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So we're back with the second installment of the Table Creation sample, rolling up Part 1 into Part 2 of a description of the MakeTable macros. Attached to this post is Part 2 of the Table Creation sample in both Word and .CHM formats. I'm using the rolling update model, so Part 2 includes the Part 1 content, lightly augmented and copyedited. Part 2 introduces the Architecture, Design and Test sections. While I have draft content for additional sections dealing with Implementation and Delivery, those sections don't appear in the attached content. But I spent too much time on Table Creation sample content, and not enough on the BackGround Material. The Background Material sections dealing with Architecture, Design and Test software development activities fell behind the content. Those sections need some work in terms of content and references. While the structure of software development Architecture, Design and Test content need not be as formal as use cases, a map template or two would be useful in maintaining consistency. I'm having trouble breaking out time to work on this during the week, and sessions in front of the keyboard during the weekend aren't getting other things done. Could be that it's time for some serious marriage maintenance. Or I can just sleep under my desk and not explain this behavior to my wife. But that doesn't sound like a viable long term strategy. Regardless, I decided to post this to get a stake in the ground. On a related note, has anyone besides me experienced some unrecoverable errors after using the HTML Help Builder from inside or outside MindManger? I modified version 1.0.7 to let topics hidden in the source map remain hidden in the Complied HTML Help output, but it is hard to see how those changes would cause MindManager editing problems. I have experienced MindManager crashes with and without the Library task pane open when deleting icons from topics, and when closing a map after generating a .CHM without that map loaded. But the Map recovery feature didn't kick in at next MindManager startup, even with the lock file present. Seems strange. I don't know if the MindManager development group has signed up with Microsoft to obtain crash dumps, but there is probably some useful information buried in there. If I had worlds enough and time, or maybe a debug build, I'd be tempted to dig around in that material.
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About dethomas
So who is this dethomas guy anyway? Here's a capsule bullet point summary:
- Midwestern white boy, ex-busboy, stock-clerk, grinder, welder and English major, now laboring lo these many years in the fields of awkward stone that characterize software development.
- 20+ years of software development experience - CPM/Apple/Unix/DOS during the Reagan years, embedded systems before the term was common, Windows development since the first Clinton administration.
- Mechanical engineering undergrad degree, showing that early success in thermodynamics is not necessarily a good thing. But the Apollo workstations running UNIX were cool.
- Engineering master's degree with a control systems emphasis, demonstrating that publishing in IEEE Transactions is cool, but not necessarily a good thing.
- Employed by an industrial electronics company as a principal engineer. Distinguished by several innovation awards, several software patents, and for once having used the word "Byzantine" in a requirements specification.
- Learned FORTRAN on punch cards, learned Pascal, BASIC and APL to do numerical analysis in several fields of engineering, learned assembly, C, C++ and Java to write software for several embedded systems, custom applications and shrink-wrapped software products.
- Has considerable exposure to a variety of technologies, including networking, databases, graphics libraries, linear programming, compilers, non-linear control systems, real-time operating systems, fuzzy logic, neural networks, UML, .Net, XML, OPC, WSI, WSDL and WWF. (On that last one, WWF, dethomas is convinced he did time in high school with a guy who went on to success in the Mexican pro wrestling circuit under the name "el Queso Grande.")
- Wide exposure to Microsoft Windows products and operating system editions as both user and developer, relative indifference to web technology and the dot com boom until the dust settled.
- Has a cable modem, but no cable TV service. Which is a philosophical statement of sorts. Television is bad for you, the Internet is not. Or at least not yet.
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