Kunal Dua

Twice in the past 10 days I have spent the best part of an hour looking for a file (different one in each case) that I know is somewhere on my computer, but i don’t know where or what it is called. I am told Spotlight would have been just the thing to take care of such a situation, considering I knew the “content” I was looking for, but as the half-a-dozen occasional readers of this blog know, I’m still with Panther and thus do not have that “luxury”. My bad I know, but with or without Spotlight things shouldn’t be in the state they are.

For a self respecting geek that I claim to be, my Powerbook is in a big mess. I am not talking about hardware issues (I have none – don’t die on me lower RAM slot!) or OS issues (dude, it’s a Mac we are talking about and I never repair permissions). I am talking about my personal files. Unzipped archives left on the desktop, documents lying in ~/Documents (that’s a bad thing if you have a gazillion) – I’m sure you get the picture. Kinda like what I am in the “real” world (err… no prospective employers, this isn’t me I am talking about, some other guy I know) – looks messy to the eye, but it’s functional and works for me. Except now it doesn’t.

I have never faced problem finding “official” documents or any kind of emails (professional or otherwise). Descriptive names take care of the former and full content search and the fact everything is in place, the latter. The trouble starts when I come across some interesting snippet on a web page and decide to copy-paste into a imaginatively named text or rtf (thanks to Textedit) file called “untitled.rtf” or “junk.txt” and put it onto my desktop. So far so good, especially if I decide to reuse this file the next time. But to my annoyance, I almost never do that. Either I end up moving this file to another folder the next time my Desktop gets all cluttered or I create another file with an equally imaginative name. As I’m typing this I am wondering when, where and how I got into this bad habit, because I remember a time (back during the Windows days) when my junk.txt or “bakwaas.txt” as it was called in those days (bakwaas is hindi for junk, roughly) used to run into hundreds of KBs. Not the best of solutions I know, but atleast I knew where to go the next time I needed to lookup that great quote.

This stuff has been at the back of my mind for quite some time now – my lack of snippets management system, if you will. It has been brought to the forefront by the case of the two missing files – I had to give up in both cases, in case you are wondering, and that is why I’ve been “forced” into action I guess. And action it has been.

Here I am, going searching through folders for all tiny and not so tiny text files I have created in the recent and not so recent past and trying to consolidate into them a single file to start with and take it from there. Not quite a single file, because I have been able to identify different categories of content and created separate files for each:

1. Liverpool – great quotes/ facts about LFC.
2. Tech – snippets of code, IP addresses etc.
3. Ideas – crazy business/ tech ideas that pop into my head (VCs note this requires a separate file of it’s own 😉 )
4. Non tech musings (see below)
5. Visit – URLs/ Websites I intend to visit in the future (Though experience tells me I never come back to this file) – this in addition to the “Visit” folder under bookmarks in Safari.
6. Quotes – Mostly funny quotes and some gems from Seinfeld for “ready reference”.
7. Service – Copies of emails to my bank using their contact form, because they don’t have a sent box, copy of transaction IDs of all transactions done online etc.
8. Read – Books on my “to read” list.
9. Naukri – Career stuff like cover letters etc.
10. Misc – Anything that doesn’t fit in any of the categories above.

*Phew* I didn’t realize until now I had created this many categories. Anyways, the operation is well and truly underway and so as not to overwhelm myself I plan to do spend a few minutes to half an hour each day (okay, between you and me, I doubt it would be “each day”) and I’m hoping slow but steady will one day win the race. Here’s the best of interesting stuff I have rediscovered so far going through folders, kinda like the movie stub, that you’d saved and completely forgotten about, you discover while cleaning your closet:

• Some Poems I wrote (what do you know!)
• A script to download images from Google Map and “staple” them together to form one big, high res pic from the days when Google Maps had just been released. And no, I didn’t write it, just made some changes to a script I found.

When all this sorting is done, the next step would be to setup a system “that works”. Since this has been at the back of my mind for a while (see above), I have been looking for software that can handle this stuff more gracefully. Piping to a flat file with Quicksilver in an option due to it’s speed and geekiness but I’m looking for something that can preserve formatting (don’t ask me why, because I don’t know myself). Quicksilver integration would be nice but not essential. I have tried Sidenote and Journler and while the former just doesn’t feel right, the latter seems too “bulky” (although Journler does a lot more than just keep notes). Both Yojimbo and SOHO Notes (formerly StickyBrain) are Tiger only so they are ruled out (aargh… one of these weekends I should bite the bullet and jump to Tiger).

Another thing that has been at the back of my mind ever since I read this piece is the “openness” of the format. So preferably the software should save as XML or something similar. Let’s see where we go.

Here’s hoping everything is in place before I feel the need to find something I scribbled in January 2002.

Two pieces of news that I found disturbing for different reasons the past week.