Re: the importance of keeping notes

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Dennis" == Dennis McMurchy <denismcm@example.com> writes:

    Dennis> I have at least twenty volumes of Unix books at hand, and
    Dennis> they are a wonderful resource, but they are _no_
    Dennis> replacement for careful notes on what you've actually done
    Dennis> and problems you've actually solved.

    Dennis> My ~/systemnotes/ directory after a year running Linux on
    Dennis> Intel contains almost a hundred files totalling over 200K
    Dennis> (that's a lot of text).

Ever think of writing a book yourself?  :-)

Too much work, I'm sure, but there would probably be a small market
for it.

On this theme, I suspect that one reason Dennis's notes save him again 
and again is because he always knows where to grep first for hints, and 
(since he wrote the notes himself) the keywords are natural.

I haven't done anything about it yet, but the agrep (aka glimpse)
package looks very interesting.  Because it preprocesses the whole
file system (if you want it to) you can find all references in your
file system in less time than it takes to "apropos <keyword>".
Applications I'm thinking about include preprocessing all my
Linux-related CDs---since the databases live in files you can keep
them online even when the CD is offline.  Even with DVD or the
following generation, you'll change media often for new applications.
Or upgrade to new distributions with "upgraded" docs (that no longer
contain your keyword).  Or whatever.  This solves the "where" problem:
search everywhere, including offline.

It doesn't solve the "unnatural keywords" problem completely (nothing
can---did you read the article on 'whatis' and 'apropos' in LJ and
notice how a keyword that appeared for one relevant man page didn't
appear in lots of others?), but you're far more likely to get hits
with the agrep database than with the apropos database.  That leads to 
an overflow problem, but that's better than underflow.

I don't know how agrep works on nihongo....

Steve

-- 
                           Stephen John Turnbull
University of Tsukuba                                        Yaseppochi-Gumi
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences  http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com
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