My first sketch using 37signals' Draft app
I was illustrating a point about C in one of my classes. Very effective.
Repaying my music debt
I'm going to admit right now: I've pirated music. I used Napster when it was around, then Kazaa, WinMX, Limewire, torrents: the works. When you're a young kid with no money, it's easy to get sucked into that.
But those days are over for me. I'm working and making money, and I just can't feel right stealing music anymore. So the other day, I had what I would consider a pretty good idea to repay my music debt.
Every week, I pick a pirated album in my iTunes library and either buy a legitimate copy of it (be it through iTunes, Amazon MP3, whatever) or delete it from my library forever. Eventually, I should end up with a completely legal music collection.
I'm looking forward to seeing how this goes, and I'll tweet as I'm going through the process.
How I made Dropbox work for me
I think many people know about Dropbox (http://getdropbox.com), the online storage and sync service. If you don't, essentially it creates a "Dropbox" folder on your computer which gets automatically synced to the Dropbox servers when the files change, as well as syncing to any other computers you have setup with them. Which means that you can edit a file in your Dropbox, then with no further action go to another one of your computers and continue editing where you left off. Awesome, I know.
The problem with Dropbox to me is that it only syncs the one folder. That's not cool with me, because I have a lot of things I want to keep synced. I don't want to be forced to keep that stuff in the Dropbox folder, I want to put it wherever the hell I want. So with that, I went looking for Dropbox alternatives. My main requirement aside from supporting multiple folders: Mac support. Ideally should have Linux support now that I think about it, but I didn't really think about that when reviewing options. Other requirements were that it be free and actually provide me with some hosted storage.
The first alternative I tried was Microsoft's Live Mesh. There is a Mac Technology Preview for their client, which I tried. And it failed miserably. I'm pretty sure that's just because of a lack of Snow Leopard support, but the menu options for adding a sync folder were almost always dimmed out and disabled, so I was unable to really even give Live Mesh a try.
The next and final one I tried was SpiderOak. SpiderOak might be ok, but it's a horrible Mac application and it's very confusing. Maybe I'm just too picky, but I gave it a shot and couldn't use it anymore. Maybe it works for others, but not me.
I looked at many others, but these are the only ones I tried. I feel like I should mention SugarSync, because even though it's only for Windows, it looks to be absolutely wonderful for it. It looks like Windows just naturally supports this sort of syncing. Delightful. But I digress.
At this point I realized that I really like Dropbox in general. It's awesome, it's just this one little niggle that was getting to me and really stopping me from using it to it's full potential. So I just decided to work around it, and I found a way to keep my files where I want (or at least look that way) and still have them sync with Dropbox. I reached into my Unix toolbox and pulled out symbolic links.
In essence, any folder I want synced will have the actual contents stored inside the Dropbox. I don't know how well Dropbox handles symbolic links but I didn't really want to find out, so as far as Dropbox is concerned, it's got all the content. Then I symlink the directory in the Dropbox to wherever I actually want to use it in the file system. Nice, easy, and it works.
But I already had a bunch of folders I wanted to sync, so I once again reached into my Unix toolbox and pulled out a nice little bash script. The script, called "dropit," takes the path to a folder on the file system, and then copies the contents to a folder of the same name inside the current user's Dropbox, renames the original folder to it's name suffixed by "-old," then creates the link from the Dropbox folder to the original location. So basically, I run one command and a folder is now synced with Dropbox. Excellent. I can then delete the -old folder as soon as I make sure it worked right, just in case.
So that's how I'm using Dropbox right now. It's working great for me. I've attached the dropit script here in case it's helpful to somebody.
