14th Jul 2005
Tiger Mentholated Filters
This is a nerdy take on part of my “upgrading the PowerBook OS” process. I really can write exciting things about cliff diving, and skateboard jumping the Great Wall of China, and anecdotes about High Performance Driving Schools. First things first …
One project in my “Reset” month has been to redo my PowerBook from scratch to Tiger (10.4.2). It’s a small detour from the study of things LAMPish and AJAXian, but I consider it all part of the idea of resetting (and I have a little time to do it the way I want). An upgrade done right feels a little like getting a new machine. The “booting Tiger off the external drive” deal doesn’t show proper commitment :-)
Part of the process (that I let run overnight) is making good backups of my Panther system. I highly recommend Mike Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner. I made one backup as a disk image (I have a cool WiebeTech ComboDock that lets me access IDE drives through Firewire), and another as a bootable drive on an external LaCie. So far, so happy.
Since I have an old iMac DV hanging around, I boot my old Panther system off the LaCie. It’s just like my PowerBook, but slower and smaller (1024×768). This takes the pressure off of having to copy everything back to my “new” PowerBook at once.
So all of that brings me to the point where I have a fresh PowerBook, an iMac that runs my “old setup”, and a terabyte of external FireWire drives that have 100’s of thousands of files.
The current step is figuring out what gets to live on the PowerBook, as in: “what gets to live on the internal drive?”. Certainly a full-on dev environment, and a representative swath of my photography, some (but not all) email, and so on. I call this the “filtering” step. What’s on the drive when I am out of the house and not necessarily on a speedy network? (another project is getting the Firewire drives on a box that I can get to from the outside world, oy!)
The conjoined twin of filtering is “organization”. I will certainly use Spotlight, and will tag some key files, but the age-old problem of “where to put things” remains. Is an artlicle about Flash Remoting to PHP something that goes in Tech/Dev/Lang/PHP? or Flash? How many links/aliases do I feel like making this time around?
The thing that occurs to me about organizing files and folders/directories, now that I’ve been doing it for about 25 years, is that it is all consistent with your state of mind At The Time Of Organization. The best you can hope for is to get everything slotted away in one flurry, before you change your mind as to “what goes where”. When we start getting inconsistent is when we start filing things away at different times, in a different mood, particularly with things that are outside the organizational scheme we already have (i.e. we suddenly need to make a new branch in our directory tree, and there are 4 equally great places to put it).
So today’s project is getting the PowerBook “caught up”, so that Tiger becomes my main boot. With enough focus coffee, I think I can get through it. I think we’re getting to the point where strict folder hierarchies are no longer so important (on a personal document scale), and where tagging becomes ever more important. Good thing, that!
