Advogato: Personal info for kevindumpscore

kevindumpscore is currently certified at Master level.

Name: Kevin Conder
Member since: 2001-11-05 21:53:42
Last Login: N/A

Notes:

A majority of the documentation for Open Source projects sucks! It's either incomplete, out-of-date, or only available on- line.

I am a native English speaker and familiar with Docbook in both its SGML and XML strains. DocBook is the closest thing to a "professional" documentation standard for Open Source projects. It's used by many major, high-profile projects like the Linux Documentation Project, the FreeBSD Documentation Project, Gnome, KDE, etc.

Unfortunately, the sad fact is that unless you actually contribute code then you are persona non grata in most Open Source projects. You will be disrespected and your suggestions ignored. If you write documentation, people will automatically assume that you can't program.

By the way, please don't ask if I can help with documentation on your project. I'm quite busy already maintaining the Alternative Csound Reference Manual. Feel free to send me comments about my articles or ask me DocBook questions though.

Projects

Helper on DocBook Initiative

Articles Posted by kevindumpscore

How non-programmers use documentation. 8 Nov 2001 at 16:22 UTC

Recent blog entries by kevindumpscore

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22 Sep 2002 »

I updated the Alternative Csound Reference Manual to edition 4.21-1. This manual covers the latest version of the Csound program, 4.21. If you don't know, Csound is a sound synthesis program: http://www.csounds.com/.

I added documentation for the following opcodes: a, butbp, butbr, buthp, butlp, cngoto, convle, else, elseif, endif, ftload, ftloadk, ftsave, ftsavek, ink, invalue, ktableseg, oscilx, outk, outvalue, reverb2, subinstr, and sense.

DocBook/SGML, HTML, PDF, or ASCII text versions are available for download from here:
http://kevindumpscore.com/download.html#csound-manual

You can always look at the on-line edition here:
http://kevindumpscore.com/docs/csound-manual/

10 Jun 2002 (updated 10 Jun 2002 at 06:23 UTC) »

I updated The Alternative Csound Reference Manual to edition 4.20-1. You can either download it or read it on-line. Here is a summary of the changes...

4.20-1 "Dee Dee Ramone Memorial" Edition:

Updated the examples for these opcodes: adsyn, flashtxt, grain3, grain, hrtfer, spat3d_UHJ, wgbowedbar, and wterrain.
Added the documentation for these opcodes: clfilt, midichannelaftertouch, midichn, midicontrolchange, mididefault, midinoteoff, midinoteoncps, midinoteonkey, midinoteonoct, midinoteonpch, midipitchbend, midipolyaftertouch, midiprogramchange, pgmassign, scanhammer, scantable, and xscanmap.
Updated the documentation for these opcodes: GEN30, valpass, and vcomb.

5 May 2002 »

Updated the Alternative Csound Reference Manual to edition 4.19-5. You can download it or read it online. Here's the play-by-play from the news.txt file...

4.19-5 "Stockhausen meets Aphex Twin" Edition:

Added examples for these opcodes: alpass, bexprnd, buzz, comb, event, expon, exprand, expsega, expsegr, flanger, gauss, gbuzz, line, linrand, linseg, linsegr, lowres, lowresx, mandol, mpulse, noise, pcauchy, pluck, poisson, rand, randi, streson, unirand, vlowres, and weibull.
Updated the examples for these opcodes: betarand, butterbp, butterbr, butterhp, butterlp, cauchy, expseg, fold, gogobel, marimba, randh, repluck, resony, reverb, rnd31, tempest, trirand, vibes, waveset, wgbow, wgbrass, wgclar, wgflute, wgpluck, and wgpluck2.
Pieced together the missing documentation for the event opcode. Thanks goes to Matt Ingalls for helping me fix my example.
HTML edition: Gave every command synopsis a normal format instead of a verbatim one. Got rid of the shading on programlistings.
Added the "marmstk1.wav" audio file to the examples sub-directory.

28 Nov 2001 »

TeX is supposedly bug-free. IT IS NOT!

TeX is written with hard-coded memory limits. Last night, I changed some of the 16-bit limits in its source code. But when I typed a "make distclean", it erased my entire /usr/bin/ sub-directory! Now I no longer have a gcc proogram.

TeX Sucks!!!!!!!!

21 Nov 2001 (updated 21 Nov 2001 at 04:23 UTC) »

TeX sucks! No matter what I enter into my texmf.cnf, I keep getting: "TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [number of strings=51768]." I'll dance for joy the day I can switch from jadetex to a capable Open Source XSL-FO processor!

I saw that the FreeBSD Documentation Project published a 400 page users manual. How did they do it? Where is their texmf.cnf? Which DSSSL stylesheets did they use? Where's the source?

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