Going Paperless: Day 1

As an experiment I've decided to try to reduce the amount of paper that I consume. As with all experiments, it may or may not work. But what does "work" mean here? I may, for example, be able to read the New York Times on-line. Will that experience allow me to read more, or to understand more of what I read?

It's not like I use a lot of paper, and my family is conscientious about recycling. I'm not, therefore, expecting to save a lot of paper.

Today I read a few articles using NYT on-line. I feel like I read less than I do from the paper, but I liked the fact that (with my ageing eyes) I didn't need an extra light source to read the articles. It also seems like the font size in the browser is slightly larger than the font size in the paper edition.

My issue today is that I like the NYT editors making choices for me. I find the web page has a lot on it, and I have to "think more" about what I really care about. With the paper edition, I sort it as follows:

• main section
• arts
• business
• sports (which I never read anyway)
  

Now I have to look at each individual article title to figure out if I want to read it or not. I feel that slows me down, and I read less of each actual article.

We'll see what happens tomorrow.

Beward of tilde characters in file and directory names

I work on an application that occasionally goes across the network to look for files. I had written some code that used the GetFiles and GetDirectories calls from My.Computer.FileSystem. One of our test-beds was a remote computer (going across the public internet, rather than within a company intranet). The calls to GetFiles and GetDirectories using the SearchAllSubDirectories option were agonizingly slow on some networks, but not all.

I tried many different workarounds (including writing my own recursive GetDirectories on the theory that something was wrong in the Microsoft implementation). None of them worked until I took a deep breath and made a long list of things to try (many of them actually just data-gathering under different configurations).

Luckily, the first item on my list fixed the problem. I had been using a tilde character ('~') to help directories and files sort in a certain order. I remembered that the "shortened file name" workaround in Windows used a tilde to generate "intermediate" filenames for older applications that used fixed size buffers for 8.3 filenames.

I changed the tilde to an equal sign and the problem went away.