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I hate the boxes of paper records I have to lug around.

Some of the types of documents in my life:

• Records of:
  • Financial transactions
  • Taxes
  • Contracts
  • Business cards
  • Academic certificates
• Papers I’ve written
  • Math
  • Creative writing

My goal is to put all my documents (paper and digital) into a single cross-referenced document management system with flexible metadata. Eric Blue recommends SCAN. From what I see, it looks simple and highly useful! I may start using this system and then convert to something else (probably a custom system based on RDF). I just purchased a nice scanner, so I’m going to implement this right away!

This fits into a larger goal of creating a unified model of all the entities I interact with, across all media.

Paper → Image → PDF → SCAN metadata store

I ♥ Panels (it does the simple layout on this blog, but it’s capable of much more advanced usage).

Most school networks provide users a personal network folder mounted as a Windows network drive and accessible from any campus workstation. This is primarily meant as a document folder, but executable programs can be stored here too. I have several useful programs in my network folder, but the most useful by far is jEdit. The same copy runs on both Windows and Mac workstations, with the same plugins and configuration options.

To use jEdit in a network environment, just make sure that your jEdit user settings directory is stored on in your network folder by launching jEdit with

“jedit.jar -settings=P:/ath/to/your/folder/.jedit”

via an application shortcut in windows, or a shell script on Mac/Linux (jEdit is an executable jar). Enjoy!

An empty husk of a posting.

Microcontent can be easily transferred between infosystems. Simpler data formats are simply more portable.

By organizing your information as microcontent, you can easily implement various distributed workflows, including

• local checkout of individual items
• consolidation (aggregation)

As the device market gets more complicated, .NET and Java propose to achieve portability through homogeneity, but the browser remains the single (somewhat) universally available client platform. The key difference is that the web grew around portable data formats, not portable code.