Continued elsewhere

I've decided to abandon this blog in favor of a newer, more experimental hypertext form of writing. Come over and see the new place.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

That syncing feeling

[profundities and delicious ironies have been scarce lately, so I'm lowering my posting threshold for awhile and will be sending out random bits of not-very-interesting tech geekery. This is by nature of an experiment.]

For various reasons, my life is scattered across several different machines and physical locations right now, and I'm looking for ways to keep things together. I set up an svn repository for most of my work files and code, but there's too much damn state information in tools.

One thing that promised to help was Google Browser Sync, which copies various items from one Firefox instance into another. At first I didn't think much of it, because it didn't do the one thing I wanted most (copying over extensions and their state). However, it does sync browser history and cookies, which is actually pretty useful. And I just found today that if you work with the history sidebar open, you can actually see the syncing happen, as elements from one computer pop on the other. That's pretty nifty.

Now if all the random config files of other programs would migrate themselves automagically from one place to another. It seems like half of the work in programming today is configuration, and the other half is glue.

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