[GTALUG] information storage ideas

[Michael Galea]

On 09/12/2020 13.42, Stewart C. Russell via talk wrote:
> On 2020-12-08 12:40 p.m., o1bigtenor via talk wrote:
>>
>> Has anyone found a 'reasonable' system that would effect this less 
>> than simple
>> 'idea'?
> 
> "Reasonable" is quite subjective. What's reasonable for me might be 
> downright paltry for other people.
> 
> Things I've found out:
> 
> * indexing written notes is hard: you have to manually add metadata to 
> find it again. The same goes for scanned photos. Digital photos are a 
> little better, as at least they have a capture date.
> 
> * distributing your ability to "find stuff" across several 
> computers/devices is hard. It will require work to upload it to one 
> central repository. This will have to become part of your routine if you 
> need to rely on it
> 
> * online tools don't necessarily stick. I used WorkFlowy (an online 
> outliner) for a while, and I still have a useful project database there, 
> but I keep forgetting about it. MindMup was quite cool too, until you 
> really needed to start paying for it to access basic features.
> 
> * for me - an untidy person - what works is
> 
> -- file dates ("I worked on this in September")
> 
> -- side associations ("I listened to the album by The ___ when I worked 
> on this, so it must've been around …")
> 
> -- saved shell histories (I'm not quite at the stage of aliasing cd to a 
> command that appends to a local history file, but I'm close - the number 
> of projects I've reconstructed through saved history is beyond countable)

laughing, in .bashrc.. I have
PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a ~/.bash_history"
So I Save each command right after it has been executed, not at the end 
of the session.  This interleaves the history from multiple sessions and
prevents loss in the event of crashes.

> 
> -- the desktop's indexer (like Tracker, Spotlight, Windows Search). I 
> can't live without this. A system without this isn't one I'd choose to 
> use. Yes, they chew CPU and storage but they remember! everything! for! 
> you!
> 
> Maybe my findings aren't worth much, though. I recently found two 
> independent reimplementations of exactly the same project roughly two 
> years apart on my system … as I was about to implement precisely the 
> same thing for the third time.

For me, this translates into not writing code I have already written. To 
prevent this I:
- record the locations where code Ive written resides and index it. I 
then use a search tool (a la grep) that searches the index.
- wrote a curses based script that writes scripts based on checked 
selections of what code snippets and packaged libraries to include.

> 
>   Stewart
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-- 
Michael Galea