As part of developing the Echelon Reference Series, I make heavy use of GraphViz. GraphViz includes several layout engines, but the key one here is called ‘DOT’. DOT takes a file with a simple declarative syntax of nodes and edges, and lays them out as a graph. You can specify …
This might derail my original plan (“Small Gods”) for the 2025 A-Z Blog Challenge, but I think it’ll be worth it. For me, at least. Recently I’ve been reading a couple of books about LaTeX, my publishing tool of choice. I’ve worked with LaTeX quite some time, and I’ve cobbled …
Truly, I can’t imagine this would be even a mild surprise to anyone that I’m a nerd at times. But this goes a little beyond the norm, even for me. I just spent that last few hours drafting — rough cut, first draft — documentation of my XML Workflow. Don’t …
… sure, I’ll call it ‘two days’. I was going to say it was actually last night, but since the ‘October 2’ on the previous post was very early in the morning (AKA ‘quite late October 1’) I’ll call it two days. Makefile refactoring is complete. 500 lines of Perl …
Sometimes, “what it is” can be much more complicated that “how to work with it”. My publishing workflow has seven different systems (including a ‘nosys’) with thirteen different domains (collections of content with that system). The pf1 set is the only one I’ve published, the rest have been captured for …
No real change to the workflow, but in rebuilding my Makefile construction I found I’d missed a step, and misrepresented a couple of relationships.
Some years ago, while working on the Echelon Reference Series, I reached a point where individual titles would take months to put together (the diagrams were horribly time-intensive). I shifted direction and decided to release the ‘Rough and Fast’ (RAF) versions of the titles, without the diagrams and all the …
Yesterday I explored some unexpected things in my prerequisite diagrams code (short answer: I did not expect what I should have, the code was working as designed). As part of that I came up with a few things to try, to see if they could resolve the oddities. Examining Updated …
Even when there is no actual narrative, a picture can make something clear that might have been easily overlooked. Yesterday’s build showed me I’d made at least one unfortunate assumption that could lead to incorrect search results. After fixing this I examined some diagrams I knew would be affected, and …
Okay, okay, it’s a little rough yet, but I can see this can work. There are a few things I’d want to add (such as the option of specifying exclusions, bits of a diagram to not include, but it looks like much of my headache is going away. These diagrams …
