Knowledge wiki examples

Chris Aldrich posted about an interesting knowledge wiki using Github as the storage of the original content and using Gitbook to render the content. I have a federated wiki instance I have been using for some topics. Chris Aldrich also mentions that his own site serves as a commonplace book, capturing information that interests him. I think this variety of tools and practices is good to see. I have used a weblog in the work environment as a knowledge capture tool, then migrating some content to a wiki. My main observation is a common one: you get out of it what you put into it. If you don’t do much, any tool you use will not be very helpful. If you contribute content on a regular basis, the value will grow and grow over time. Which will you choose?

The effect of music in our lives

Earlier this week, I read a terrific post by Ron Chester on the effect of silence at the end of the performance of a piece of music. I sing in a church choir, and there have been many times that a short silence at the end of a piece can really bring home the feeling of richness to the experience. During the past weekend, I also had two musical experiences that reminded me of the power of live music. I sang at a church retreat, and attended a community band concert. In the retreat, I was moved to tears at one point by one of the songs as I sang. At the band concert, several of the pieces were ones I had played when I was in band in high school or college, and the pieces brought back fond memories of making music with a group. It also helped that the band was excellent, easily the best community band I have ever heard. All of these experiences helped to remind me that having music in my life is an uplifting experience, one that I want to continue to have.

How embedded software projects run into trouble

Jack Ganssle has written articles for his top ten list of how embedded software projects run into trouble. Most of this could apply to any software project! Here are the links:

  1. Unrealistic schedules
  2. Quality gets lip service
  3. Poor resource planning
  4. Writing optimistic code
  5. Weak managers or team leads
  6. Crummy analog/digital interfacing
  7. Bad science
  8. The undisciplined use of C and C++
  9. Jumping into coding too quickly
  10. Not enough resources allocated to a project

 

Doing a local install of Federated Wiki

Earlier this week, I installed the latest version of NodeJS and NPM (https://nodejs.org/en/) . I am going to try to install wiki on my Windows laptop.

Per this page (https://www.npmjs.com/package/wiki), I started Node.js command prompt and entered the following command:

npm install -g wiki

I then opened a browser tab and went to http://localhost:3000 and was able to see the Welcome Visitors page:

To be able to see the journal icons and be able to make edits, I clicked on the word “wiki” at the bottom of the page. After doing that, I saw a check mark appear next to the word, and I was able to make and save edits. It still looked like there is a yellow background to the pages. In the past, I thought that meant that changes would not be saved, but I will need to look into that more.

Next steps – look at getting wiki source code and running that so I can make local changes.