RE: OFF TOPIC: How do you organize all your technical info !!!

Hi All,

Now there is an apocryphal story, if ever I've heard one! The apocryphal gospels were in fact rejected as heretical from the outset. There were a small group of disputed writings, and it took several centuries before there was consensus as to which of those should be regarded as authoritative, but the apocryphal gospels were never even considered. The decisive criterion for the disputed writings was whether the documents were either written or endorsed by one of the apostles. Hebrews was accepted because of its early association with Paul, despite its unknown authorship. Revelation was accepted because it was written by John, despite that some disliked it. A handful of works were not accepted despite having orthodox teaching and bearing the name of an apostle because they were thought to have been written pseudo-epigraphically in the second or third centuries. It seems that the early church got it right. There are thousands of manuscript fragments extant today that date all the New Testament books to the apostolic era, and none for the extra-canonical writings. There have been subsequent challenges to the inclusion of James and Revelation in the New Testament, most notably by some of the leaders of the Reformation, however it was because they regarded them as having little or no theological value, rather than that they doubted their authenticity.

I have a file system based "knowledge base" and some Perl code to build an index. To find information, you just grep the index. Here is the code if anyone is interested.

	#!/usr/bin/perl
	use File::Find;
	open INDEX, "> /home/steve/index.txt";
	$base_path = "/home/steve/kb";
	find(\&get_words, "$base_path");
	sub get_words
	{
	    return unless -T;                    # only scan text files


	    $path = $File::Find::name;           # get path from doc root

	    $path =~ s|$base_path/||;

	    print INDEX "$path";                 # start line with pathname
	    open FILE, $_;                       # read the entire text


	    $text = lc(join("", <FILE>));        # and convert to lower case

	    close FILE;


	    $text =~ s/<([^>])*>//gs;            # strip out all html tags

	                                         # consider words in reverse order
	    foreach $word (reverse(sort(split(/\s+/, $text)))) {
	        next if $prev =~ /\Q$word\E/;    # skip words matching the previous
	        print INDEX " $word";
	        $prev = $word;
	    }
	    print INDEX "\n";
	}

@   Regards,
@   Steve Adams
@   http://www.ixora.com.au/
@   http://www.christianity.net.au/		<- some good material here

-----Original Message-----
From: Stephane Faroult [mailto:sfaroult_at_oriole.com] Sent: Sunday, 7 January 2001 0:10
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Re: OFF TOPIC: How do you organize all your technical info !!!

Kam,

   Was discussing this topic with a seasoned SE the other day. He had bought some (text) information management package, and told me he had found it totally useless and, in his opinion, there was nothing such as the AltaVista software on his PC - the Web type of search. As far as I am concerned, when I get to something really interesting, e-mail, doc or whatever, I print it. This allows me to scribble totally unrelated notes on the back or, when the back is full, between paragraphs. I stack everything on my desk, and usefulness shows when docs tend to stay towards the top of stacks. Natural selection occurs when papers fall off the desk, pushed by others, which usually mean they can be trashed. Nothing truly innovative here, I have read somewhere than in the early days of the Christian church to decide which were the truly holy scriptures competitive books where put on a table and what fell off is known today as 'apocryphical gospels'. A rather innocent form of 'judgement of God'. In a way, much more honest than many a benchmark.
Regards,
Stephane Faroult
Oriole Corporation

Kam Chan wrote:
 Dear List, I am sure all of you have collected a lot of technical info over the years, they may came from different sources and formats. How do you organize these info for later retrieval?? How do you categorize or classify different topics?? I had a hard time try to organize my technical resources, at the moment I just organize them into different folders in my computer, I find it hard to define a classification scheme to cover everything, can someone share their Received on Sun Jan 07 2001 - 01:49:52 CST