Comments on: It’s the 21st Century. Do you know where your files are? https://gregladen.com/blog/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/ Wed, 14 Apr 2010 11:56:40 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.8 By: Marion Delgado https://gregladen.com/blog/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517063 Wed, 14 Apr 2010 11:56:40 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517063 Greg:

On Macs, the easiest way to automate tasks based on emails sent to me turned out to be using the file system, but in other systems that wasn’t the case.

Built-in polling and triggers are known as Folder Actions in the Mac OSes, as just a subset of WMI events in Windows Script/VBScript/PowerShell, and are optional software on Linuxes.

]]> By: HJ Hornbeck https://gregladen.com/blog/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517062 Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:27:57 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517062 In my case, I periodically copy files from my laptop to my desktop, which has a RAID-1 array mounted as my /home directory. One of those drives is in a caddy, and once in a while I yank it out, drive halfway across the city, swap it with another one, drive back, and slam the “new” drive back in.

It’s not quite meteor-proof, and the offsite backup can go weeks without a swap, but it does the job for me!

]]> By: MPL https://gregladen.com/blog/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517061 Tue, 13 Apr 2010 21:56:24 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517061 For those who are truly attached to to seeing their data as files, it is possible to export even webmail to text files—one file ascii RFC2822 format per email. For example, getmail running in Maildir mode can do so. Email is intrinsically a very human-readable format (at least RFC email).

Regarding computer-as-filesystem-manager, it may be that the the directories-and-files model is due for a tuneup, but I think the application-centered model is a dead end. The web is built of html and not applets for extremely good reasons, for example. Data is what the users are there for, not your code.

]]> By: DuWayne https://gregladen.com/blog/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517060 Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:48:53 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517060 Ooohh!!! Very Sexy…Shiny even…

Thanks

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517059 Tue, 13 Apr 2010 18:51:31 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517059 DuWayne: I have one word for you: Mendeley.

Oh, might as well give you the link as well:

http://www.mendeley.com/

I’m starting to think it is the most brilliant piece of software I’ve ever seen.

]]> By: DuWayne https://gregladen.com/blog/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517058 Tue, 13 Apr 2010 16:45:04 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517058 Oi – and as far as email goes, I use gmail in browser only. Honestly, I might have started using thunderbird or something, but have no idea how to couple it to gmail and really don’t care. Anything particularly important gets copied to google docs and if I really want to have offline access, I download and save it to an external drive. I would note that I very rarely actually do that. Attachments are always saved, OTH…

]]> By: DuWayne https://gregladen.com/blog/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517057 Tue, 13 Apr 2010 16:37:19 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517057 I know exactly where all of my media files are, because they are all either backed up on a external drive or on DVD – some are on both. And I know where all of my document files are – both those written by me and papers I have used for source material or just want to read (though the latter is a huge fucking mess that makes me extremely grateful for search functions). Oi, and I know where all of my pictures are too.

All of my files are backed up on an external drive and every once in a while I take new original documents and pictures and burn them to DVD. And all my pictures also get uploaded to my picasa account, while all my documents are backed up in google documents and Scribd.

I do not – I repeat do not use bloody iTunes either. Since I got my Cowon media player, I use Jet media player on my computer, because it has fucking incredible sound (as does the player itself) and was free with my mp3 player (it does play video, but I am not one for watching shit on a 3″x4″ screen). But unlike iTunes, I can just pick the file(s) I want to play and click them – they automatically open in Jet media player. Or I take the files I want on my player and drop them onto my player’s memory.

I manually handle all of my files. I don’t let anything download into a temp file – even software installers. I save all my software installers to an external drive with everything else. Not everything translates perfectly – such as updates, but if I need to transfer everything to another computer, I can do so with minimal fuss and bother. I can completely copy the setup I have on my computer now, in less than three hours. And I save very few passwords on my computer, so I don’t have to worry about that.

Though it occurs to me that I could totally streamline that whole process if I were to make a DVD of all my software installers, with the settings I like in a notepad file.

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517056 Tue, 13 Apr 2010 16:02:19 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517056 Graycat, you did not see any of your mail messages. You saw a file that you were not able to read.

But actually, that file type is text, a readable file, and that’s a good way to store email.

]]> By: Graycat https://gregladen.com/blog/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517055 Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:38:58 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517055 Greg, I got curious so I looked, and found my email messages under User/library/mail/mailboxes/(particular mailbox)/messages. They’re listed by date and when you click on one, it opens up in Mail, so I don’t know if that is user readable or not. They are.emlx files. G5 iMac running Leopard.

I don’t actually know anything about computers, files, etc but I can poke around and find things on the mac.

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517054 Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:54:52 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/04/12/its-the-21st-century-do-you-kn/#comment-517054 Marion, that may have been an early adaptation. The files where as you say they were, but within that they were not organized in human readable format, in that a human would like to see the names of the songs or artists or something.

I have no idea what you are talking about with the “folder action” thing.

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