The tedium of erasing journal entries

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Albert,

On 3 Aug 2008, at 23:03, Albert Cahalan wrote:

> I gave up. My journal has 1150 entries, 99% spam.

I'm at about 900 or so after 4 months.

> I don't even want to look in the journal. Not ever! It's unusable.
> It's worse than the worst email inbox nightmare. Nothing has a useful
> name, the scroll bar doesn't move with my mouse, clicking to mark an
> entry takes many seconds to work (leading me to click again), and
> the purely iconic interface is totally incomprehensible. I'd even
> prefer the dreadful interface of Macintosh System 1.
>
> An improvement would be to delete the datastore at boot. No joke.
> The user's files are effectively missing already, because they are
> lost among the spam. Stuff saved to the journal is unrecoverable
> in any practical way.
>
> In other words: users CAN NOT SAVE THEIR WORK on the XO. Sure, it
> may technically get saved, but there is no hope for finding it back.

This is rather unfair. I take it you've just filled up all available  
space and jffs2 is now thrashing (as would happen on almost any file  
system)? If you're really sure you want to wipe all your work from  
journal (at yoyr own risk)...

	rm -r /home/olpc/.sugar/default/datastore

And some possible journal & activity related file rot:

	rm -r /home/olpc/.sugar/default/data

I find my way around my 900+ entries just fine. I do agree that a high  
percentage of my entries seem to be cruft, but there is a proposed UI  
feature that I believe will greatly reduce accidently creating new  
journal entries when what was really intended was a resumption of an  
earlier entry. The much needed extension of the new Home view to  
default to, and display, recent entries for said activity.

	http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Activity_management-07.jpeg

This combined with a larger Activity name input box (ridiculous small  
for no good reason I can fathom), and perhaps even a dialogue to  
prompt for a name if one is not set when stopping (though this may  
well be annoying unless well planned - a good default name, auto  
confirm timer, input focus for typing, return key for immediate  
acceptance etc).

> Clearly, nobody is dogfooding.


I would like to see more dogfooding, perhaps once 8.2.0 is out the  
door; as mentioned before, some occasional sugarised only dev meet-ups  
would be a nice start (Chat, shared Write for group notes, Xo IRC as a  
fall back when it all blows up, and any thing else that's useful).

--Gary