeout(), and the Function() constructor is, for the most part, similar to using eval()