Information Leak

Thursday, 06 December 2007

I realised a few days back that my code/data is spread across my workstation at office, macbook and my home-pc and not forgetting the remote servers hosting my website and of course Amazon S3.

How does one keep all of the code/data in context. So many "sandbox" projects, so many snippets of code gathered from failed experiments, one liners gleaned from IRC discussions and online forums...

Today, I reopened Zim desktop wiki on my homepc and I saw nearly 10 pages worth of brain dump I had done after reading David Allen's Getting Things Done. Some nuggets to recover there.Sometime I get this nagging feeling that a good part of my work just leaks away into the dark recesses of time :(

There needs be a way to reduce the interfaces that access this data. * One editor to edit all the information I deal with * One automated shell script to backup/sync data

Perhaps Emacs can be that interface. Time to improve my Emacs chops.

Also, using a remotely backed up version control system to store these files seems like a good idea. The kind of harddisks that I'm getting nowadays in local market do not inspire any confidence at all. Neither do I have the energy to run a RAID array at home. And what is easier than doing svn ci & svn up for data sync/backup?

I'm using Assembla to host my personal files on a svn repository. Assembla gives 100MB of private svn hosting, which looks sufficient for the time being.

PS: Emacs-wiki.el looks like like a credible alternative to Zim.