From: Karl Anderson (kra@monkey.org)
Date: Fri Dec 01 2000 - 11:57:32 PST
"Jim Whitehead" <ejw@cse.ucsc.edu> writes:
> Hi,
>
> I'm curious -- for FoRKs who areinvolved in Engineering of some form
> (hardware, software, etc.)what is your opinion on the use/value of
> maintaining an engineering lab notebook? I'm about to inherit a software
> engineering project class where there is currently a requirement for
> maintaining a lab notebook. However, I've never used an engineering project
> notebook, and I know relatively few software developers who do.
>
> I personally am more of a pad of paper person, although I have very rarely
> gone back into these pads after about, say 3 months. Email archives, on the
> other hand, I do consult fairly extensively.
Wikis are great for this sort of thing - the first artifact of most
all of our projects at Digital Creations is a ZWiki. Easy to write,
easy to collaborate. Uses Structured Text, see a recent FoRKthread
about that kind of thing, which is a great (usually) simple text
layout/organization format.
The point is that it's a simple idea, keep it simple & keep it easy,
don't add features that get in the way of using the tool. So I can
still slap text into an emacs buffer without thinking very hard, and
it's there for I and others to reference.
I hate modelling/diagramming tools, so almost all my models stay on
whiteboards/paper, that's a drawback, but if I really cared I'd scan
them in, at least.
-- Karl Anderson kra@monkey.org http://www.monkey.org/~kra/
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