JPz’log

I have started the transition of the documentation to reStructured text. You will find in src/doc-reST from the SVN trunk the first chapters that have been extracted.

The migration phases will be the following ones.

1. Extract the text from the old documentation and put into reStructured document files, one per chapter. There should be no modification, the goal here is not to have a perfect extraction but have a decent base to get started.
2. Create 2 ‘main’ reStructured text documents: one which is tailored for HTML ouput and one which is tailored for LaTeX/PDF output. The reason here is that HTML is better read when split through several files rather than when put into a single document. By contrast, generating the LaTeX/PDF version needs the output to be done in a single file.
3. Provide the automated scripted build support. Provide an anchor in the Ant build to call the documentation building chain.
4. Enhance the markup, fix typos, rewrite unclear paragraphs, and so on.

I won’t have time to work on this for a few days, so volunteers are welcome for performing the extraction of the other chapters. I will handle the rest of the 2, 3 and 4 phases of course

If you need help on reStructured Text, then please go to:

• http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html
• http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/directives.html

If you are outside of the project and would like to volunteer, then please contact me either by email, on the izpack-devel mailing-list, or by a comment here. Thanks!

I bet that like me, you come across several interesting stuff across the web everyday that you would like to blog about, but you just don’t have enough time, not to mention the fact that your posts would be most of the time as short as the URL of the link you want to share.

Wouldn’t it be simpler to have a tool where you would “save” links as you come across them during the day, and then let it automatically blog for you at night?

Here comes del.icio.us to the rescue. You may already use it for bookmarking. If not, I highly recommend that you try it for yourself. A relatively unknown feature is that of daily links blogging, which you can configure in your del.icio.us settings. Once you have set it up, it will automatically post to your blog (through an XML-RPC interface) the links that you have added the same day. You will see this in this category of my blog.

The setup is very simple, but I suggest that you follow those tips.

1. Create a blog author especially for del.icio.us, so that you don’t give away your own username and password…
2. Create a category for your daily links.
3. When you tag a link on del.icio.us, remember to add a description as it will appear next to the link in the generated blog posts. This will be much nicer for your readers (I did not do that for my first daily links entry).

• Coding Horror: Bill Gates and DONKEY.BAS
  (tags: fun blogs)
• JavaFX: First Steps - “Hello OnJava” App - O’Reilly ONJava Blog
  (tags: javafx tutorial java opensource)
• How to use the self with object-oriented javascript and closures | Javascript Kata
  (tags: blog javascript howto tutorial programming)
• muCommander: a cross-platform file manager
  (tags: java tools Utilities Windows mac linux ftp ssl)
• autosport.com - F1 News: Renault: Hamilton will give Alonso doubts
  (tags: F1 motorsport news)
• autosport.com - GP2 News: Dennis unimpressed by GP2 field
  (tags: F1 motorsport news)
• The Unarchiver
  A must have for Mac OS X, especially if you need to open a .sit archive one day. It is also a very capable BOMArchiveHelper.app replacement.
  (tags: mac osx compression opensource apple software tools)