Tech Tok

In my web browser I set my history to the max # of days. I wish you could just set it to “infinite”. That’s what databases are good for! Well, I guess you should archive every now and again.

I manually archive things like mail at the end of the year as it is. But I can still access all the (casual) bookmarks I’ve ever made back to June 2003! Having that many bookmarks broke Foxmarks such that I couldn’t use it until late last year.

Every month I create a new strftime(”%Y-%m %b”) bookmark folder (e.g. 2008-03 March) in which to store casual bookmarks. Ditto for download folders, which are always strftime(”~/download/%Y-%m-%B”) (e.g. ~/download/2008-03-Mar), although I may switch from ~/download to ~/Downloads since both ubuntu and Mac OS X use that folder name.

I’ve thought of writing a Firefox plugin to manage all these month-specific setups. I should also write an Azureus plugin that does the same thing. Both could be really, really low level so you could just use strftime format strings in any preference folder/file name.

Download folder: %Y-%m %b

That would be sweet..

I’m working in Windows at the moment (my development Mac hasn’t arrived at work yet) so I’m looking around for replacements for things I use on the Mac. I found out today about the “E Text Editor” (and also the free, Monaco-like font Anonymous). E is the closest thing I’ve seen to TextMate, my favorite Mac text editor.

What really struck me about the author’s description of the editor was that:

1. He has a powerful revision-control system embedded in it (in fact, the editor was just a test app at first for the revision control app library)
2. He actively sought out Allan Odgaard, the author of TextMate, and talked with him about making a Windows-based editor with a lot of compatibilty (being able to use TextMate plugins, etc), and Allan was highly in favour of the idea (the TextMate page mentions it will never be available on Windows, after all).

So I have downloaded the app and will give it a 30-day tryout. Maybe I’ll post a review here or something.

Does anyone have any other Mac-replacement recommendations? And why, after all these years, does Cygwin installation still suck so much? They need to be like a Linux distro and have a single, massive installer with everything in it, instead of forcing everyone to separately download everything as part of the install.