binglo

Regarding battery technology, if I'm not mistaken, that's already a solved problem: Lithium-Ion batteries have great capacity and are quite light. Their only problem is "venting with flame" if you don't charge/discharge them within their limits, but electronic control can mostly eliminate that.

Now we just need a battery company to start making car-battery-sized Li-Ion's and sell them for a reasonable price. When that happens, I think you'll see some serious action.

Converting cars to electric is ... not optimal. Cars are built very heavy these days due to "safety concerns". They're also heavy because they're loaded with features. It's very unlikely that you can find a nice light minimalist car that you can successfully convert, but if you know of any, I'd love to hear about them.

Ah. Ok, then that makes things easier.

For your case, don't use Python, nor PHP. Both are pretty much just like Perl and Java with only minor syntax changes.

If you want to expand your understanding of computing in general, while also learning a new language, and while doing a webapp, if I were you I'd learn Common Lisp and try out Hunchentoot. There's even some screencasts for that setup floating around.

Going with Python or PHP after Perl and Java is not going to be terribly enlightening for you.

Why are you determined to use either Python or PHP in this latest project?

I would make sure you have a good answer to that question before using something besides Perl.

I love LaTeX for docs that simply use one of the built-in documentclasses -- and which use no extra packages or custom commands or environments.

I strongly dislike it for anything else. Getting anything non-default to work right has always been a major headache for me.

Also, conversion to html should be easier. Last time I looked, latex2html was pretty much unmaintained and also a bear to even get installed (if your OS doesn't already provide a package for it).

Texinfo might be a good substitute for LaTeX, but it's a bit clunky with manually specifying menus (nodes and sections)... though I know that Emacs will do that for you.

Wait. So, getting 4 hours sleep, then showering and rushing out of the house with a cup of coffee within 15 minutes of waking isn't optimal?

From the article: "I also must confess to a strong bias against the fashion for reusable code. ... you’ll never convince me that reusable code isn’t mostly a menace."

???

Working at night is great. Trouble is, you pay the price the next day when you're downing coffees just to keep from falling asleep on your keyboard.

I'm guessing at least some here have made that trip out to the parking garage around lunchtime while simultaneously setting their cellphone alarm for +20 minutes for just a quick nap. Extra points if you keep a blanket in the back seat. :)

Could it be that you're just scarred from trying to do branching with cvs? I've heard svn is much nicer regarding that.

That's quite nice. Still not sure how I feel about wiki-style plain text markup formats though. I like them for simple and short docs, emails, and README's because it looks good in the editor, but it seems like the more you ask from that sort of format, the weirder things begin to look as you add features to support writing larger docs (and you end up with more syntax to memorize as well).

Thanks for the heads-up.

Those seem to just be a collection of html files where you can edit them and fill in the blanks. I guess if you like having your docs in raw html, it could be useful for those who have a hard time choosing where to begin. Thanks.

Yes. Thank you. I like POD for man-page -style docs, but for longer multi-section docs I'm not sure it buys you much more than plain text (except that you can easily convert to other formats). Also, it's harder to read than plain text -- though maybe easier than docbook xml.

The POD docs I see as html are just single long html pages. I realize this is just an implementation issue though.

Definitely beautiful pdf output, but I was never happy with the available "latex2html" converters.

Bonus for being able to render mathematics in your docs.

Edit -- Also, I agree with you about the learning curve. Although it's very easy to get good-looking docs if you use one of the canned documentclasses and built-in commands, once you start to stray from those you're in deep water very quickly.

Why do you use docbook?

I find that a plain text file longer than about a dozen pages in a terminal window -- containing more than a handful of sections and subsections -- becomes a pain in the neck to efficiently navigate around (during both reading and writing). A non-technical person might be reading such a document using Notepad.

So, we're talking about a doc that's getting a little too cramped being just a plain text file, and which might grow longer as time goes by.