Jeni's Musings

Amen, sister, re keeping data in closed-format form. And the Charles Stross quote struck me when I read it, too. I still have part of my email archive in a scarcely-accessible format from when one of my workplaces used Lotus Notes.

Of course (strokes beard - or rather, bald pate) this is one reason for the original unix philosophy of “all data files are text files”. And this keeps coming up - for example, this is a really interesting post about making your own pda/workflow-tool based on text files, allowing all sorts of anticipated and unanticipated analysis and processing. This relies, of course, on another part of the unix philosophy - building big special-purpose tools out of little general-purpose tools (using pipelining and scripting) - but I must be getting boring…

PS I really like, in the above quoted link the idea of analysing ones own degree of success in estimating task timing - and the quote “the ubiquitous relational database, while wonderful in some ways, does tend to get in the way of ad-hoc faffing with your data” - and the idea of emailing yourself the daily to-dos, rather than remembering to (or avoiding) reading a todo list.