Author: grant

Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) In A Few Words

DITA is a philosophy for topic-oriented information management along with structured document data definitions for delivering it. It isn’t a general-purpose reusable technology like DocBook. Instead it focuses exclusively on creating a document model that best serves the diverse needs of your readers across different and equally valid scenarios.

A lumpier way to put it is that DocBook is to DITA as a chicken egg is to an omelet. You can’t unscramble an omelet, and when you figure out how, you shouldn’t! You can use DocBook to provide a DITA-like approach but you can’t use DITA to provide DocBook’s functionality.

How do DITA and DocBook compare? They don’t is how.

DocBook is an open-ended technology for designing anything. DITA is a focused technology for delivering a learning model.

An open standard created and maintained by self-sacrificing volunteers and BIG companies it is beloved, high-quality, and suffers the same ills and pangs of all human endeavors

DocBook In A Few Words

DocBook is a semantic markup language used to both define documents as structured data (and its elements ) along with explaining the meaning of those data (and its elements.)

The domain of the documen structured data is completely open and unlimited meant for 100% definition by the user.

It publishes to just about everything.

An open standard created and maintained by self-sacrificing volunteers and BIG companies it is beloved, high-quality, and suffers the same ills and pangs of all human endeavors

MkDocs: Project Documentation With Markdown

MkDocs is a fast, simple and downright gorgeous static site generator that’s geared towards building project documentation. Documentation source files are written in Markdown, and configured with a single YAML configuration file.

Looks like a nice static website generator.

Its intended for project documentation but looks fine for any topic based writing.

Choosing Between Code and Verbatim Markup In Org Mode

Its helped me to standardize my approach to marking up techie language. Keeping it simple the content is either programming stuff or everything else tech related. Sufficiently vauge you see: I write down examples to keep it straight in my head. Here you go:

Continue reading “Choosing Between Code and Verbatim Markup In Org Mode”

How To Format USB Drive For A Printer Or Camera In macOS

Today I had to store a scanner’s scan onto a USB thumb drive. Unfortunately there weren’t any thumb drives sitting around that worked. Long story short I had to format the partition to be “device friendly.” What device do you ask? Cameras, printers, and scanners come to mind. What partition type are you wondering?

You might have easily guessed MS-DOS formatted. You might have easily forgotten like me it needs to be a MBR partition though. Doh!

WARNING: Unless you hold yourself responsible for the outcome don’t proceed.

Run diskutil list to see where your thumb drive is mounted.

Customize the command to specify the correct path now.

The command deletes everything on the drive and creates a single partition taking up the entire drive.

DOUBLE WARNING: IF YOU DO THIS WRONG YOU’LL LOSE ALL YOUR DATA!

The error would be specifying the wrong disk drive and poof your data is gone.

You seem to know what you are doing though.

Here is the command―you have to customize it for your thumb drive: 

sudo diskutil partitionDisk <<<thumb drive name>>> MBR MS-DOS "PRINTORSCAN" "100%"

Configuring A Simple-Modeline

Customizing your Mode-Line is one step forward on every Emacser’s right of passage. Whether you use the informative yet quiet built-in Mode-Line or the visually stunning doom-modeline: you are finding the right porridge for you. Here is my choice―a simple halfway between those two―simple-modeline.

Its so great that I copied and pasted the options here. Alternately run customize or open simple-modeline-segments.el and occur simple-modeline-segment on it. Yup, that great.

Read on for the variable info

You Gotta Try Using ~describe-symbol~

You gotta try out using describe-symbol because it is usually what you really want from describe-function and describe-variable.

The most useful part is that it instantly teaches you when there are both a variable and a function with the same name. Sometimes it is surprising and better to know right away. For example M-x describe-symbol RET emacs-version RET: 

emacs-version is an interactive compiled Lisp function in ‘version.el’.

(emacs-version &optional HERE)

Display the version of Emacs that is running in this session.
With a prefix argument, insert the Emacs version string at point
instead of displaying it.
If called from Lisp, by default return the version string; but
if the optional argument HERE is non-nil, insert the string at
point instead.

Don’t use this function in programs to choose actions according
to the system configuration; look at ‘system-configuration’ instead.

  Probably introduced at or before Emacs version 19.20.

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emacs-version is a variable defined in ‘C source code’.

Its value is "28.1"

Version numbers of this version of Emacs.
This has the form: MAJOR.MINOR[.MICRO], where MAJOR/MINOR/MICRO are integers.
MICRO is only present in unreleased development versions,
and is not especially meaningful.  Prior to Emacs 26.1, an extra final
component .BUILD is present.  This is now stored separately in
‘emacs-build-number’.

  Probably introduced at or before Emacs version 19.20.