Filtering information flow
Like all most of the people I know, I too find myself struggling to keep up with the increasing information flow and the need to come up with means to filter that information stream as to spend as little time as possible evaluating and putting it into good use, and focus on the kind of information that matters to me the most.
Naturally, it would have been best to store/collect/accumulate every bit of information that comes your way. However, unless you be able to identify the usefulness of that information in timely fashion since the acquisition, you are merely storing what you coul/should most probably be able to acquire/lookup later on anyway ( Google, usenet, etc ).
There are various tools and services that make it possible to throw everything at them ( textual content, multimedia, URLs, .. ) which they will happily store away, optionally encrypt them, make them searchable, place them in 'smart lists', you name it. Examples of such applications on Mac OS X are Together, Soho Notes, Yojimbo. I have tried over a dozen of those applications but nothing really worked for me ( pun intended ). They are mostly fine applications, mind you, and may very well turn out to be the perfect tool for your needs so you should try them. ( Sugar is apparently a happy 'Together' user ).
I am relying on NetNewsWire for acquiring information. My subscription list is rather short. I keep track of my friends, some 'interesting folks', various dedicated technical sites and a couple sources providing me with gaming and other entertainment news/meterial. It turns out that having a like minded (sub)network of friends is more valuable than having access to a highly comprehensive list of sources.
Your friends will filter the information for you. They know what you are interested in. They will happily forward you stuff they consider cool/interesting/useful. Thus, its not really that useful to subscribe to popular information sources, for your friends and other sources even, are monitoring them anyway.
I usually check for subscription updates once day, when I get back home from work. I quickly go through the list of items and the ones that seem interesting/worthy I open in a NNW tab for later. Sometime that list of tabs grows to over 100. I go through the opened tabs list whenever I have available time to do so; ones deemed really interesting/useful end up in my Safari bookmarks ( more on that later ) list. Eventually all tabs/pages are consulted and closed. This two-phase process helps me make the most out of the information that reaches me via NNW.
Safari is my web browser of choice for various reasons. I maintain a hierarchical list of bookmarks folders which help me keep references to URLs, obtained mostly via NNW, organized. Most of the bookmarks are tagged by means of adding a list of keywords describing the content within [] in the title. For example, I bookmarked http://www.pragprog.com/ as 'The Pragmatic Bookshelf [store, books, technology]'.
I also maintain text files that hold content specific to a given information domain. For instance, there is a file entitled 'Syntax compilation hints' which I use to store useful, interesting phrases and writing techniques I can refer to in the future. There is another file named 'Quotations', a folder 'Studying Src' which contains files such as 'Algorithms', 'x86 Assembly', 'Cocoa', 'Interesting Findings' etc. In fact, whenever I am studying the implementation details of an application ( say, Lua or Quake III ) I create a text file where I document my findings and thoughts on those. There are over a dozen of folders holding over 100 or so 'notes files', ranging from 'personal rules to follow', to 'ways to deal with stress' to 'ideas about work projects' and 'My Books'.
It all comes down to the fact that thanks to Spotlight ( one of my favorite features of Mac OS X ) I can locate the information stored away as text files ( of course, you can locate anything on your system using Spotlight anyway ) and bookmarks instantly, consult them and update them with little effort. In addition to that, you can easily synchronize and backup that information to locally attached media ( external disks, CDS, etc ) or over the Net (.Mac, online storage services, rsync to a server you have access to you, .. ).
The rules of evolution, thankfully, apply to most systems and processes. What that basically means in this context is that I will eventually figure out a better way to approach the problem. Until that time comes though, I am sufficiently pleased by the benefits the existing solution is providing me with.
Saturday, 5 July 2008 8:35 pm
New Theme, iPhone, Google AppEngine
My brother provided me with a theme for my blog. Its pretty clean and simple - yet not a simple or clean as I would have wanted it to be, but that's entirely my fault. Its a matter of modifying the structure of the various elements and using font families and colors that make sense.
I purchased two iPhones from Las Vegas ( Thank you for the invitation Patrick ). I used to dislike cell phones with a passion. Especially those engineered by Nokia. Complicated for no reason, cumbersome to use, fancy for the sake of being fancy and loaded with a gazillion crappy applications and 'services'. The only cell phone I actually liked was the original Nokia phone ( short-lived moment of glory for them ) used in the Matrix 1 movie. So, naturally, my expectations were rather low when it came to putting the iPhone to the test.
"The iPhone is a revolutionary mobile phone". It actually is. Everything just works, supported by an ultra sleek UI, robust facilities and solid design decisions. It is by far the best mobile device I ever used, far surpassing any expectations I may have had.
Amazon kick-started the cloud computing era by introducing an ever expanding array of facilities and services, from S3 to EC2, to SimpleDB. Microsoft is entering the game with SSDS. Google made available a dozen APIs and WebService as a means to interfacing with their core services but everyone knew Google would come after Amazon and co, big time. It did. What is perhaps the most important benefit and side-effect of the availability of such a platform is that the everyone can build any web application without having to shelling out for the kind of resources that would have made this application possible. The AppEngine service is going to provide everyone with free access to resources and documentation - all one would need to do is signup with them, build the application on his computer using the provided SDK and then push it back to the cloud. Once the application gets successful (say, 4-5 million page views / month ) that said developer would pay Google for access to more resources. Everyone wins.
I am looking forward to similar offerings from IBM and Sun. For those who are into buzzwords, Web3.0 is here.
Tuesday, 8 April 2008 10:08 pm
WWDC 07 - the rundown
The Stevenote came and went; overblown expectations replaced by the collective uhm? and 'where is this and where is that?' concerns from Apple fans users/advocates. 300 new features are included in Leopard, yet Steve chose 10 of those to demo during his keynote. Initially we were hoping for 10 brand new(=not demoed before or mentioned or whatever) features, the kind of features that would be deemed super secret and super valuables, the kind of features Apple wouldn't demo so that Microsoft wouldn't (once again) 'adopt' them for their Vista Windows revision.
We were mostly wrong. 3 new features were revealed. Not really that amazing, mind blowing or otherwise worth celebrating for, yet worthy and interesting as a whole. The new desktop, which seems to be heavy on Core animation and whatnot and also comes with 'Stacks', a nifty feature which I am really going to put to some good use once I get access to it. There is also ( at last ) a new, really slick finder which is a whole lot like iTunes, only for files. The third new feature demoed is called Quicklook, which is about being able to live-preview files ( based on their file-type ) without having to launch an application. Very handy. The other 7 selected features were basically overviews of previously demoed/confirmed features (Phaistos Network ) can't wait to get their hands on this baby and build apps for it. A release date was provided ( June 29th ) and that was basic it.
The one more thing turned out to be ( thank God ) Safari 3.0. It is now available for both Mac and PCs ( Windows ). Its way faster, it sports draggable tabs, super slick in-line find and a very cool textareas resizing system ( so that you can resize it if you feel like doing so while writing some text, just like I did when I started posting this ). It doesn't work at all on my brother's Windows box. Then again, its beta, take it with a grain of salt etc. I love Safari.
I really hoped they talk about iWork, iLife and the new iMacs. That was by far my biggest let-down. I hope they 'll make up for it by releasing them within the following days though.
Monday, 11 June 2007 11:50 pm