I haven't been hanging around here very much since I switched to mainly using Linux, but I thought you guys might have an idea of where I should start researching this.  Bear in mind I have pretty much no coding skills but I kind of want to learn anyway, so a little project might be a good place to start.

Anyway I have been collecting various tidbits of information, articles, etc. on a personal tiddlywiki (mostly using the TiddlySnip extension for Firefox) for a few years now, and I have lots of little bits and pieces stored in this way.  I like this particular setup because it is cross-platform and I can keep my wiki online at tiddlyspot for free, so if I want to access it from elsewhere I can.  But I often forget to search the wiki for information. 

I would like to have a program/Firefox extension that would somehow search my wiki first, and then go on to search Google (or whatever search engine) for a given term.  I imagine the results would be presented in a Firefox tab, with a section that marks out which results are from the wiki and then which ones are from the web.  Maybe with tabs, like Dogpile?  That aspect of the design is pretty unimportant at this point.

Can anyone offer some suggestions as to how I might do something like this?  Or, indeed, if something already exists to do it?

I'm sure this is a really stupid question, but I thought I'd give it a try anyhow.

I finally took the plunge and reformatted my laptop hard drive and set up partitions to dual boot, with a single fat32 "data" partition.  I haven't installed the Linux part yet (trying to decide between Fedora Core and Ubuntu) but I am setting up the Windows system to be more organized than it was before. 

After trying out FileHamster (mentioned in this thread https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=10212.0) and having a look at Tortoise SVN, I am starting to think that a more "proper" version control system would be a good idea.  Syncing and so on proved to be a pain in the butt, and because I tend to generate scads of changes in my PhD documents (in Word, LaTeX, Access, OOo, GRASS GIS, GIMP, etc, etc, etc...) I can easily get lost in the changes.  This has led me to screw up at least one important document in my file cleanup frenzy before I reformatted the hard drive.

So, the dumb question is this:  can I set up a Subversion system on my laptop to track changes that can be accessed by either Linux or XP?  It's not entirely clear to me whether both systems can understand changes made in a single set of documents.  Does anyone have a good solution for keeping one set of data files and using either operating system to modify them?

I don't know if this is something I should be able to figure out using a native capacity of Windows XP, or what.  I've been contemplating a clean install of Windows for a while, and as part of that I want to clean up the clutter on my hard drive.  There are zillions of little programs and such that I have downloaded, most of which I never use, some of which I use all the time, and some of which are probably running and doing useful things right now but which I have been using for so long that I have forgotten I installed them.

What's the best way to see how often a program actually runs?  I was thinking that it would be nice to have something spreadsheet-like, that will tell you how many times a program was started and how long it was active in a defined period of time (in the last year, last 6 months, since Windows was installed, etc.).  Presumably there is a way to get at this information somewhere in Windows, but I don't know how to get to it.

Any advice?