5   What kind of data is Tonto2 good for?

It's hard to say what kind of data Tonto2 is good for; there are so many kinds of data!

Generally, Tonto2 is good for data that can be characterized as unit records — what we used to think of as cards in a deck of punched cards. Unit recs in a rel are all alike, having a consistent fld structure. Generally, though, Tonto2 does not put the rels to any higher purpose beyond sorting, searching, and some rudimentary reporting — much as unit-record equipment did before the advent of general-purpose high-speed data processing.

Tonto2 produces at least four predefined types of rels, and you can start as many new tabs as you want based on any of them. They are:

• Calendar

• 3x5Cards

• Passwords

• Address List

... so much for parallelism.

And there is a fifth for Bibliographies.

In my mind these are all lists of some sort. You can even define your own kind of rel from scratch without any predefined underlying peculiarities of fld structure or text display. The only requirement is that it be basically a list. All rels are essentially lists of recs.

You specify what sort of rel a tab is going to use when you create a new tab, and you can't change it!

5.1   Calendar

You can think of a calendar as a to-do list of future tasks, but you can just as well use a calendar to log past events.

When you create a new calendar tab, it is populated with a list of events for some United States holidays. Feel free to add or delete from this list.

You may view the calendar for a month at a time as a grid. Click View. Click View Calendar Month.

Future events may be seen in the Alarms List. Click View. Click View Alarms.

Tags are grouped:

• Identifiers

• Schedule Specifications

• Alarm Specifications

5.1.1   Calendar Identifiers

• Calendar events may be categorized by Project in the same way that 3x5Cards are by Category.

• Title is a long name for an event.

• _Handle is a short name for an event. _Handle is used on the calendar grid display and must be fairly terse.

• Events are sorted by Start date and time on the calendar grid display.

• ForegroundColor of the day's ordinal on the calendar grid is taken from the event on that day with the highest Priority. Red is for red-letter days.

• BackgroundColor of the day's cell on the calendar grid is taken from the event on that day with the lowest Priority. Consider using light shades such as aliceblue, antiquewhite, blanchedalmond, cornsilk, lightcyan, lemonchiffon, linen, navajowhite, oldlace, or whitesmoke because the default text color on the calendar grid is black. The color names are — believe it or not — traditional. Color samples are available online from the W3C (Çelik, et al.).

• Status indicates whether the event is Pending or Finished.

• Remarks is a log entry to provide details about what must be done or what has already been done.

• Keywords provides additional search terms in various combinations beyond the phrases that occur elsewhere in the event description.

5.1.2   Calendar Schedule Specifications

• Start is the first scheduled date and time of the event.

• Duration is the number of hours required by the event.

• Offset is a positive number used to indicate events that recur, if given.

• IsOffsetTypeDays indicates whether Offset refers to days or months. An event may be scheduled every seven (Offset = 7) days or every three (Offset = 3) months, for example.

• OffsetInMonth is a positive or negative number used to indicate that the event is scheduled relative to the beginning or end of the month, if given.

• IsOffsetInMonthTypeDays indicates whether OffsetInMonth refers to days or weeks. An event may be scheduled in the second week (OffsetInMonth = 2) of a month, for instance. It then recurs on the same day of the week as Start. An event may be scheduled in the last week (OffsetInMonth = -1) of the month or on the last day (OffsetInMonth = -1) if need be.

• A recurring event is not scheduled after the Stop date and time, if given.

5.1.3   Calendar Alarm Specifications

• AdvanceAlarm, if given, indicates that an alarm may sound so-many minutes in advance of the Start time of the event. NOTE: The Alarms List does not show the Start time. It shows the Start time minus the AdvanceAlarm minutes. I can't think of a use-case for it, but AdvanceAlarm can be negative.

• AlarmSound is the name of a *.wav sound file. You may search for sound files by clicking on the magnifying glass, but you kind of have to know where to look for them. Try: /usr/share/sounds or Windows\Media. A default sound may or may not be configured.

• SpeakTitle indicates whether the event's Title should be pronounced. It won't work unless a voice synthesizer is configured.

• RepeatInterval is the number of seconds before the alarm sound and the title are repeated.

• RepeatLoop is the number of times the alarm sound is played before the title is pronounced.

5.2   3x5Cards

The 3x5Cards rel type is simple but interesting. It has already been explained exhaustively in the preceding section. It has no underlying peculiarities of fld structure or text display. As such, it is a typical starting point for creating a rel from scratch.

5.3   Passwords

Use a Passwords rel to record your credentials for accessing your various online and offline services and devices. It has no underlying peculiarities of fld structure or text display.

WARNING: Tonto2 does not do any kind of encryption to scramble the contents of the native csv files. It stores passwords in plain text. You are not dependent on a tricky encryption scheme and are not subject to the risk of losing your encryption keys, which protect your password store. Be aware that, if you use Tonto2 to store passwords, you have to protect them from discovery using other means. As always, your first and last line of defense in protecting your passwords is to keep unauthorized people out of your machine. OPSEC is not Tonto2's job.

A Passwords rel has the following flds:

• Vendor is the name of your source for the service or equipment.

• Service is a memo for the kind of service or equipment the Vendor provides. If you use more than one password-protected service of the Vendor, you'll need separate Password recs for the same Vendor.

• Web is the URI of the Vendor's login, signon, or account maintenance Web page.

• eMail is your own electronic mail address. This reminds you which one (among potentially many) you used to set up the Vendor(s') accounts, so that you can follow up with the Vendor(s) when you decide to change it.

• UserID is the user identification you use with the Vendor, if you use any ID besides eMail.

• PasswordType is almost always the word Password. You can use PIN to remind yourself whether or not the Vendor requires a personal identification number, but PasswordType may be anything.

• Password is the text of your password for a Vendor account — uppercase letters, lowercase letters, digits, punctuation, and all. To use it, select it, copy it to the clipboard with Ctrl-C, and paste it with Ctrl-V into the password blank on your Vendor's login page. There is no need to rely on your browser's insistence that it can store your passwords for you. Yeah, right, like that's going to be secure! But see cautions at "Drag and Drop."

• Account is your account number or ID with the Vendor, if any.

• Project is additional identifying information of any kind that the Vendor may require. ProjectType is a memo for what kind of information this is.

• Likewise Challenge and Response are the sign and counter-sign of some two-factor authentication schemes that Vendors used to require.

• ExpirationDate is the drop-dead date of your Vendor account, if it has one.

• AccountStatus tells whether the Vendor relationship is Active or Closed.

5.4   Address List

The Address List holds a list of contacts. It must be appreciated that you can import the underlying csv file into spreadsheets and into word-processing documents to produce mailing lists, addressed envelopes, form letters, telephone directories, and the like. This is much more difficult actually to do in real life than it is to say so. It is much more difficult than it actually needs to be, but that's not Tonto2's fault. In the Appendix I make some hand-waving gestures in that direction.

Address List recs may be maintained through the same Field Entry Dialog as other rels, but Address Lists uniquely feature a Free-Form Entry Dialog, too. Click Edit. Click Free-Form Entry. The notion is that contact information — as seen in printed sources — is regular enough to be parsed by a computer. Hah! If only.... Still, it may be possible to make progress by copying information from the wild and pasting it into the Free-Form Entry Dialog text box. Once there, the information can be parsed into flds. The flds may then be edited — possibly by copying info manually that failed to be parsed automatically. Later, the flds can be rendered back into free-form text. The position of the insertion cursor in the text box is all-important. You may wish to erase extraneous info from the text box before attempting to un-parse (view) flds. Finally, you can copy contact information out of the text box and paste it back into contexts where free-form text (such as a block address) is appropriate. Try it!

Free-Form parsing is not A-I, and it is certainly not perfect, but it has its own beauty, warts and all. Drawbacks include but are not limited to the following:

• Telephone numbers are hard to spot because they are different lengths in different parts of the world and they are divided by different separator symbols into substrings with inconsistent numbers of digits.

• Mailing addresses in different countries place the Zip Code on different lines — some at the beginning of a line, some at the end, and some in the middle.

• Mailing addresses have a variable number of lines in most countries.

• First Name / Last Name is a Northern European convention. (Upper Name is an Oriental convention. Most of East Asia uses first/last names in Western contexts.) Tonto2 is easily flummoxed by Mediterranean and Middle Eastern names and is hopelessly confounded by Hispanic surnames. These must be sorted manually by someone who knows the person or at least knows what he's doing. See the Wikipedia Article on "Surnames" for an introduction to the complexity.

• To take a stab at parsing an address block according to the culture it comes from, Tonto2 needs to spot the country name in the block. Only a handful of populous countries with rigid addressing standards are recognized. These country names should appear as though the mail were originating in the United States for delivery overseas, using (ideally) English country names and ASCII or UTF-8 orthography. If a recognizable country name is not present, the address block is going to be parsed as United States domestic mail. If parsing fails, try including the name of a larger country with similar culture to see if that improves the parsing.

Fig. U — Free-Form Entry Dialog Ready to Parse

Here I have pasted a public-relations address block I copied from the Siemens Website into the Free-Form Entry Dialog.

Fig. V — Free-Form Entry Dialog Parsed

Here it is after parsing. Marvelously Tonto2 saw the name and the telephone number, but, because the telephone number and the eMail address were in a non-standard location within the address block, it accepted them as address lines, too. These had to be erased. I had to move the company name up to the Company fld and fix up the eMail.

Fig. W — Free-Form Entry Dialog Viewed

Here is the address block after un-parsing (viewing). That was pretty easy — easier than locating a mailing address on the Internet to begin with. Thus, I've demonstrated that it is possible to harvest and regularize contacts from the wild — even from overseas — with very little contrivance. Yes, Tonto2 knows that 20099 is the Germanic Zip although I don't suppose they call it that in Deutschland.

The Address List flds are as follows:

• ListingType will usually be Home or Work but can be anything.

• Greeting is used in the "Dear" line of a form letter. Tonto is seen to have been prescient in forecasting the need for this, since modes of address have become increasingly fluid. To do a good job of choosing the Greeting, it helps to know the contact. Failing that, you can always use the generic Dear Sir, Ma'am, or Sir or Madam.

• PoliteMode is used in the top line of the address block on the envelope and on the inside address, leading the first name. Mr. and Ms., Miss, or Mrs. seem hardly to cover all the possibilities nowadays. Once again, it is best to cultivate a rather intimate knowledge of the contact's preferences in this matter. You call professors and medical doctors of both sexes Dr.; don't you?

• FirstName and LastName both appear on the top line of the address block as well. The FirstName includes the middle name or initial. Take care to divide the FirstName from the LastName at the appropriate point. You have to solicit and rely on the contact's preference. You can't depend on it's being the rightmost space for many individuals who have compound names. From the small amount of work I have done for Halls of Residence for a Big 10 University, I've come to understand that students from other cultures will rip you a new one if you don't alphabetize their last name correctly for the campus directory. (This is an issue that Tonto2's automated Free-Form Entry fails to deal with.) Many individuals from outside Anglo cultures drop all but one LastName or hyphenate a pair of names just to avoid the hassle when doing business in the United States and elsewhere. If you're using Tonto2 correctly, though, you can accommodate most preferences.

  On Christmas Cards I have used "XXX Family" as the LastName and the Greeting. I've added the year to the Keywords as #XMAS1999 so I can find and keep track of who was on my list in what year.

• Title will be left blank for most individuals except those holding some rank or degree such as Phd. When corresponding with a functionary in a large bureaucracy, it is customary to include a short job title here along with the DeptMailStop below the Company name. Then your correspondence can still reach a person of responsibility even though your original contact has been promoted, let go, surplused, or even defenestrated.

• The top line (PoliteMode, FirstName, LastName, and Title) may all be #N/A in anonymous company addresses.

• Locus provides an additional address line to use that is seldom needed except on large campuses.

• Postal carriers are trained not to look above the Street line so it should contain all the information that the postal service needs beside the City, State, and Zip. Some Country(s) do not organize their postal addresses by State.

• For feeding your Address List to mapping programs, it will be necessary to include Latitude and Longitude in each rec, but you can leave them blank until you need them.

• PhoneType will usually be Home, Work, or Cell but can be anything.

• There is room for four Phone numbers in each rec.

• eMail and _URI are Web addresses used by the contact.

By now, you're probably wondering how you can populate a Tonto2 Address List with entries from your contact list, which you maintain in the cloud with your ecosystem provider. If so, my work here is done, and I applaud your appetite for using Tonto2, but, although this export/import thing across platforms both mobile and desktop is easy to talk about, it is fraught with difficulties. See my writeup in the Appendix, where I try very hard not to be too discouraging.

5.5   Bibliographies

I use this type of rel to hold and sort external references that I intend to cite in research or on one of my Web pages. It has enough flds to handle nearly every conceivable kind of reference. By viewing a Bibliographic rec as text, I can see approximately what a Modern Language Association (MLA) bibliographic entry would look like. (Tonto2 tries follow the MLA Handbook, 6th ed., which is now in its 9th edition, so I'm not very up-to-date.)

There are other style-books for bibliographic entries: American Psychological Association (APA), American Medical Association (AMA), American Sociological Association (ASA), University of Chicago Press (Chicago Style), and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) come to mind. These are among others presumably. If you need to prepare bibliographic entries for hire or if you hire someone to typeset a manuscript, you'll probably be required to follow one or another of these style-books. So far as I know, references are not freely convertible from one to another. Some of these may be more amenable to machine generation than MLA. I don't know. I wish I did.

In these days of burgeoning Artificial Intelligence (A-I) that is able to churn out plausible explanations on any subject completely without any grounding in research, readers hunger for bona fide references. Writing well-formed references will thus become vital to your credibility. This I predict.

The MLA proposes a set of standards that is slightly different for each kind of reference, but, when looking at a reference, you may not be able to tell what kind it is. You have to be familiar with the reference to know for sure. The MLA bibliographic format is only a guide to writing a reference so that others may find it. There is no way for a machine to parse a bibliographic entry in general. I find it equally difficult to generate well-formed bibliographic entries because I don't do it day-in-day-out.

You should expect that the footnote Nazis will get you if you don't arrange and punctuate each reference correctly. To those who deal day-in-day-out with this kind of data, a rigorously well-formed entry is essential for verification. Yes, you have to do it the right way.

Because Tonto2 cannot rigorously generate well-formed bibliographic entries for all kinds of references, I cannot recommend the bibliographic rel as a daily-use starting point. It may be good enough for casual use, though, and is certainly better than nothing. Still, you should have a copy of the MLA Handbook and groove on its prescriptive examples. If Tonto2 doesn't generate something that matches the appropriate example, you've used the wrong flds for the releavant information and should move values around until the reference is exactly right.

5.6   Other Uses

That has been a brief overview of the kinds of data that Tonto2 was built to handle.

You may suspect that that is not all there is. In fact Tonto2 rels can be expanded with other flds beside those that are predefined. Exactly how this is done remains to be seen. Suffice it to say, that, if you plan to roll your own rel, it behooves you to start from the predefined rel type that most closely matches your requirements. That way the underlying peculiarities of fld structure and text display should be similar to what you need and expect.

I have, in the past, used Tonto2 rels for bibliographic references, a diary of orchard activities, and a long list of DVDs I'd like to own because of cast and director affiliations and reviewer ratings.

Other people, I suppose, use spreadsheets and databases and a host of other note-taking and to-do list applications for these things. Tonto2 is a more generalized approach and yet adapts itself well to many list-keeping tasks without a lot of bother. It is not as sophisticated as many of these other apps have become. I don't think it needs to be. Thus, it should be easier to learn and use if you can accommodate yourself to its limits.

Next up is a detailed peregrination through Tonto2's menu structure.