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fusiongyro

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Daniel K Lyons

http://www.storytotell.org

Feel free to email me at fusion at storytotell dot org.

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I don't know exactly how it would work. But if I wanted to figure it out, I would start by taking a fairly large project's ticket tracker and sort through every reply on every ticket and try to categorize them into buckets.

For instance, I'd expect you to find "me too" comments, and those should be eliminated, just as "me too" "answers" on S.O. are eliminated.

I'd expect you to find status-update queries and replies. So that suggests you need a mechanism for pinging for an update that doesn't require a bunch of text from user and developer, or else some mechanism by which the freshness of a ticket becomes irrelevant.add new answers to old questions.)

I'd expect you to find people posting workarounds, which would suggest that you want workarounds to be a different "type" than regular commentary, and you probably want them called out separately somehow. It sucks to have to read through three pages of identical me-too complaints to find a workaround and then read through another two pages of people thanking the workaround author for the workaround, as frequently happens on the Ubuntu tracker.

I'm not sure if these are helpful examples or not, but I think when you see a pile of messages that you have to read through to extract content, you are looking at an opportunity to work out the hidden semantics of the thing, and turn those hidden semantics into first-class entities and actions, to make a more structured environment that will save people time.

I have seen too many JIRA deployments where the only plan was, make the state machine larger and require more separate fields from everybody. But those fields and states really just represent the hope that you might not have to read that pile of comments. In practice, most of those fields wind up empty, most of those states wind up skipped over, and you still have to read the whole ticket. Why? Because a JIRA ticket is still fundamentally a chronologically-sorted forum thread.

The main problem with issue trackers is similar to the problem of programming forums before Stack Overflow. Issue trackers become a chronological pile-up of crap. Stack Overflow is an incredible leap from earlier programming forums because it isolated what was valuable (questions, answers) and moved the chaff out of the way (comments, revising the question).

JIRA is basically the most sophisticated programming forum, for issue tracking. What we need is the Stack Overflow of issue tracking, that figures out what the real entities and actions are and eliminates the chronological pile-up.

Most of my questions on tex.SE are about ConTeXt, simply because all paths in ConTeXt are less explored than LaTeX. The frontier is nearer. But I have never failed to get a useful and informative solution from one of the handful of experts.

I wish I had sources for my other comments handy. If I have time I will try to dig some up.

There is not, to my knowledge, a really commonly-used workflow that starts at Word and ends at typesetting. This is something Pandoc purports to do, but I would expect to lose most of your manual formatting tweaks from Word in the process.

Pandoc is a good tool for automating workflows that start with some other format and end with LaTeX.

Another good option if you like Emacs is org-mode, which has a LaTeX export, among other things.

I have used ConTeXt a fair amount and I like it quite a bit. I would actually say it is easier than LaTeX, in the sense that it is more discoverable. After you use it for a bit, you see that the macros are all built on each other in predictable ways, so they all tend to take the same options and achieve similar effects. In LaTeX, the answer to your questions is usually "there's a package for that," whereas in ConTeXt, the answer is often "this macro takes the same options as this other macro, so just pass them in."

What is different about ConTeXt is the prevailing attitude towards using plain TeX from it. LaTeX really seems to consider plain TeX quite unsafe. I suspect this is because it is hard to build a resilient declarative system on highly weird and procedural TeX. ConTeXt, on the other hand, kind of encourages you to use TeX directly. So that led me to learning more about plain TeX, which now seems much less scary to me than when I was using LaTeX.

This complaint is basically the reason XeTeX was written, which accesses your standard system fonts instead. LuaTeX also handles TTF and OpenFont without trouble. These both produce PDFs instead of DVI or Postscript output (per your comment below).

I have fond memories of playing Final Fantasy II as a kid. I downloaded Octopath Traveller on the Switch and couldn't get through the introduction I was so bored. Going back and playing Final Fantasy on the NES Classic, I can't believe I used to have so much time on my hands and so much patience to play this stuff.

Then again, I've gotten deeply in chess lately...

I'm a beginner at Go but I think it is fascinating and full of real-life lessons like this.

In general, strong play has a lot of forcing moves that demand responses. Being obsessed with having the last word is akin to allowing the other player to dictate when and where you will play, which is a substantial advantage for the other player. Go is won by area, not capture, so often a weak-looking sketch of territory is more effective than a lot of direct squabbling over little stones.

It's also easy to overplay. Being greedy is a good way to lose everything in Go. So a good game can have the flavor of a negotiation. There are even a lot of standard trades that aim for equality between the players.

I'm starting to think that "computer-substitute" is precisely what smart phones have become, and that having a real computer you depend on might correlate with age, income or occupation in a way that phone ownership cuts across. It's pretty easy to finance a phone purchase through your carrier, especially compared to Apple's Barclay deal (unless this has changed a lot in the last few years.) I think a lot of people under thirty are borderline computer illiterate, but get by using their phone. For them, a bigger screen that's harder to type on is fine. For people with more money and computer literacy, it's just a matter of taste--but we're not the biggest slice of the pie.

The actual reading of email with mu is about what's on disk. Using offlineimap is just a common configuration, and in its configuration you can specify a function, so if you wanted it to prompt you for a password whenever you get mail, you could do that. You could also just have Postfix deliver mail to your directory, then just have mu4e run the mu index command periodically to find new mail.

As for the writing of mail, it culminates in running some kind of sendmail program on your message. If you have sendmail or postfix setup locally to forward mail up to another server, you already don't need to have a password set up in Emacs. But you could also make that program do whatever you want, it just needs to be a binary that accepts certain arguments (or an emacs function that operates on the file).