.::output >> /dev/null::.

I am into the second section of David Allen's Getting Things Done book. He was mentioning about organizing and how you can choose to use an electric organizer or a paper and pen organizer. Then I stumbled across this article on 43folders: How does a nerd hack GTD?. Merlin was using BBEdit to show all his @action lists in one window. And using Quicksilver he can quickly append a new entry to the text file using the Append to.. command.

However, as much as I like using Quicksilver to quickly add a new entry to my action lists, it does not allow for easy synchronization with my Palm and iPod. StickyBrain filled that niche. By adding a new note that belongs to both the Palm and iPod folder in StickBrain, I am able to keep both lists synchronized. And I can always take them with me wherever I go. This is good because I can never modify notes on iPod so I do not need to worry about versioning and merging. And since if I do modify anything on the Palm it would reflect that it is my latest version and StickyBrain should just replace the whole file and vice versa. There is no concept of merging; this can be a bad thing because if I made some changes on the Palm and forget to synchronize, and then make some changes in StickyBrain, the next time I sync, only the changes in StickBrain will be reflected.

However, using StickyBrain does not solve all the issues that I have:

1. The size limit for the note on the palm is 32K. This should not be a problem but there is no guarantee on what happens when it exceeds the 32K limit. The same thing should apply to the iPod because the iPod cannot store notes larger than 4K. However, StickyBrain is smart enough to link the chunks together (good!)
2. There is no way to sync with .Mac. And I just realized the other day that to install the iDisk component for Windows, it require administrative rights. Therefore, the only folder that you can access on .Mac is the public folder. Even then, it is pretty hard to make changes. I do not think that I can use the default WebFolders program on Windows to run .Mac. So if I forget my iPod or Palm, I have no access to my lists!
3. Furthermore, StickyBrain does not store its notes in .txt format. It stores it using some XML format. So I cannot just access those notes by using SSH from a campus machine into my own machine. The only solution I can think of now would be using VNC. Hopefully, a VNC client can be installed on a Windows machine without administrative rights.

Since my current setup already settles the issue of synchronizing with my computer, iPod and Palm, I am going to continue using StickyBrain. However, I want to be able to export my files using a single click to .Mac. I was thinking of using Applescript to take those files out of StickyBrain but, alas, StickyBrain does not offer AppleScript support. Dead end (for now).

Updated: Webmin saves the day, somewhat. Now I am not dependent on any platform specific tools to have access to my computer. Using the hints over at macosxhints.com I am able to configure Webmin over SSL and use it to access files from my computer. The only thing that is needed is a browser that supports java.

And since I am so keen on being able to access things from my computer, why not run VNC on it too? Indeed, that is what I am doing. This is good because I can use the nice Aqua interface from a windows machine; almost like remote desktop. Three resources for this:

• Server for OSX: OSXVnc
• Client for OSX: Chicken of the VNC
• Client for Windows: VNCviewer