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

[Pietro Terna]

        What a work! Many thanks, Pietro

At 14.19 08/11/99 -0600, you wrote:
>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
>
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   to day usage of Swarm.  For list administration needs (esp.
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   with "help" in the body of the message.