Wondering if your New Years’ resolutions will make it past February? While there is no substitute for personal discipline and all that stuff, it is nice to have some help along the way. Here are some ways that technology can make that resolution just a little bit easer to keep:

Get Things Done

Do you just need help remembering all the stuff you didn’ get around to last year? Go no further than Remember The Milk. This free service has it all: To-do lists with calendering, email/SMS/RSS/instant message reminders, and integration with everything from the iPhone to Google homepages.

If you want to embrace hard-core efficiency, read Getting Things Done and then check out this list of GTD software tools. The list has both buyware and freeware for Palm, Pocket PC, Linux, and Windows.

Get Fit

The coolest exercise gadget this year has to be the Nike + iPod Sport Kit. If you own a pair of Nikes that can accomodate a special sensor, this kit turns your iPod into a performance monitor and coach. At $45, it beats buying a new treadmill.

Need help with a exercise program and fitness tracker? Here is a Online Fiteness Tracker that helps you manage both your diet and your exercise plan, monitoring nutrition, and creating weekly and monthly reports of your progress. There is a free version of this service as well.

Eat Right

Counting calories? If you have a personalized Google homepage, you can add this Calorie Calculator widget. “Use the calorie calculator to see each meal’s calorie details and sum up your daily total. Use the settings to see your recommended average daily intake.” If you want something more portable, try the Nutrition Assistant. Or if you own a Windows Mobile device here is a roundup of diet software for smartphones.

Need to completely overhaul your diet? I personally recommend The South Beach Diet website. You get lots of tools to help shed the pounds, including a diet profile to track your progress, forums and diaries to share successes and struggles with like-minded people. Best of all, it has a meal planner that lets you pick and print recipes, including a coalated shopping list. (If you pick four recipes that each call for a 1/4 cup of minced onion, for example, the shopping list will combine the amounts and let you know to buy a cup of mixed onion for that set.)

Get Going!

Good luck in 2008! If you use any high-tech tools not listed here, drop a comment and let us know what works for you. Happy New Year from TechBrew!

If you’ve been looking for a good excuse to learn Ruby on Rails, now is a great time.

Sitepoint.com is giving away the full PDF of “Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications” through the end of the month of November. All you need to do is provide an email address and they’ll send you a link to the PDF download.

I started reading it last night, and it seems to be oriented to people familiar with building web applications but aren’t webdev pros. (If you’re the “just give me the API” kind of developer, this book is probably a little too verbose for you.) For details of what is inside, you can take a peek at the table of contents.

*Note: Free PDF offer expired: Saturday, December 01st, 2007 - 00:00:00 AM

I’ve been a user of the excellent IntelliJ Java IDE for 4 years on Windows. Even though the official Linux support by JetBrains is only for RedHat, you can also install IntelliJ fairly easily on Ubuntu. I’ve tested this with Xubunto 7.10 (Gutsy), Java 6, and IntelliJ 7. Here’s how to do it in four basic steps:

1) Get Java

Install the Java 6 JDK, which IDEA itself needs to run. (You can have other JDKs for your projects, but you’ll need this one to run IntelliJ itself.) For example, type this in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

Follow the prompts for root password, download confirmation, and eventually the Sun EULA to install Java itself. If it installed successfully, you should be able to type this at a prompt:

java -version

… to get several lines telling you the version of Java you have installed. If this doesn’t work, refer to Sun’s documentation on troubleshooting installations.

2) Get IntelliJ IDEA

Download the latest version of IntelliJ IDEA for Linux:

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/index.html#linux

Once the download is finished, extract the archive using the correct filename according to your download. For example, to install IntelliJ in /usr/lib, do the following:

tar xfz idea-7.0.1.tar.gz ./usr/lib/

The IntelliJ installation will now be in a subdirectory indicating the build number, in the format “idea-xxxx”. In the case of IDEA 7.0.1, the app directory is “idea-7364“. (Once the extraction is done, you can delete the downloaded archive to conserve disk space if needed.)

3) Get Environmental

There are a couple of environment variables to be taken care of. First, you need to set a new environment variable that tells IntelliJ where your install of Java is. For example:

export JDK_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/"

Use the “env” command, or just “echo $JDK_HOME“, to verify the variable is set.

Next, you’ll need to edit /etc/environment with superuser rights in the editor of your choice, adding the idea-xxxx/bin directory to your PATH variable. For example, you can edit the environment with the GUI mousepad editor like so:

sudo mousepad /etc/environment

The various directories in the environment PATH variable are delineated by colons (:). Append the current value (inside the quotes) with a new colon and then add the idea-xxxx/bin location. It should look something like this:

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/lib/idea-7364/bin"

Save and close the environment file. You’ll need to “source” it for your system to pick up the new directory in the PATH. You can verify your changes by echoing the variable as well:

source /etc/environment

echo $PATH

If you see the path to IntelliJ returned in the output, you’re all set.

Lastly, you may want to change the VM settings of IntelliJ. This depends entirely on your project size and other factors, so you’ll need to base these settings on your own need. The settings are in idea-xxx/bin/idea.vmoptions.

4) Get Started!

That’s it. Now you can run “idea.sh” from a terminal in any directory, and IntelliJ should launch…

idea.sh

If you run into problems, be sure to double-check the readme files in the installation directory.

Give Back

If this article proved useful to you, please drop us a comment and let us know. Or, if you find problems/alternate solutions along the way, please share them for the benefit of others. Thanks and happy coding!