IE6: Bye Bye, Die Die
IE6 support is officially pulled from Google Docs, meaning I can no longer access these files from work. I can also not use it as a dropbox for files I want to pass back and forth. That’s what a USB stick is for, so no biggie there. I just can’t update my cost basis file or other documents from work anymore.
I had just been thinking about how good Google Docs is for what I’m using it for.
Grammar moment: … how good Google Docs is for that for which I am using it. (?) Some authorities are saying it’s perfectly fine to end with a preposition as long as it makes sense (to?). I feel like verb-helping prepositions are part of the verb in many cases (learning Turkish will do that to you, actually). Since I doggedly begin sentences with “but” on free-thinking principle, I am not one to talk about such things.
Also: did anyone else hear that style guides are saying it’s no longer so smart to put two spaces between sentences? Heresy! Although the web’s write-plenty-show-once policy with whitespace has not helped my cause.
Anyway, Docs is a OS- and (more importantly) computer-portable way to keep up with basic stuff without resorting to more complex measures.
I’m in love with Dropbox for similar reasons, but it’s heavier-weighted to allow for a more rich experience with the documents. All of my Windows-enhancing portable apps (Notepad2, grep, md5sum, git, svn, 7zip, WinSCP, etc.) are stored in my Dropbox account. I then add this tool folder’s location to my PATH environment variable via System Properties, and I have command line access to all my tools without downloading anything to each computer separately. This has reduced my system reinstall overhead significantly.
By the way, I am now using that virtual directory linking tool I mentioned before as a means of creating a more sane “profile” folder in Windows. I have a C:\User directory that houses symlinks to several key directories, but the directories have been linked as one-word names. So I have C:\User\Music (My Music), C:\User\Documents (My Documents, breaking up nesting like this is no biggie, so subfolders can become peer folders in my virtual structure), C:\User\Dropbox (My Dropbox inside My Documents), etc. If you get tired of fishing out the Application Data hidden folder in your profile directory, you can link that in as well, maybe as Settings.
You could also do a C:\User\Brandon* structure easily if you’re self-hatingly trying to do a multi-user Windows experience. This is pretty much how Mac organizes user files. It’s nice, because the existing Windows structure (Documents and Settings, etc.) is completely unmodified. You’re just accessing them in different ways.
Since I sometimes access music via the command line (working on an even better way to do this, actually, besides calling on VLC directly), it’s nice to avoid file names with spaces as long as possible. Windows does a nice job sloppily escaping spaces, but it takes a lot of time and tabbing when typing directly. Did you know Windows 2000’s command shell doesn’t have tab completion?