All is relative…

A few people have contacted me if they were allowed to translate the online book I’m writing (Linux Sea). Of course they are, the license allows it. However, I recommend to wait a bit. At this moment, I’m not going to release the docbook sources (I’m not writing it in DocBook, but I’m generating from another XML into DocBook) until I’m happy with the final result.

I’m glad to see that the document is well received. There is still lots of work on it (more excercises, a thorough spelling / grammar check, elaborate on certain topics, …) so stay tuned for further updates. Why are those updates “slow”? Well, let’s say that I use a “fair share scheduling” principle on all my hobbies ;-)

If you’re not up to the various free image gallery sites, you might want to try out ZenPhoto. Quite powerful, easy to use and well themeable. Requires PHP / MySQL.

Having documented a lot in LaTeX (back in the old days at the university), GuideXML (Gentoo’s document markup language) and DocBook (Linux Sea) I’m now pointing my arrows at DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture.

DITA “forces” the technical writer in separating the content of his document in specialized subjects: reference, task or concept, or a specialized version of any of those which you can create/define yourself.

By separating content in those three subjects, you can more easily manage your technical documentation (write concepts as individual topics, tasks as end-user procedures and references for affiliated topics or command information).

Once all these documents are written, you bind them together using a DITA map (a metadocument which holds references to all related concepts/tasks/references) et voila: your documentation is ready.

Well, not really, you need to build it to something end users can read – you can use dita-ot for that. It supports building for Eclipse Infocenter, RTF, XHTML and PDF out of the box.

At work, I am often busy with quite a few projects. Yet, at times, I have no outstanding tasks because all of my tasks can only start when an event has occurred (like a server which is made available, or a budget that is approved) or another task has finished.

To keep track of my work, I write an extremely simple task manager: an XML file (for the data), XSL file (for the rendering) and HTML/CSS file (to render and use the browsers’ XSL capabilities). I call it taskviewer due to lack of more imagination ;-)

It is a simple manager with no user interface for managing it at all – so you’ll need to edit the XML file yourself. However, the HTML/CSS file, together with the XSL file, renders the content of the XML file in such a way that you have a nice overview of your tasks.

It’s “features” are simple:

• keep track of events you are waiting for
• keep track of a tasks’ dependencies (events or other tasks)
• get an overview of tasks that can immediately start versus that are blocked, waiting for its dependencies to finish

There is an example available online with some hypothetical data.

If you know of a simple program (preferably java or one available for both Windows and Linux) that has similar features (especially tracking tasks depending on certain events), please do tell me. I’ve looked at tools like taskjuggler but couldn’t find one that remains simple yet has these features.