V3.41.0.0 is an update to work with the latest Web Browsers from Mozilla and Microsoft, namely Firefox Version 4 and Internet Explorer Version 9. It will also work with older versions of these browsers and continues to work with Google Chrome.

My next blog post (out tomorrow) is titled “Why Google Chrome is my Web Browser of choice.”

Have a great week everyone.
Nevile

Google Chrome Context Menu

This works in the same way as our other Surfulater Extensions for Firefox and Internet Explorer, by adding Surfulater to the Chrome right click context menu. For some background on the Chrome Extension see my previous post.

The next important new feature in this release is the ability to remove HTML markup from article content. There are times when captured web page content includes styles and formatting etc. which simply add clutter and we don’t want. Remove HTML Markup comes in handy here and lets you choose various types of markup to remove, including all HTML markup.

The menu shown below is available whenever content is being edited.

Editing context menu showing: Remove HTML Markup.

I suggest you try each of the menu options to see the result. You can always press Escape to Cancel the changes and keep the original content.

A perennial problem that a very small number of people have is the inability to add new articles from their Web Browser and see images in existing articles. This is typically caused by either Firewall or Anti Virus software blocking access to Surfulater’s built-in Web Server. I’ve written about this issue before here and here. Well it happened again recently to a new user and this time I decided it was time to write some code to check access was working and notify the user if not, preempting some frustration on their part and support requests on ours. I’ve also added a new Troubleshooting section to the Surfulater Help which provides assistance with this issue.

A nasty bug which was introduced in the last release has also been fixed. It was related to the new capability added in that release to enable articles to be dragged from the content window to the knowledge tree. The result was a random, very difficult to reproduce crash. An big thanks to the various folks that sent in the crash reports.

A variety of other issues have been addressed including some Unicode issues with Knowledge Tree Filters. They are all outlined in the V3 Release Notes in the Help.

As always we trust you benefit from the work we’ve done in this release and look forward to your feedback and suggestions. The Surfulater Download page is where it’s been for a while now.

-Neville

Time has passed and Chrome’s popularity continues to rise (I can now see why). For us software developers the good news is the Google team behind Chrome keep working on its Extension programming interface, recently adding the missing features we need for the Surfulater Extension.

What all of this means, is that I am pleased to report, we now have a Surfulater Chrome Extension that is 86% complete and in testing so far, is working very well indeed.

In fact I’d have to say this would be the best extension we’ve developed so far, largely due to the great job the folks at Google have done in designing Chrome’s Extension interface and the way Chrome extensions work.  Also Chrome’s debugging capabilities seem smoother than other browsers. Overall it has been a pleasure developing the Surfulater Chrome Extension and Plugin, which isn’t something I can say for the other Web Browsers.

Google Chrome is a very interesting product, which along with important new functionality in HTML5 and future developments that Google is working on, opens the doors to new and interesting ways for folks like us to create and develop products. I understand the folks at Mozilla are making fairly major changes to Extensions in Firefox V4, however I’ve not yet had time to look into this. There is no doubt in my mind that they have quite some catching up to do, compared with Google Chrome. It will be interesting to see if they can pull it off.

Neville

There are various things you can do to prevent such nefarious events from occurring.

First never ever open an E-mail attachment unless you know who sent it and why they sent it. And remember anyone can spoof the senders e-mail address, so you need to verify that the e-mail really is from who you think it is from. Checking the full e-mail headers should alert you to a fake e-mail or failing that e-mail the sender and ask them. Opening bogus attachments is the easiest way to get your PC infected.

Antivirus programs are the next line of defense and you absolutely must be running one and ensure its virus definitions are updated daily.

Next comes Firewalls. Firewalls prevent (Internet) traffic from entering and exiting your PC, thus blocking unauthorized access while permitting authorized communications. Firewalls excel at helping to protect your PC, however they are usually complex to setup, manage and use correctly. Firewalls come in two types; Hardware which runs in your Router etc. and Software which runs on your PC. We are only discussing Software Firewalls here.

The Microsoft Windows Firewall is easy to use, however it is limited in its functionality compared to third party firewalls such as Comodo and Agnitum Outpost. I have no intention of discussing the merits or otherwise of any particular Firewall, suffice to say searching for “Windows Firewalls” on Google will give you plenty to read.

Now it’s time to come back to the title of this article “Firewalls are wonderful things except when they aren’t.” I mentioned that Firewalls can be complex to setup and manage and herein lies the problem. In fact I was prompted to (finally) write this article after a brand new Surfulater user Peter, ran into problems on day one. Fortunately he took it in his stride, but we all know from experience how frustrating it can be when something (new) doesn’t work as expected. To make matters worse this was on a weekend, so normally the issue wouldn’t have been resolved for a few days. However we’d had a Surfulater promotion that week and I wanted to ensure all the new users were happily using their latest acquisition, so I was keeping a close eye on our Support Forums and E-Mails.

A picture or two is worth a thousand words. When you open the sample Surfulater Knowledge Base and select the “Atlantica Blended Wing Body” article this is part of what you should see.

And this is what Peter saw. None of the images shown in the screen shot above are being displayed.

After a few e-mails back and forth the cause was discovered and the issue resolved. You’ve probably worked out by now that Peter’s Firewall was the culprit that prevented Surfulater from displaying images. If so you are correct. Now let me explain why.

The Surfulater content window (in the screen shots above) is in essence a Web Browser and like a Web Browser it retrieves its images from a Web Server. However in this case the Web Server is not out on the Internet, but built-in to Surfulater. In fact Surfulater’s Web Server is used for a variety of tasks beyond serving up images, including for example providing the list of matching tags for Tag auto-suggest. Now if your Firewall is set to Block Surfulater’s Web Server, it is unable to do its job and serve up the requested content resulting in missing images etc. etc.

When you install and run Surfulater for the first time your Firewall will pop-up and ask you whether to Allow or Block various requests it makes, as shown in this screen shot using Outpost Firewall.

For Surfulater to operate correctly you must set your Firewall to Allow Surfulater to perform all activities. Anything less will cause problems. Depending on which Firewall you are using, there can be several of these pop-up windows, which you need to confirm, to allow access.

Firewalls will also prevent Surfulater from checking to see whether there is a new release available and informing you of such. This screen shot shows the Windows Security Alert prompt which is displayed the very first time Surfulater is run.

When we do the check for a new release no information of any sort is sent back to us, so you do not need to be concerned about your privacy. Further the automated ‘Check for a new release’ is completely optional and can be turned off or on at any time. When it is off you can still use Help|Check for a New Release to perform a manual check. We therefore request that you select the Unblock option here as well, so that we can deliver an optimal user experience.

Clearly there is a perfectly legitimate and necessary requirement for applications such as Surfulater so send and receive both local and Internet  traffic and therefore not have Firewall Blocks put on them. You need to judge the veracity of Firewall block/unblock requests on a case by case basis, taking into account where the application came from in the first place. If it was purchased directly from a reputable vendor there should be no reason to block its access.

I hope you found this useful and that it will assist future Surfulater users, should they run into the same problem Peter did.

If you’ve had any specific good or bad experiences with Firewalls or applications which abuse your trust, comment away.

The folks at Mozilla have removed some of the code used by extensions prior to Firefox V3.6, which is preventing our extension from working. Specifically none of the Surfulater menu items appear on the Firefox right click context menu, even though the Extension appears to be installed ok. That’s the bad news.

The goods news is I have updated the Surfulater Firefox Extension to bring it up to date with the latest Firefox Extension specification. I have also taken this opportunity to update and improve the Extension code. A few Surfulater users have tested the new extension as have I and all is well once more.

The updated extension will be part of the next Surfulater release, Version 3.30, due out early next week. There are some great new features and enhancements in V3.30 which I’ll talk about in the next blog post.

I’m heading back to finish updating the Surfulater Help for the new release, then on to the release packaging and final testing.  I’ll see you all on the other side.

Knowledge Tree Filters enable you to choose specific items and only those items to display in the tree. This lets you quickly drill down and locate a set of items of interest and then work with them, while everything else remains hidden out of your way. You can filter by Folder name, Article title or Tag name. For example you can elect to display only articles whose title includes “energy”. I have been using this constantly while developing and refining it, for well over a month now and I have to say I am finding it very, very useful indeed.

Let me start by showing you the new Knowledge Tree Filter user interface panel which lives at the top of the Knowledge Tree bar.

As you can see it is quite simple and hopefully self-explanatory. You pick whether you want to filter by Folder Titles, Article Titles or both and then type the text to filter on. Filtering occurs as you type with the results displayed in the Knowledge Tree.

This is a screen shot of the enhanced Knowledge Tree for the sample MyKnowledge database without any filtering applied.

Now the same tree filtered by Folder or Article Titles which contain the text “energy”.

Notice that the tree items that match the filter term “energy” have the matching text highlighted, in the same way search matches are highlighted in articles in the content window.

Only articles that include “energy” in their title are displayed. The ‘Folder-Article’ counts displayed in gray are the total number of articles in the folder, not the count of filtered matches. So the folder “Solar Power” has 4 articles, but only two match the filter and are thus visible.

Two folders “Solar Power” and “Pending Reading” do not include “energy” in their title and therefore do not match the filter as such. However they do contain articles that match and because ‘Search in: Articles’ is checked, these matching articles and thus their folders are shown. All other folders and articles are excluded or filtered out.

In the screen shot above ‘Search in: Articles’ is not checked and the filter is therefore only applied to Folder Titles. You can see that only two folders match and these are highlighted. Furthermore because the Articles filter is off no checks are performed on article titles and all articles in the matching folders are included in the results.

Knowledge Tree Filters can be used with all of the Tree views, not just the Folder (normal) view. These final two screen shots show the Chronological view filtered by “march” and the Tags view filtered by “power”.

  

Each Knowledge Tree view retains its own independent filter settings and filter status.

The button turns the filter on and off and the button collapses and expands the Filter panel. See the Surfulater Help topic: Power Features | Knowledge Tree Filters for more information.

As I mentioned at the start I’m finding Knowledge Filtering a most welcome new feature that lets me quickly locate and see a specific set of articles. I hope you find it as useful as I do.

Other updates in this release include support for Windows 7, several Vista specific issues fixed, an update to the Firefox Extension, updates to use new versions of third party libraries, another reduction in the Surfulater.EXE size, some more performance improvements and various bug fixes. Full details are in the Surfulater Help | V3 Release Notes topic.

This sparkling new release can be downloaded from the Surfulater Home page or Download page. We look forward to your feedback and suggestions on this new release.

An enhancement that people have been asking for is to improve the visual characteristics of items displayed in the Knowledge Tree so that for example bold or italic text could be displayed, making specific tree items stand out from the crowd and therefore be easier to locate when scrolling or paging up and down.

I’ve actually taken this a step further and have enabled tree items to display HTML so that what you see in the content window, is what you now see in the tree. This means text foreground and background colors along with bold and italics now appear in the Knowledge Tree.

This screen shot shows an article with its Title highlighted using background and foreground colors as well as bold and italic text and its corresponding item in the Knowledge Tree with the same visual markup applied.

I’ve also highlighted some folders and other articles. One other thing to note is the article counts to the right of each folder are now displayed in Grey instead of Black, making them a bit more subtle.

You have always been able to set the images displayed for each tree item and now with the ability to set the appearance of the text, you get full visual control of tree items. Further it lets Surfulater highlight items of specific interest, as the need arises.

Apart from our users wanting this, it was needed for the other even more important new feature coming in this release, which you will hear all about soon.

I’ve also taken this opportunity to make substantial changes to the way the Surfulater code is packaged. In particular seven DLL’s have been completely removed and two more have been taken out of the Installation package. This code refactoring and repackaging removes problems caused by wrong versions of DLL’s and moves us closer to the possibility of a single .EXE file, potentially without any need for an Installer. Further it helps pave the way for a Portable USB Stick version of Surfulater. And finally it reduces the size of the Installer download file from 7.79MB to 5.67MB and the installed code footprint from 16.347MB down to 12.68MB. Substantial effort has gone into this, taking up much of our development time since the last release.

That is all below the surface, but there are good things happening above ground as well.

The most visual change in this release is how Tags are displayed in articles.

They don’t just look a lot better, but they perform better as well, in that you can now click on Tag to jump to it, in the Tags Knowledge Tree and then see and work with all the articles with that tag.

The next enhancement is the ability to change the color of text using Set Text Color, which is in addition to setting its background color.

  

Clicking on the button or choosing the right click context menu item changes the color of the selected text to the current color.

Clicking on the down arrow opens the color selection palette, which enables you to change the current color. Note that the current color is displayed below the A image. Restore to default is also new in this release and sets the current color back to its default value. This is also included on the Highlight Text color palette.

Another new feature is Set Title to selection which enables you to set the Title of the current article to the selected text. This is available on the right click context menu, when used on selected text.

There are times when an Article Title is not what you want and this provides a quick convenient way to change it.

If you are observant you will have noticed Web Search on the menu screen shot above.

This new feature enables you to perform a Google search using the currently selected text. Another handy time saver.

A subtle change we’ve begun in this release is the ability to make more changes to selected text without having to be in edit mode. For example the Add a Link and Remove this Link commands can now be used when not in content editing mode. As can the new Set Text Color.

Of course there is more; drag & drop can now be used during content editing to move text and images, and Copy and Paste as reciprocal ‘See also’ links can now be used in the Tags and Chronological Knowledge Tree views.

As always all of the new features and bug fixes are documented in the V3 Release Notes in the Help as well as in new and updated Help topics. Make sure you at least read the release notes.

The latest release of Surfulater is available from our Download Web page.

We’ve recently completed a major overhaul of the Surfulater home page and I hope it does a better job of conveying to people what Surfulater does and how useful it can be. Feedback welcome.

I’d like to dedicate this release to our friend and golfing buddy Neil Oram who sadly and unexpectedly passed away last Monday 20 Apr 2009. Neil was always a pleasure to be around and had many great games of golf left to play. He will be fondly remembered and greatly missed.

Thank you for your email. Allow me to share my musings on technology.

I will reflect on what you have to say, as I do believe there is some sense in it. I will try to regularly saved pages as they arise; maybe it would not be as cumbersome as it seems to me. I guess maybe what I would want would be to turn it off and on. I will do google searches and click from page to page with a dozen windows open, most of them with multiple tabs and I really do want *every* one of those pages saved (automatically, I think as it is a good record of my train of thought). I guess I thought perhaps there was sophisticated enough searching such that it would not be a waste of time. I also thought it would be often me doing a more general term search, thinking “I know I read something about “dopamine reward pathway” and “the hedonistic calculus” and then I would basically hit on the motherload of all the pages I was looking for. There were more than a few times when I was glad that slogger automatically saved everything. For some reason, though, when I did a general Microsoft system search the results did not come up for terms listed on the html pages, so the search was effectively useless, except for some times when I kind of tracked stuff and was glad it was all there.

1) Slogger is not compatible with the latest version of firefox and I have other add-ons which I believe require it to run. I’m not sure about keeping an earlier version of firefox.

2) I had the issue of a term in an html file saved via slogger not seeming to come up, making search almost useless (again unless I could track it down manually).

3) I guess I just think it is really cool to pick a day from 2005 and just go from page to page that I was visiting and recapture everything I saw. This fits in with my whole vision of the ideal that we will archive experience. As storage space becomes effectively free and camera technology becomes miniature, it will not be uncommon for people to, for example, simply videotape their days. I believe there are people who already do this JustinTV(?). All of this is very crude now. But if the data is gone–one thing we know it will stay gone. Who knows what kind of smart searching technology we will have in 10, 15, 20, 1000, 10000 years. This doesn’t even get into backing up one’s memories from the day so nothing is lost at all. Again, I feel like this the way I originally felt about gmail. Why would I want to save every email I have ever sent? What’s the point? Well, when storage space is effectively free, the question becomes one of search. Clearly search is going to get A LOT !!!! more sophisticated. (Again, though, if the data is gone, it’s gone.) I look back now (being 34 years old) and my parents never had a videocamera, so there is basically no record of my childhood other than a few hundred photos maybe. Contrast that with a kid today who would have tons of videos of all kinds of things. Tons of pictures. And a record that is always there of everything that passed in front of his eyes if it ever occurred to him to want (given that it was effectively free to preserve it). Why *not* do it? You point to security. OK, I guess maybe I should be more concerned about that I am. Maybe someone could access my files from my external hard drive. And, yes, there is the danger of how secure is the data if it is sitting on an external hard drive sitting right next to the computer. Again, maybe not very. But if it costs nothing to do so, why not? OK, search is cumbersome. It seems to me that if there were some combination of smart searching where I could get little thumbnails of the 300 pages where the term came up (I’m taking what would seem to be the excessively cumbersome number of results which supposedly would happen enough to make the whole idea questionable–I don’t think, if the user interface was well done that it wouldn’t be worth it to go through–I think that would could be cagey in how one employed search. I must I admit I was hoping for some exciting things on that front. I guess I want to have all the files there so that, when the smart search technology is there, I can say to it (as it looks over the exabytyes of data I have) in natural language: “Molly” (I’ve just decided I’m going to call my first smart search interface avatar “Molly”–see Kurzweil’s current crude “Ramona”) search my files for the summer of 2009 and display my wall display the first 25 files which use the words “artificial intelligence” and “Moore’s Law” more than twice each in each file (ordering from top left to right and down being the default). And then I walk to the wall size display and scan the different documents, tap the one I want so it shows up on my tablet and sit down to read the document. (or whatever and however it all plays out). Of course this doesn’t even get into more sophisticated artificial intelligence-based smart searching. (I’m sure that in 10 years the above scenario will seem locked into a Windows 95-esque paradigm.) Or, based on a cross-referencing of the relative status of the authors of all articles downloaded in the last 5 years based on (some kind of) Google-like popularity rank, give me the articles on “genetic algorithms” by those writers linked to with the greatest frequency. (Obviously, I’m just making shit up now.)

4) But the key to all this is: We could have Turing-passing intelligent software agents but that won’t do you any good if you haven’t saved the files. And, if the searching is sophisticated enough, you will want all the files you could have.

5) also I saw surfulater as offering files which would go beyond simply firefox. Word. Powerpoint. Adobe Acrobat. etc. All those would show up in the proper order so that when I had 3 word files, 10 firefox windows (8 of which have multiple tabs), an Adobe Acrobat document, and a Powerpoint file; Hey, who knows, maybe a mp3 file too. All of that would be right there so that when I looked at the thumbnails on my wall display I could easily tap any one of them to have it come up in the form I want.

interview with Kurzweil, the man Bill Gates calls “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence,” where he mentions backing up our brains. If we can back up our memories (and presumably search them), presumably it would be feasible to search through the text of some html files we went through 25 years previously. Clearly, artificial intelligence programs could see relationships between the data that we can’t imagine. If we are relearning it, there could algorithms for reintroducing the material to us in a way that would allow us to optimally retain it, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt to have a complete record of when we came across it. I realize that technology is hard to make and these are pretty unrealistic, fanciful notions–for now. My hat goes off to you for you will be creating the technology of the future. It’s pretty exciting though I would have to say.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=195200003&pgno=1&queryText=&isPrev=

some links: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6287126.stm

I apologize if I came across as snippy. I did not mean to.

I guess it just comes back once again to my main point: We could the most insanely advanced technology (e.g. storage and search capability) but it is only as good as the set of data available for search. Pretty axiomatically, assuming your search technology is sophisticated enough the more info you have the better. ONCE IT’S GONE, IT’S GONE. And I want it all. It’s really that simply. If I can’t use it all now, then I want it for later. (I guess I thought I would still be able to search it now to get what I want, but maybe that would not be the case.)

Like I said, I’ll check out surfulater for a while and see if it, in combination with Google automated (link-only) history saving, is my best bet until something more complete comes along. In the meantime, obviously these technology speculations are quite fanciful, and, although I dispute much of what he says, once one reads someone like Kurzweil, one starts to think: OK, what would I want, assuming everything was *exactly* the way I wanted it to be. ANd, then, since it never is, one finds what one can to most closely approximate that desire. Part of maximizing that desire may involve a certain planning for the future. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

My reply: Thanks for your erudite and lengthy response, which I have to say was rather unexpected. I agree with your view that once its gone it gone, however a very large proportion of what is on the Web tends to hang around. The problem is often finding it again. But you aren’t just talking about the Web I know.

If I look at my personal use of saved knowledge the focus is largely on recently created and gathered information, with anything much beyond a year or two old unlikely to be relevant to me any more. In fact often times it boils down to information garnered in the last few months. Such is the rapidly changing world we live in. However if there is one stand-out thing I’ve learned from developing Surfulater it is that so many people use it in so many different ways for so many different things!

Your vision for search is very good, but we seem to be taking only baby steps in getting there. I have no doubt this is an area that a heck of a lot of resources are being ploughed into though.

Assuming search does improve dramatically and that all Web content is cached and lives forever then I get back to my earlier blog post and question why you need to save each and every page you visit. If you add value with notes and organization (tags/folders) and therefore make it easier to re-find, then that is a different story.

And further correspondence from Mr. T.

Here is a little more I why more unfocused writing on my rationale for getting surfulater in the first palce: I am in the 6th year of my PhD program in philosophy with a strong interest in cognitive science broadly construed (neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, artificial intelligence, etc.), so I spend many hours a day reading dozens of articles (some thoroughly, some only skimming them). As I said, many times during the day I will have a dozen firefox windows open (many of them with multiple tabs) in addition to a couple word documents, maybe an pdf file and a powerpoint for the class I am teaching. This has been my life for the past six years. I would say that just about anything I looked at relevant to my research or just general interest would be something that I would be very interested in being able to find very easily (and I like the idea of recapitulating all the things/files that were going on when I accessed a given, say, journal paper. Of course I would like to take the time to add notes and such, and maybe surfulater will be the key to organizing it, but I can’t tell you how many times I have had the experience of reading something about a topic and being vaguely familiar with it, but not knowing what I read on the topic. I guess I could just get in the habit of right clicking and selecting. (There has to be a key command though, right? I guess I’ll find that out.)

Here is the message I sent to a friend who asked why I would need such a thing when I basically asked if anybody knew of something like “slogger but much, much better” (and to which a friend replied by recommending surfulater):

I guess maybe I am just trying to justify being a packrat but I have something like the following experience quite often. I will be reading one article which will lead me to one web page which will lead me to another page which will lead me to do a google search for one term then I’ll look at one of the articles referenced in one of the articles.

I might also open up Microsoft word and type out some thoughts I have on it. Maybe I get an idea. Maybe there is something I want to check out more.

And then, when it comes to go out, I have to turn off my computer and there is all of this–stuff–that is lost. I feel like I can never reproduce the train of thought I had going at the time. If I had displayed right in front of me chronologically or searchable via keyword every single document that passed in front of me it would jog my memory much easier; it would make it all fresher in my mind when I go back to the same topic or something similar. When I get the feeling, “Haven’t I read something similar on this topic?” unless I have saved it in the right way in my current system by author I can’t quite get what specific article or web page I may have read–forget about having the whole 2 hours of surfing/annotating/reading/switching-between-files laid out in front of me. I guess I feel overwhelmed with information and if I have some logging of the stuff that I have gone through on some level I don’t feel like I am starting from scratch.

I guess I am just a (digital) packrat. I guess I just really like the idea of clicking on a day from years ago and seeing the random books I searched on amazon, the blogs I read that day, the hockey games I checked on ESPN. When storage is effectively free, it is like being able to have a little museum look into the past–your own past. Maybe I should just let things go…

Hopefully, I will find a way to use surfulater such that it will best search my needs. I haven’t begun to tap into all I’m sure it is capable of doing.

I suppose you could use the above, too if you like.

And, I just thought of the work of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Now, I don’t go into this kind of existentialist philosophy so much any more because it is all just a bit too wooly for me, but one of the ways Heidegger saw us living our lives is by projecting our lives out into the future. We see ourselves as engaged in a project which will define our future. “There’s no future in this.” Or “We don’t have a future.” being ways of saying, “It/You will no longer be a part of my life (or even a part of who I am).” And because we are temporal beings, we are always living out our lives as projecting into the future by appropriating elements/experiences from our past. If you don’t think that’s true then listen to the absolutely horrifying yet fascinating story of Clive Wearing, the person with the worst case of amnesia ever documented, such that every single moment of his life consisted of him remembering absolutely nothing that had ever happened to him and feeling like he was waking up for the first time ever. Interestingly, there were two areas which allowed those moments to stretch more than a few seconds. If you’re interested, I’ll leave it for you to find out what those were. http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/06/08 (Part 3)

Anyway, to return to the Heidegger, here’s what I hope is not too boring of a biographical interlude. I studied philosophy in college. I enjoyed it very much but I could never have seen myself become a philosophy professor because I associated philosophy with the kind of wooly thinking exemplified by Heidegger. So I forgot about philosophy and just kind of put it away as something that had conditioned who I was but was not relevant to my life.

A new chapter in my life started: I moved to Japan. So, let’s take the example of learning a language. I happen to speak Japanese. When I lived in Japan, I saw my ability to speak (and read, etc.) Japanese as integral to who I was. I imagined future careers as a translator. I was going out with a Japanese girl. It was very much a part of who I was because I saw it playing a key role in my future. So all of my kanji flash cards and textbooks on Japanese were very important in my life. It is easy to see how I would want to capture all of that material as it went by on my computer.

Fastfoward 7 years later, I basically have no real desire to keep up my Japanese, because I don’t see it playing much of a role in my future, but now, for reasons I won’t go into, I have rediscovered the joys of philosophy. All of a sudden all that old stuff I was studying as an undergraduate is immediately terribly relevant. I am going through my old notebooks. I am trying to get into my head as a student at the time. This is all the more prominent given that I am an adjunct professor, so I am teaching students the very same material I learned. I am remembering back what I did and did not like about philosophy.

What I have meant to indicate by this little exercise is 1) the nostalgia factor which I think is inherently interesting for a packrat like myself; I recently read that one million people have some form of unhealthy hoarding behavior, so I don’t think my wanting to save everything is terribly outlandish compared to some of these people. For me it just takes up space on a $100 TB hard drive, which will probably be $20 next time I buy one.

2) perhaps, more importantly, we may not *know* what it is that we will really wish that we have saved in the future. If you go so far as to see our very selves in the process of reappropriating features of our earlier experiences in ways that project our lives into the future, one can feel a little bit like one has lost a part of one’s self when all of what one did all day is lost (or maybe when only the “current stuff I need for work” is saved). This feeling seems particulately acute for someone like me who, lamentable as it may be in some respects, spends, let’s say 8+ hours a day on the computer.

[The careful reader may notice that, despite my saying how I have put behind me this whole Heideggerian way of thinking, it has obviously had more of an effect on me than I may realize, for I am reappropriating it here, even though I disavowed its importance just a few lines earlier! Surfulater-related, I would love now to be able to look at a complete history of everything that I did on a computer for an hour as a senior in college in 1996. I think such an experience would be a fascinating window into my thinking at the time, and this would be something interesting (to me, anyway–maybe not many others) even without any kind of advanced search capability. This gets part of what I mean when I am trying to get across how, although I would very much like surfulater to organize my experience of using a computer and retrieving files for my research, I would also like to have it as a window into my experience (which, given current technology, there is no hope of recapturing–here I’m thinking of something along the lines of the movie Brainstorm where there is a cap that you can put on your head and experience whatever someone was experiencing at the time a recording using the cap was made).

I guess that’s all. I imagine this voices everything I have to say on these matters. Thank you for stimulating me to reflect on these issues. I think I may even bring up one or two of these points in my “Introduction to Philosophy” class when I discuss Existentialism. One is always trying to make these old-timey philosophies *relevant* to teenagers technology-obsessed lives.

Digital Packrat with an Eye to the Future

Clearly retaining and refinding information is of interest to us all. The amount though is very much an individual thing. Mr. T’s musing’s are definitely food for thought as Surfulater continues to evolve.

I see several issues. First up out of all the pages one visits how many are of any real value – not many. Every time you do a Google search, do you really want the Search Results pages saved, and out of all the pages you visit from these Search Results, how many are of interest; when you are watching a Video on YouTube do you want that page saved, and on on it goes. Then there are issues of security! Do you want pages saved when you are doing your On-line Banking, or purchasing some goods with your credit card number shown – I don’t think so.

Yes disk space is cheap, no doubt about it. But if all these pages are so important, then backups must be just as important. We all know disk drives die, usually the day before you go and put a backup system in place! So you need a 1TB External Backup drive; no big deal and reasonably cheap as well. But this alone isn’t enough, well not for me, and would have to be complemented with a secure, reliable off-site backup. Ok now we are set with backups. But how long will it take to back up all these web pages, and how often will you perform the backups? And what about disk clutter, are these pages splattered all over the place as lots of individual files, or stored in a database. And what overhead is there in actually capturing them all in the first place.

This leads on to findability. There is little point storing large amounts information if you can’t quickly and easily find the specific gems of interest again and again. The more information you store the more difficult it becomes finding those needles in the haystack. If say 60% of the saved information was never of interest in the first place, then you’ve just made findability all that much harder. Computer people have a saying “garbage in – garbage out” and that is what we have here.

Organizational capabilities, such as Tagging, placement into Folders and adding Cross-Reference links along with the ability to add Notes and edit Captured content all aid greatly in findability, but I find it difficult to believe anyone would undertake such tasks for each and every web page that popped up in their Web Browser. And everyone that uses Surfulater knows just how important organizing content is, in aiding findability.

Now I doubt any of this will make any difference to the aforementioned customer and others like him and that’s fine as we can and should be able to use our computers in whatever way we feel works best for us. This simply seems like a bad idea to me, or for me. I want to be in control, saving the information I consider to be of real value and not cluttering my world with lots of useless crap I need to weed through.

Let me finish on something which is a good thing and that is the next release of Surfulater should be out this week.