[PLUG] Personal Documentation

AthlonRob AthlonRob at axpr.net
Sun Feb 15 12:45:02 UTC 2004


On Sun, 2004-02-15 at 12:27, Bill Spears wrote:

> > Usually, somebody has posted on use-net or the web how to do something
> > close to what I'm trying to do, though, so I just use their example to
> > get a basic grasp on the program's arguments and run with it, with aid
> > from the man pages.  :-)
>
> Do you save any sort of notes of what you've figured out?  I have a
> spiral notebook(actually many) where I figured out how to use mkisofs
> and cdrecord. I  go back to these pages everytime.

If it is something I might need again and something I don't think I'd be
able to easily google again, I'll put it in a text file in my home
directory... sometimes I grep -R my home directory to remember such
things.  Generally, though, I just use google.

> Re Google, it seems to me that Google is not as accurate as it used to
> be.
> 
> An example.  Suppose you wanted to find out about
>   a) cdrecord, would that be your google entry, would you restrict the
> search to  a site?
>   b) I'm interested in understanding Linux/Unix better.  So when LC_ALL
> came up, it turned out that there was a _whole_ bunch of stuff, i18n,
> etc. about locales, sorting, that I knew nothing about.

I think google is as accurate as ever... although with the abundance of
information out there, growing daily, it can sometimes be difficult to
find exactly what you're looking for.  If I want to just "find out about
cdrecord" I will read the CD Writing Howto and glance through the
documentation on the cdrecord website.  I rarely wish to read about such
generic things.  I want to know how to use cdrecord to blank and write
to a CD-RW out of a pipe from mkisofs or something like that.

On the LC_ALL thing; you must learn to refine your searches.  Give as
many keywords as possible you know will match up with what you're
looking for.  If that is too narrow, cut out a few keywords.  If it's
too broad, add a few more in there you think might work.

Google, I think, is where it is at.  :-)

Rob





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