So HoudahSpot worked well for while and I still use it today for searching because it’s easier and faster than Spotlight – even with regex searches. It supports search templates which allows me to define regular search types instead of typing up repetitive searches. There is almost nothing that cannot be search in an easy to use interface. HoudahSpot with a sample search.(Click for a full size image)Īs you can see, you can search in the text or the name, or in your email. HoudahSpot is a front end that helps to search for files. Regular Mac Users will be familiar with the Spotlight which creates a detailed search index of all files on the disk. Go somewhere else if you want those solutions. As a rule, I choose to pay for my software since I believe that these products will survive over the longer term.Therefore I will walk through the process as I adopted tools, then moved onto more complex tools as I tried new ways of working.Īs far as I know, there are no programs that perform equivalent functions on Windows or Linux. And many of these apps have way more features than a script, and these features are also valuable. In general, I could have scripted any of these tasks but the time taken to write and debug these scripts is more than the cost of the apps that do these tasks. My toolset for handling this is entirely based around Mac OSX specific features and software that I’ve bought. I found myself wasting many hours searching for PDFs that I remember reading but cannot find. To solve this problem, you need more than a directory on hard disks, you need a tool that can organise files according to some other schema. In the same way a Cisco MediaNet 4.0 QoS Design Guide might be any of the following:Īnd so on. I might want to classify this into the following: So, now that you have downloaded a bunch of PDF files you have to find a way to organise them into meaningful data.Ĭonsider a PDF file from Brocade on VCS Fabric Technical architecture. I’ve learned that you can’t rely on the Internet to be a reliable content store. If it’s a blog page, then blogs often disappear when people change lives and decide to stop paying for the hosting. It’s frustrating to recall that read about something but cannot find it. And big websites have things changing and moving, and a bookmark isn’t useful two or three years later because the content has moved. Why download it ?īig companies have big websites. Once I’ve found a useful document, white paper, technical reference, product manual or whatever then I will download it to keep for reference. Most of the web pages on a vendor site aren’t the core technical information that I’m looking for. In terms of reading documentation to find what I am looking for then, without doubt, a Web page is the easiest way to review lots of materials to find what you are looking for. Since a number of people have asked me to talk in more detail about how I organise this and what methods I use, here is some rough description of how I perform knowledge management. A few times I’ve mentioned about how I manage collections of PDF documents, Text files and the accreted detritus of a Network Engineer.
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