Swarm Guide Alarm Sounds because Alex is gone but may return as volunteer

[Paul Johnson]

I was flying back to Kansas from Indiana and while changing planes in
St.Louis I ran into Alex Lancaster. Literally, I stepped on his toes.  I
had not been getting email for a week and had missed the Pheremone's
announcement that Vladimir had already gone to Illinois and that Alex's
official duties with Swarm had come to an end.  I was sorry about that,
for sure, because both of them had interesting perspectives on things.

Alex was going to London, but he expected to return for a short while,
before taking a longer hiatus, I thing in that place down-under where he
came from.  When he returns briefly from London, he may be willing to
volunteer some effort to help format the Swarm User Guide.  Or, well, I
intend to try to persuade him, and I expecte he will be easy to
persuade.

In case you have not been taking notes, Alex and I have been writing
this on and off for about a year, integrating slides and outlines that
Benedikt S prepared.  For the most part, I've been churning out words
and sample code and Alex has handled the (from my perspective)
difficult,tedious, and mind-boggling task of seeing that this all gets
strained through the DocBook dtd so that it comes out in reasonable
looking html and postscript.  I've been dropping drafts on my site,
here:


http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn/Swarm/Beta/SwarmUserGuide/userbook.html
There is userbook.ps too for people who like that kind of thing.

This work is done on a volunteer basis.  Please don't suspect I have any
financial interest in it. My interest was in preparing something
relatively nice to read so I could teach a Swarm class.

<excuses>It has been much more difficult than I expected, partly because
some of the nooks and crannies of Swarm have never been very clearly
promulgated in the user community and partly because my experience with
book writing in the past was totally different than document preparation
with markup.   When the author does the markup, the author is doing the
job of the developmental and copy editors and proof reader. And also
because there are some parts of Swarm that I have never used. Anyway,
these are meant as excuses for tardiness. </excuses>

Today I'm finishing up a section on memory management and Zones and some
updates on random number generators. I'll compile that and put it at the
address above.  Tomorrow, I'll work on the problem of "nil" items in
lists.  To me, that's a significant one.
 
After that, I'm just about out of fresh sections that absolutely need
writing.

Here is what I wish the user community would do:

1. Tell me if you think some things need treatment in new sections.  If
you think sections need to be added, perhaps you will tell me what they
ought to be or write them.  Even a paragraph here or there will help.  I
think at one time I had a longer list of chapters, but it has long since
gone out the window.

2. Tell me what mistakes you see, spelling, mismatch of examples and
prose around them.

Lets hurry so we can be ready for Alex when he returns from London.
When I write these chapters, I only put in a minimal amount of markup,
to separate sections and so forth. I've not been doing lots of markup to
indicate items for the index or other fancy bells and whistles. Alex has
been doing all of that.  So if we make a community push to get as many
of the words/chapters put together by the time he returns from London,
perhaps we can prevail on him to help finish the markup.  There is no
doubt in my mind I could learn all the markup code of DocBook, if I had
a spare week or two and a tutor, but I'd rather not, so if we make a
push on the Guide, we can get Alex to mark it up.

-- 
Paul E. Johnson                       email: address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66045                FAX: (785) 864-5700

                  ==================================
   Swarm-Support is for discussion of the technical details of the day
   to day usage of Swarm.  For list administration needs (esp.
   [un]subscribing), please send a message to <address@hidden>
   with "help" in the body of the message.