Re: Docbook tools

[Mark Galassi <rosalia@lanl.gov>]

    >> Just to be clear on this point, all the credit for the DocBook
    >> packages should go to Mark Galassi, not Cygnus.

    Derek> 	Mark: THANK YOU!

Dude, thanks, but my effort is negligible compared to the guys who
wrote the major software.

    Derek> Finding these packages was a godsend--not to mention the
    Derek> tutorial (I'm a newbie at this).

I feel like Wallace, in "Wallace and Gromit -- A Close Shave", saying
"windows are our speciality".  I guess I'm referring not to "windows",
but rather to getting something that works out of the box.

But the real godsend will be if we can pull together with the
SGMLTools effort and do the automake/autoconf stuff I mentioned in a
message earlier today.

    Derek> Also, I will tell my editor at O'Reilly about this and
    Derek> they're likely to become the defacto for O'Reilly authors
    Derek> who want to write in SGML/DocBook.

Since Norm Walsh used to work for O'Reilly, and O'Reilly used to host
the Davenport group, I thought they would have something they can
offer to prospective authors.  Maybe not.

So, dude, tell me what your O'Reilly book is about!

    Derek> 	In case it's still not clear: the work Mark is doing
    Derek> is incredibly important and will become even moreso as more
    Derek> people start to write Gnome, KDE, and O'Reilly
    Derek> documentation in SGML format.

O'Reilly has been using properly customized DocBook for many of its
books for quite a while.

    Derek> 	If it's not inappropriate to ask... what's the "rocket
    Derek> scientist" project?  Something cool Mark can talk about?

It's quite open, really: I'm an astrophysicist, although I have
frequently been on the verge of being defrocked becuase I like to hack
a lot.

Right now I'm working on the HETE-2 satellite, which is a small
satellite designed to collect information on Gamma Ray Bursts (a very
trendy, exciting, and difficult phenomenon in astrophysics).

I'm designing and writing the flight software for the more complex of
the instruments: my software triggers on a gamma ray burst (by looking
at X-ray and Gamma ray data), figures out its position on the sky (by
deconvolving the X-ray data with a coded mask pattern), and handles
instrument housekeeping and so forth.

Once HETE-2 launches, I might finally actually have a chance at
analyzing and publishing on some astrophysics data, at which point I
can go back to some of my ideas on grand unification of scientific
software.