[Glastonbury] "tomorrow's" meeting - Review of Martin's presentation

[Ian Dickinson]

On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 22:01:56 +0000, Kelvin <kelvin24 at gcircle.co.uk> wrote:
> Well, I enjoyed the chance to talk informally with people and when Martin had
> sorted out the projection it felt a bit sad to have to sit still and shut up,
Indeed, it was nice to have a chat at the start. I'd like to echo
Tim's suggestion from a while back to have, once in a while, a bit of
go-round-the-circle introductions. It would be good to be able to put
faces to email addresses :-)

> and I got a little bothered when we seemed to spend a lot of time on various
> methods of inputting text on the command line, and different editors, and
> various people including Martin do have their own very strong preferences for
> different editors (me, I use Pico for little fiddly things and command line
> work, Kate under KDE for big programming jobs, and OpenOffice.org for writing
> human readable stuff).
Yes, by way of (what's intended to be) constructive feedback, I didn't
find the editors part of the talk that helpful since I've personally
also settled my choice of editors long since. But then I have a degree
more experience than some other folks in the group, and I'm sure other
people may have found it more useful. It's always difficult in a group
with mixed skills to get the balance right. We've recently had some
reminders of that general difficulty on this list! I do applaud Martin
for taking the time to start at the beginning; perhaps the feedback is
that, in future talks, it might be worth a quick poll of the audience
to get a sense of what the right balance is between introductory and
more adventurous topics.

> But things really picked up when we got onto the business of translating from
> various formats into other formats while handling and processing big
> documents, and I got to understand that DocBook is a format, and not a
> program (which I had thought it was - computers, I sometimes think I know
> nothing about them...), and the way the formats are related to each other
> (most derived from SGML) and the history of SGML (much older than I thought)
> and clearly Martin has done a lot of work on this stuff. Thank You Martin, it
> was excellent, and I understand the process a whole lot better now, and am
> glad to be familiar with Linux's ways of dealing with it, even if there is a
> rather bewildering choice of them....
Indeed. Appetite well & truly whetted.  Martin, you did offer to
bundle up some of the web URLs and documents you mentioned and forward
them to the list. If you have time, that would be most helpful.

Regards,
Ian