I’m down to the wire on my (unpromised) fixing of my roommate’s computer. He gets back tomorrow.
I didn’t want to miss a chance to fool around with borrowed equipment, so I’d better get to it. I lost a bit of time last night with a Windows Automatic Update, but now after a couple of days, my head is slightly clearer on what needs to be done. Oddly, Google was my Friend.
Let me recap:
- No videos would play on the Youtube site.
- New annoying alert box.
Youtube had a helpful message instead of a video player frame: “Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off, or an old version of Marcomedia’s Flash Player”. My first instinct was to grab a fresh install of Flash Player. I didn’t know why his version would be too old to play those videos, but so what. I reached a troubleshooting page at Adobe, current parent of Macromedia, that had a lot of scary things to say about damaged versions and how important it might be to uninstall the existing version first. Today, browsing the comments that Google search yielded, I got better sense of the problem, and then a link to a special stand-alone player at Adobe that people said would resolve the problem. It did. One down, one to go…
There are system freak-outs on Vista, and then there are the garden variety Alerts. The system freak-outs are new to me. XP has the notifications in the lower right corner - and Vista gave me a couple of those. It does seem that Phil’s A/V program has expired. It sent up the occasional flag to me to indicate how agitated it was. System freak-outs usually come from installers. It makes a little sense, but I got Alert fatigue within minutes. I spoke to a Vista user today, and her best advice was “You know, you can turn those off!” Thanks, but as annoying as they were, it’s not my computer, and that wasn’t the complaint. If it were my computer, that would be my complaint. Such is life. Specifically, NONE OF THE ALERTS INCLUDED ANY DETAIL. They were so vague - I just wouldn’t know what I was agreeing to anyway - so what’s the use of asking? In fact, this is the exact same complaint I have about my Trend-Micro PCcillin Antivirus software: It is currently set to notify me in the corner of similar events - program installation, registry changes,… that type of thing. These events are seen as completely separate by the system, so there is no context information I can use to connect an event with one of my intentions. How can I be confident that I was the cause of the freak-out? Some day a malicious program will start up at the same time as something I did, and when that prompt comes up, I’ll click OK. I allow this to happen because, there is an option to investigate how the changes were ordered. This more often than not, it is a hardware driver update. I recognize my modem manufacturer’s name now. I haven’t used the modem for years. But most days, I have to search the web for clues on the 8-letter program code. With eight letters, anything can sound sinister. Look in your WINDOWS/System32 folder some day… “ctfmon”, “nddeapir”? There are hundreds of files beginning with ‘ms’ or ‘hp’, which are probably Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, respectively. But, how can you be sure - what a great place to hide something bad!
Oh, where was I?
“Do you want to allow software such as ActiveX controls and plug-ins to run?”
My first instinct was the Internet Options dialog. It might even be related to the Youtube problem - weird settings on the scripting controls. But, I don’t imagine Phil would have been mucking around in there, and after careful checking, every setting that seemed the slightest bit relevant was set to “prompt” or “enable”.
Now I see that McAfee suggests this might be related to the VBS/Godzilla@M virus. That might explain it: The Youtube message comes back if I answer no to the ActiveX question, so those two problems are related by the obvious “An Active X script on that page needed to run”. I appear to have switched the setting to ‘Enable’, not ‘Prompt’, so I should not be seeing that message anymore. The virus on that page relies on the preview pane of an email client program. Phil does his email on Yahoo or something. It’s curious indeed. I got the impression that he’s willing to live in peace with the virus as long as it stops asking so many questions. ;-)
In the final analysis, I am bugged by the meaninglessness of every question the computer asks - or, I should say, by the fact that you just don’t know which questions are serious and which are a joke.
Posted in computer-interface | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 23 Jul 2008 02:03:00 GMT
So it turned out that there was a second person at work who could benefit from access to the POS system over the Internet, but was excluded by her choice of operating system. We have a part-timer who does graphic design - flyers for the stores and some advertisements. She stays at home to take care of her kids.
Here we have a threshold effect: Because nobody considered it valuable enough to solve her problem, we never did - and she never complained. But the moment I succeeded in setting up one computer, it was a proven fact. And free. So, she wanted in, too. Open up the flood gates.
Add to this the crucial fact that I would not have had the confidence to help someone set up the program if I hadn’t seen it for myself - remember how I had to learn the ANSI escape sequences?
And potentially more exciting that all that: I now have a user with years of experience with both the Mac and the eccentric system we use at work. Miss R__ had a modest amount of each of those, which didn’t make her a good test case: Now I have somebody who asks all the right questions - I had forgotten that a major reason both of these people needed access was to edit textfiles stored on the POS system. I won’t even begin to explain the weird text editor. I had an infuriating time once trying to create and edit a message from home because the keyboard mapping is different. I originally learned on a dumb terminal, which had special function keys. With each new terminal emulator program on the PC I had to get used to the keyboard quirks - and in some cases, the main system offers to provide other emulations. The choices start to multiply, and none of them is perfect.
Posted in computer-interface, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:48:00 GMT
My roommate went out of town for a couple of weeks, and he wanted me to take a look at his laptop. Youtube videos wouldn’t play. Plus he’s got a Bluetooth/Wi-fi dongle that’s acting up - don’t really know what to say about that other than: “You gotta jiggle it a little”.
This is some HP laptop with the multimedia look - much more black plastic than my old ze5300. And, it’s running Microsoft Vista. This page has more words - Click here to continue reading.
In a few minutes of poking around, I understood all the jokes about Vista. Actually, the moment I turned the thing on, it hit me with a series of alerts: Antivirus subscription expired. There was a box in the center to warn me, and a system notification in the lower right corner. Also, there were warnings about some mysterious USB device not working (the Bluetooth dongle, it turned out…), and a page not loading. Then, a browser page reloaded and a box asked me if it was okay for the page to run Active X scripts. “Hell, I don’t know? What does the script do? Does it erase the hard drive or show me an animated dog?” It would continue to ask me that same question on every new page. Are there Active X scripts on every page, or is the system malfunctioning? Who can say, there’s no independent source of information. It’s really quite vague. I thought XP struck a good balance with options to explore more specific information if the user is interested.
The Youtube problem has something to do with Flash player. Internet Explorer gives a message about Flash player, or disabled Javascript. Okay: which is it? I went to a page that definitely had Javascript and it seemed to run… So I went to the Adobe page to try downloading the latest version. But first: I looked at the Windows help file. It didn’t help, but it offered a link to a page of troubleshooting on the Adobe site, so I clicked that.
The first bit of advice Adobe gave me was to uninstall the existing version, if present. So, I went looking for “Change or Remove Programs” - I just remember the icon is in the Start menu in XP, but it is called “Set Program Access and Defaults”. Everything was as I remember it, except: There is no “Change or Remove Programs” option. Fantastic.
This was making me tired. So I went to play a game of Collapse. You know - I had to check if other browser add-ons were working - in this case Java applets. Maybe there would be a clue there. I have a hard time finishing a game of Collapse, because, as the situation becomes more dire, my abilities increase. It’s sort of like a reverse Tetris: The blocks come welling up from below in whole rows and you click to eliminate contiguous groups of the same color. The larger groups get bonus points. Especially in the early stages of the game, you can allow the stack to get really tall, click once or twice and eliminate most of the board. I found that you can only get really high scores by letting it get to the brink like that. By the time I finally allowed it to beat me instead of ratcheting up my performance, I noticed that one corner of the computer was getting VERY HOT. So that was the end of our session.
Tonight I should have another good opportunity to continue troubleshooting. (Hey - At least we know Java works!) Now that I’ve had some time to adjust, the Vista annoyances should be lessened.
Disturbing Trends in Modern Operating Systems…
Of course, just like Mac OS X… Well, have you seen the TV commercials where the two actors play the part of PC and Mac? I like to heckle them both. That PC doesn’t really reflect what my machine is like, so I don’t feel self-conscious laughing at him.
Mac: I call you to task for your dock full of bouncing Application Icons. And the way a window got sucked away as if by vacuum cleaner whenever I minimized it.
Windows: I call you to task for your weirdly translucent window edges. I spent too much time wondering what the texture meant before I realized I was seeing “through” to what was “behind” it.
If you have so many spare processor cycles, why don’t you donate them to charity?
Posted in computer-interface | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:42:00 GMT
If you read this then you will be interested to know that I succeeded.
Miss R_ didn’t know very much about her Mac laptop. I discovered it runs “Tiger” and the Terminal program welcomed me to “Darwin”, which I guess I knew was a “Bash Shell”. I had to provide the IP address. The menu command was a red herring. Can anybody tell me why?!?!
I came in on a Saturday - I was a little short on hours, and I had promised to figure all of this out. The air conditioning is also much better here at the bookstore.
Terminal’s menu command had a dialog to fill out - I told it every relevant detail I could think of - and when I clicked OK, the window asked for a login and password, but none of the possibilities worked. I was obviously in the wrong place. I changed my approach a little - I keyed in a simple telnet [ip] command - and I was in.
The screen emulation was note perfect. The function keys were not. First, I made some adjustments to the font size to make it more readable, then I went looking for more pertinent help… I discovered a good page of SCO ANSI escape sequences (from the Canadian Government?!?!) and I programmed them into F1, F2, F3, & F4. F4 is an essential key on our system. It exits from nearly every context. It’s also known as PF4 or BAR-IV. F2 and F3 are only slightly less important. But function keys were prime real estate on this computer. Every one of those keys was already a Desktop command. I got creative… I wound up using option-F9 through option-F12. They didn’t launch a calendar or change the speaker volume.
For now, I’ve saved the command text in a .txt file on Miss R_’s Desktop, but I know there must be a way to structure a shell script to open Terminal and invoke the command directly - so it’s just a double-click from the desktop. This sort of thing is easy in Windows because I am so used to doing it that way that it makes sense. But it is the simple things that trip you up the most - they would be right there in front of you if you could just recognize them.
Posted in olssons, computer-interface | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 19 Jul 2008 22:41:00 GMT
I have the opportunity to do something exotic compared to my normal tech support duties: Help install a telnet client on a MacIntosh. As dull as it is, we’re a Windows shop exclusively. And only a select few have the need and the wherewithal to telecommute.
The old mainframe had a few dial-up modems, mainly for the programmer to call in and for us to call EDI orders out to publishers. Back then, someone would have needed a really good excuse to call in. Some of the book buyers demonstrated the need. Tech support was partly about policing the traffic on the three phone lines. As PC operating systems have matured, it has gotten hard to find a good terminal emulator for dial-up. Some people these days don’t even have modems in their computers, let alone a telephone(!)
The mainframe was replaced with a Unix box of IBM manufacture. Some Power PC tower - it’s already getting expensive to service the thing. But, the programmers broke down and admitted that telnet access over the Internet would be acceptable. Times have changed. Assuming the DSL line stays up, it can be a lot faster for big file transfers. Of course, none of the staff does any file transfers - we just need to check in with the online email system, which several people use to store text files. Using the web server for this never caught on, which means that someone working at an off-site author event or something is out of luck - they won’t be able to access the system.
After a few people started telnetting over the Internet from their home PCs, they started coming to me with tech support issues. I couldn’t really help them - I didn’t have any hands-on experience. So eventually, I got some. It tied in to my console trouble on this server: I had just installed the very program I needed to telnet in to work. The only problem was getting the function keys right and the screen layout to look nice. Once that’s done, it works like a charm. When I log on to this server, I like to maximize the window, but that wouldn’t match the way this other box paints the terminal screen. Sorry, you’ll just have to imagine it.
This is also my opportunity to talk about readable fonts: The only monospace font I can stand is Lucida Console 14pt. Going from 12 to 14 on a screen gives you double the thickness to the glyphs with only an 8% enlargement. 14 can be too big for some screens, and you probably can’t tile windows with the font so big. I just spotted a campaign to ban the Comic Sans font, which made me laugh.
So now that I’ve mastered the tricks of PuTTY, the free telnet client for Windows, our new author events scheduler (this might need explanation…) wants to work remotely with a Mac.
I heard a rumor that it could be done. It seemed like a lot of trouble, though… Isn’t OS X built atop BSD Unix? Wouldn’t such a system have a native telnet ability? I suppose Windows has a telnet client, too, and for some reason I couldn’t use that. So there must be more than meets the eye here.
It was at about this time that I stumbled on this old discussion at Slashdot about ANSI terminal emulation in Mac OS X. It doesn’t look like there has been much of a solution - at least on the freeware front. So, now I’ve been directed to dataComet. Of course, I don’t have a machine to try it out on - there’s a 30-day free trial, and then the license is $70 for the SSH version.
Oh yes, the explanation: We used to have one full-timer who did all author event coordination, staffing most events, and gift buying. She worked a lot of 70-hour weeks, though. She left to work at a gift shop one block from her house. Her job(s) have been divided up further and further ever since. This actually creates the occasional problem with the right books not arriving for the event, but it’s rare.
This new person has been working part-tine in the store for a while, and now she also does the event booking. This is the nebulous, keeping your finger on the pulse sort of work that can benefit from telecommuting. At one place she was working, she had a PC on her desk, but she didn’t have the authority to install software. I object to the whole notion of terminal emulators as ‘software’ - they’re really just ‘settings’. Which brings me to a pet peeve: Browsers enable secure protocols like https. How is SSH any different? It doesn’t alter the client system at all. Telnet should be second nature in these ‘borrowed computer’ situations. But, your mileage may vary: Different employers will have different attitudes about what you’re allowed to use their workstations for. I got the impression that this particular employer would have been okay with a lot of frivolous web surfing off the clock, so what a shame she couldn’t easily telnet somewhere and do something more constructive, just as you might briefly look at personal email, write a blog post, or check bank balances as long as you’re not spending all day doing it.
Saturday I have a date to guide her through the installation process. Not that I have any specific experience with it - just some general knowledge. And I intend to collect a little of that specific experience.
Posted in olssons, computer-interface | 2 comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:44:00 GMT
No silly, it’s Rock Band the Video Game.
One of the bars in my neighborhood has installed the video game and lets people play on Tuesday nights. It used to be karaoke. People got tired of karaoke, the staff more than anyone, I’m guessing. Two things worry me about this game.
First, it’s similar to the nostalgic exercise of playing old ‘hit’ songs to evoke a golden past. Just as with karaoke, you align yourself with the pleasant memory and live vicariously through the cultural product of the recorded song. Not all of this is a bad thing. But, I’m beginning to sense the pathos of it: People taking excessive association with a life they never lived, instead of doing something new, creative, and possibly just as fun. By this method we abdicate. The future is less rich. I don’t worry too much though - I imagine future teenage rebellions to invigorate culture in our wake. This is another wave of the stultifying effects of reproduction on our relationship to the works of art.
Second, and more disturbing is the bad feeling I get from all of the members of this video game family: “Dance, Dance Revolution” and “Guitar Hero” have been popular in Japan first. The games had to be ‘localized’ for American shores by stocking them with the pop songs from our charts. Every one of these games operates on the same basic principle: Simon Says. When I was a kid, we had the electronic Simon game with the four big buttons that lit up in a sequence that you had to repeat… In my mind, all the fancy guitar and drum controllers and the silly rock avatars playing on their virtual stage on the monitor do not change the basic principle at work here: You do what the machine tells you. Your score quantifies how well you obey. Is this the future? People sure look like they’re having fun doing it. “The first Matrix was designed to be a perfect world - Where everyone would be happy…”
And, the funny thing about the songs themselves: They’re not all necessarily popular hits - they’re specifically considered ‘hard rock’. This makes sense with the Black Sabbath or Soundgarden. But then you get to the grey areas - Weezer makes some sense, but R.E.M.? I could go on. We all have our personal favorites. I suspect there is some interest in crushing this out of us, though. Marketing is certainly much easier if we all like the same stuff for the same reasons.
Well, I’ve never played. My friends have tried to push me into it. It probably is fun, I won’t doubt that. Most nights when I’ve seen it, I get a real serious craving to go home and play my real guitar. I’ve even said it out loud. My reclusive habits are not the issue. It would be fun to jam with some people on other real instruments. I’m just not sure I know many people who do play. The game has levels you can set individually for the four players. It simplifies the task by presenting more or less decimated ‘fake-book’ sequences you have to match. The microphone checks your pitch and ‘gate times’ to score. There are bonuses for improv in clearly marked sections.
Posted in music, ontology, bar-scene, computer-interface | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:53:00 GMT
I just started reading Donald A. Norman’s “The Design Of Future Things” this morning. I picked it up based on a seductive combination of Norman’s reputation and the futuristic car-like product shown on the cover.
I am really on board with his ideas about the dialog between humans and ‘intelligent’ machines. I may not be too psyched about his example of car navigation systems - given my recent anti-car diatribes - but they feel like a perfect stand-in for a range of assistive technologies. And they encapsulate the problem of delegated authority in machines. Most aspects of a computer operating system are like this: I sure don’t want to have to manage my own file allocation tables or virtual memory swapping, but sometimes I want to have some say in the process. Most of our intelligent machines give us the stark choice. “It’s MY way or the Highway.”
The middle is a hotly contested territory for some reason. On the other hand, I think of it as the only place to be. These so-called intelligent machines are not yet truly intelligent. At best, they are the canned knowledge of experts. Not to good for adapting to reality. We need to be able to negotiate with our machines, but the designers don’t normally value this. Neither should be a slave of the other - it’s another teamwork situation.
Posted in books, computer-interface | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:06:00 GMT
After my Blogger Issues, I finally broke down and explored the help available on their site. The situation is dismal, but there was one ray of hope. Let me explain.
I administer the writings of several blog writers on the Olsson’s site. The very simple act of publishing a post has proven very problematical. (Sorry if that was excessive alliteration…) I continue to get the message saying “Your publish is taking longer than expected”, but of course it’s only been 30 seconds. How long do they think it’s going to take? What happened to the good old days, when each post published on the first try.
As you might imagine, with six blogs, all individually configured, I got pretty good at crafting the settings. The process of posting causes Blogger to log in via FTP to the Olsson’s server at Network Solutions, and publish new editions of the files that change with the new post. In most cases this takes less than a minute. I just naturally assume that because it has worked correctly in the past, each of the six worked independently, all of the FTP settings are under my control, and Blogger doesn’t offer much in the way of troubleshooting during the process… I assume they broke something on their end.
I also just sort of assumed that because it would affect tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people, that it would get attention from the squeaky wheels out there, and I could freeload on the solution. But no. More realistically, the problem affects some subset of the population using Blogger. Even still, that must be a sizable group, right? Even if it isn’t fixed, there ought to be a Frequently Asked Question about it, right?
The help at blogger is extremely useless to me. That’s not to say that nobody else will get any use out of it: It’s good basic introductory material. It is also in the naive mode of the instruction manual, not the troubleshooting guide: It describes how things ought to work. And for most people, most of the time, it probably does work that way. At least that means that I’m special. Yippee.
Next, I investigated the “Google Groups” area. This humbled me. Other people are having much bigger problems. Your blog could be reported as spam. You could be getting error messages when you try to upload photos. You could be unable to log in at all… But there we go: I found a few people who remarked that they are having problems like mine. All in the last couple of days. And,… There is no response. It’s been 24 hours since I posted mine, and nobody has addressed the problem.
So we wait.
This is one of those situations… The interface guides me. I don’t have a lot of choices about how to push the publish button. When something is genuinely wrong, I get a warning, suggestions, and an opportunity to correct the problem. When I used to get the occasional publishing error, there was diagnostic information. Nothing about my account or my server is implicated in how the Blogger interface behaves. So what’s the secret? Why is is behaving that way?
Somewhere along the way, I did spot an interesting complaint: The Google Group is mainly lost souls crying in the wilderness. Maybe the theory was that visitors might have some helpful insights to share. But, of course, as a tech support person, I know that the devil is in the details… There isn’t much I can say to most of these people that would actually help. Sometimes it’s a bit of “Did you try X?” or, “Are you aware of Y?”. And it only takes a quick inventory of all the little details I had to straighten out to get it to work in the first place. There’s no magic bullet for any of that. All the information came from some source, and I collected and refined it meticulously.
Posted in computer-interface, web-craft, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 29 May 2008 17:23:00 GMT
I tried to accomplish two little chores today, and I have had very limited success. I guess I can’t say I failed completely - and if I want to be optimistic, I should say I’ve made a pretty good start. It feels like one of my ‘evil’ sudoku puzzles, where I can stare for a few minutes and see nothing, then suddenly set off a cascade of logic, filling in ten, maybe twenty, numbers, only to find myself stuck for a few minutes more. You see, I now have an excuse for doing those puzzles: They provide a perfect analogy.
It’s Text. In a Box. How Hard Can It Be?
Windows is very opaque when you first start out programming for it. The details: I have a free C++ IDE (Integrated Development Environment), an extensive help file with reference to a thousand topics in gory detail. I am free to browse the header files - though that’s an exercise in frustration, too. I also have a book or two. The books have some typos that took me a while to discover.
By working through some of the examples in the book, I was able to compile programs that launched a simple window on the screen and painted a rectangle, or an ellipse… Wow. I eventually worked my way up to more complicated graphics, menu items, and form controls. I even had some success reading from files and displaying… something. Based on what was read. For example, I was able to display header information from a Wave file (sound) and scroll through a graph of the wave in a sort of oscilloscope trace(!) Forget writing to files. I never got that far.
So I’ve been thinking that I often open a text editor to check the contents of a text file. Sometimes I just need a text ‘viewer’: A little widget window that can sit in the corner for visible reference. I would like to be able to display the text in a larger font, since it is an area of the screen I won’t be concentrating on - only glancing at briefly. I don’t think I am going to accomplish all that today. And, I actually got a program running to display an overly particular factoid. It’s just in a standard system font that I need to squint at to read. (My screen has a nice big DPI - and I could probably use new glasses.)
And I think: Okay, I will now take the next step - add code to select a bigger font. Suddenly I’m awash in EnumFontFamiliesEx() and GetTextMetrics(). I notice that in HTML it isn’t nearly as hard to pick a font name and size. So it won’t happen today, for the eternally recurrent fact that I have the explanation, but it doesn’t make any sense to me.
So HTML Is Easier, You Say?
Back to something I do on a daily basis: The Blog. And, a little pet peeve I thought I ought to be able to fix in a matter of minutes: The page where I edit posts does not take advantage of the full width of the browser window.
I’m very visual, so when I am working on something, I like to see it. Is that too much to ask? Can my document fill the page, please? I don’t know why I have a 1440 by 1050 pixel screen if I’m going to be forced to write in a little 40 column box. I insert a link here and there, and these URLS can be quite long - I’d love to have some more width to work with.
The post editing screen has the main panel taking up 85% of the browser. With lots of nice white margin on both sides. Which is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen: Margins and layout are for end users. I’m trying to work here. Would you condemn 15% of your desk as unusable empty space? No. You’d use that space to work with. Similarly, I can reduce my browser window if I don’t want to use all that screen space - say, I want other windows to be visible with references, like I might keep a thesaurus on my desk. I managed to fix that. But, it wasn’t what I would call “easy”. The page code shows the URL for the stylesheet. But this URL is a redirect: The blog tool, written in Ruby, intercepts the URL at the server and sticks some extra directory path information. So…
"/blog/stylesheets/administration.css"
is something more complicated that I need to know if I’m using FTP, or the command line:
"/rails_auto_apps/blog/public/stylesheets/administration.css"
Once I figured that out, I changed that 85% width to 100%. It took more page refreshes than it should have, but eventually I got it to work. So, I succeeded at one thing. That’s pretty good for an entire day. When it came time to change the text edit box, things were not so simple.
I can see in the page code where the rows and columns are set in the HTML form that lets me type the blog post contents. But that whole page is the output of a Ruby script. That’s simple enough - but which script is it?
Now I’m getting really ticked off. I start digging through eRuby files ending in “.rhtml” that all do real work, even though I couldn’t get one of these files to print out the date and time. Is the server running them, or are they just fodder for ‘Ruby on Rails’. It’s not clear from the source. But as I navigate through the directory structure and browse the code in the rhtml files, I start to comprehend the purpose of each part. The form I want isn’t the only form generated, but I’m picking up the clues as to the purpose of each one. I locate the call to generate my form, and… rows are specified, but columns are not. I bumped up the number of rows from 25 to 35, and that worked. Maybe I can change a bunch more stuff I wasn’t trying to change. Maybe that will serve as some sort of consolation.
For the life of me, I can’t figure out where the width of this text edit box is stored - read from a data file somewhere or called as a literal in the code. I see the call and it’s not there. I don’t see any good candidates for such a data file.
Like I said, if I want to be optimistic, I’ll say that I’ve learned something. But that’s the way it always is: I learn something and accomplish nothing.
This Blog Tool Has a Web Page.
I wonder if it is helpful.
No. Sorry. It isn’t. The Leetsoft page isn’t loading at the moment (did it ever?). And Planet Typo is a bunch of seriously advanced language tweaks for Ruby on Rails. Yes, okay, some day I may reach that point. But, it doesn’t seem very likely if I can’t find help on modifying a single number in the software.
So then, I notice a link to Nuby On Rails - clearly a site directed at beginners. Nice Ruby/Newbie pun there, guys. But what you actually have here is one more blog of obscure code invention. I can’t see how that helps me. I gather there are some community standards about how to package your Ruby code. That’s nice. I might need to know that some day. There is also a portable documentation system for ruby. That sure will come in handy once I can understand what the documentation says.
It looks like I hit one more dead end - based on the fact that none of these sites are the front door: There is no “Getting Started” anywhere that I have been. Where did any of these people ever get started?
Posted in computer-interface, programming, web-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 25 May 2008 18:57:00 GMT
I’ve been troubled lately by my frequent inability to remember to attach a file when I send an email. Quite often, I send files to people over email. As I’m sure you all must now by now, it’s a fairly easy thing to do. Most email programs have a big button with a paperclip icon that says attach. No matter: I continue to key in the addresses I’m sending to and a reasonable subject line, then click send. Sure, it’s my fault. But I still blame the computer, and I think there is a fundamental reason why it is right to do so…
Simply put, computers are more reliable than people. I have typically just edited the file I want to send - I’ve got ‘file on the brain’. Cognitively, the next move I make has the file as an implicit attachment. When I begin ‘composing’ the email, that file is still floating around in my short-term memory. The part of my brain that ticks off the steps in the process has mistakenly crossed that one off the list as completed.
There are a lot of things I do on a computer where the task is ‘structured’. The computer follows a script and funnels me into following along. As I mentioned recently, I’ve designed some of these scripts. The ability to design them, however, does not make me infallible. Much of what you do on a computer is ‘free-form’. That’s nice when you are exploring possibilities, but it’s cumbersome when it makes you responsible for all the little details of a process. There are several ways I might send these file-attachment emails, and it’s no beauty contest. Each way has pitfalls, or presentation problems.
I’ve noticed that there is a big trade-off of another nature: Let’s say I write a script to handle the details. What happens when the details change? How much is safe to hard-code? When I need to make some obscure script change, will I know to do it? Will I remember where to go, or will I have to hunt for it? Will I even still be around?
This all relates to something else: In many computer environments, users are not allowed to make programming changes, even if this is just a batch script of some variety. GUI machines discourage the practice, and furthermore, I’ve found it time-consuming just to locate information on program APIs anyway. I can write those scripts at will, but I don’t always know how to code each step. By about this point, I’ve forgotten what I was doing in the first place.
Posted in computer-interface, programming | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 13 May 2008 15:07:00 GMT
