[Vimoutliner] Fwd: Lyx article on OSNews

[Steve Litt]

On Tuesday 27 February 2007 18:44, Noel Henson wrote:
> On Tuesday 27 February 2007 13:00, Steve Litt wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > This guy made use of a "mind mapping" software that produced a pretty
> > picture, but as far as I can see, it's entirely hierarchical, which
> > means it could have been done in about 5 minutes with VO.
> >
> > I have to ask myself why someone would use "mind mapping" software over
> > VO. Are they visually oriented or something?
> >
> > SteveT
>
> I, too, am a visual thinker. I can also use outlines really well but I see
> them in my head as I write them.
>
> Noel

Sounds like we need a VO to mindmap converter, and I think I'm just the guy to 
do it (when I get the time).

<brag type="oldendays">
At Santa Monica College in 1983, the Cobol instructors made us make "VTOCs", 
Visual Tables of Contents, i.e. mindmaps, of every Cobol program we turned 
in. I HATED it. I was lousy with a pencil and ruler in 3rd grade, and haven't 
progressed much. At this point I had under my belt 1 semester of 
Microprocessors (6800 hex machine langauge), 1 semester of beginning Cobol, 
and 1 semester of Pascal.

One day I was griping to my buddy Jeff Jones, THE PREMIER intellectual honcho 
in the Santa Monica College computer lab. I said "I hate these VTOCs! I 
should make a program to turn a Cobol program into a VTOC."

Jeff said to me "You can't do that -- you're not a good enough programmer."

I said "For two cents I'd do it!"

Jeff reached in his pocket, pulled out two cents, and gave them to me.

Three months later I put the finishing touches on my source code to VTOC 
program, written entirely in Cobol so it could convert itself :-). The 
program printed boxes with dashes and pipe characters, and also printed 
connection lines with dashes and pipe characters. The hierarchy started at 
the top left, and extended down in sequence and to the right in depth.

Jeff Jones reluctantly admitted he might have underestimated my programming 
ability. My program became famous as students asked their instructors whether 
they could "use Steve Litt's VTOC program" to create their VTOCs. The 
programming experience I gained from writing that program gave me knowledge 
above that of most of my classmates, and gave me a HUGE reputation. Even 
though the early 80's were a terrible time to break into programming (the 
late 70's and mid to late 90's were much better), I got a programming job a 
year later while all my friends were still computer operators (kind of like a 
dumbed down sysadmin who's adept at placing and removing 9 track mag tapes).

Anyway, yeah, I've got some graphical hierarchy programming under my belt :-)
</brag>

SteveT

Steve Litt
Author: Universal Troubleshooting Process books and courseware
http://www.troubleshooters.com/