Older blog entries for jennv (starting at number 5)

Does anyone else think it's wierd that the assembly instructions for a bookcase were written in icons?

I mean, look at the word. Bookcase. A case for books. If you want somewhere to store books, surely you read? Ok, maybe not English - but something.

Whoever designed them didn't have paperbacks in mind, though. The available shelf heights (and number of shelves) are all wrong for paperbacks. Whatever bookcase you buy. It's rather depressing.

And Target doesn't have the nice black ones anymore. I've got these dark reddish bookcases, one for the computer room and one for the paperback overflow. Our loungeroom looks like a flood zone, with paperbacks instead of sandbags.

Bryce,

I'm a tech writer and I think I'm a good one - but what's capex? I don't speak American either!

Pride, as they say, goeth before a fall.

I decided to put the LinuxChix FAQs up on sourceforge, making use of their repository for my offsite backup. But I wanted to have the markup nice and clean and tidy before putting a project with my name on it up where everyone could see it.

I didn't have a .sgml ending on the file 'issues'. I typed 'sgmltools issues'. sgmltools went ahead and created a directory 'issues' ....

Well. One way and another, I've lost it. And stupidly, I don't have a backup. At all. Even grovelling through the swap partition couldn't find a copy. Stupid, stupid me.

So I get to do it over, from the Cerebral Backup Unit. Oh well.

Skud has been encouraging me to 'write something about documentation' for the AUUG conference (Australian Unix Users Group).

Me? What can I say about documentation that hasn't been said a zillion times?

Tonight friends dropped in. So I fed them, while Dancer was off swearing at machines. (See his diary). I mentioned the AUUG - and Cat said she was on the program committee and would I /please/ write something.

Argh.

Looks like I'm going to blather on in public about documentation.

Considering what I'm given at work, maybe I should discuss structure. And how a document is really like a program.....

Jenn V.

Spent most of yesterday and half today trying to get Docbook & sgmltools to believe in the new admonitions 'advanced' and 'readme'. Netizen currently has a kludge for it, but I wanted to create an elegant solution.

Got the DTD working just fine, very quickly. nsgmls and sgmltools understood the new admonitions and created the text just fine...

... just not in the same style as the old admonitions. Argh. Hm.

So I tried to elegantly hack the stylesheets - creating a new stylesheet file. Then I tried getting it to work at all, and hacked the files in stylesheets/docbook/nwalsh.

The errors kept changing. So I was making some progress.

But I'm stalled out. And I really should either be doing billable Netizen work, or relaxing.

I'll work on it later. :) Need to make time to sit down and /grok/ stylesheets, sgmltools and maybe jade.

Maybe I should become an SGML guru and add to the documentation on SGML - on the inner workings, rather than the how-to-write-documents.

Jenn V.

Yup. Skud sometimes sleeps on the office floor. So do Morgan and occasionally Thorfinn. Usually not all the same night. Something about being both healthy and dedicated, I think.

My main diary is at http://www.simegen.com/~jenn/diary/. I probably won't maintain two. Yup - you've seen that statement before!