Grrr!

[altivo]

I've said enough before that you know I'm not fond of having internet computers for the public to use. Inevitably we are asked to "teach" people how to use a computer, and they know nothing. Worse, when they can't get something to work, it is always our fault as far as they are concerned. Our machines or software must be defective.

Today, two at once. One who "couldn't access his e-mail". That one turned out to be because he didn't know either his user name or password at Yahoo. Sorry, not our fault, no we can't do a thing about that. No, it isn't our machine that's causing this difficulty. Just because your machine at home "knows" your id and password, that doesn't mean that ours would know it.

The other was, against repeated advice that we give, purchasing tickets with his credit card on our public access workstation. This is not a secure place to use your credit card or access your financial records. Period. But they will insist on doing it. Once the transaction was completed, he couldn't print the receipt or the tickets. The job kept going to the printer, but would come up with "0" pages. He was sure it was our fault. It was because our stupid machines have Linux instead of Windows and a proper browser (by which he meant IE, duh.) So finally he was allowed to use a staff machine with Windows on it. The tickets still wouldn't print. Same symptoms. Turns out that the website is using Flash (!!!??) to handle the receipt and print operation. Jeez! How stupid can you get. Flash is insecure, unreliable, and bug ridden.

This time it wasn't an airline. He was buying tickets for an amusement park. Why he didn't just call their 800 number and buy them, I have no idea. Somehow the computer is "easier" even when it doesn't work and he doesn't know what he's doing. We often have similar problems with airlines though. People buy tickets online and want to print boarding passes, which in some cases just doesn't work. Even on a Windows machine, the things won't print. My only guess is that they assume a printer directly attached to the PC rather than a network device. Or maybe the airlines are using Flash too. How incredibly stupid can they get?

Came home, had dinner, hurried out to the garden to get in the last hour before sunset. Mosquitoes out in force. Did get 18 more tomato plants set out for late season crop if it doesn't freeze too early. I love tomatoes. If I can't get anything else from the garden, I want my tomatoes. Blueberries are starting to ripen, I see.

Looked around for suitable dye plants to use for a workshop on Saturday. Found large quantities of two that I didn't realize I had: curly dock, which is a noxious weed that produces zillions of seeds that no one seems to eat, so it spreads like mad; and fleabane daisy, which is pretty but can take over huge areas. Cut several ounces of each. According to my sources, the curly dock is in fact edible, seeds, leaves and even root. It's in the buckwheat family. A black dye was once made from the roots, but I'm after a deep yellow from the seed heads.

Comments

[silver-kiden.livejournal.com]

there needs to be a competency test that users are required to take before using your computers.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't work. Then I'd have to administer and grade the test. And if they flunked, it would still be "my" fault. ;p

[silver-kiden.livejournal.com]

no, you see, you make it a multiple choice test on the computer that you have to pass to log in. they have to log in with their library card number, then take the test, and if they get more than 2 wrong out of 10, then their library card is stopped from logging in for the day. and if the questions are randomly chosen from a long list of questions, it would constantly rotate. and yes, i thought about this waaaay too much in the past five minutes :p

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, it would be fun, for about an hour. Then the number of irate users would reach critical mass and I'd be lynched.

You see, the "right" to use a free internet computer at the library was apparently guaranteed in the Constitution or something...

[silver-kiden.livejournal.com]

now, you see, i'd just get annoyed with them and tell them that it's not my problem, that if they were too stupid to pass a test that my 5 year old nephew could pass then they had no right to use the computer anyways.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, I do need to keep my job. There are limits beyond which I cannot go, and I already came close to them yesterday.

Fortunately, after these incidents my boss received a cold call from some idiot trying to sell her a "voice over IP" phone system for the library. She had a lot of trouble getting the jerk off the line (she's too polite to hang up on them, as I will do once I'm sure they are idiots) and was mad about it afterward. So I could say, "See, it's your turn to yell about something now."

[nekura-ca.livejournal.com]

I just looked up making and using plant dyes. It looks like a really neat hobby. Do you dye the raw fiber, the yarn, or the finished fabric? I seem to remember seeing somewhere that different fibers can take widely different colours from the same dye.

What colour does the fleabane daisy make?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

*snicker*

Dyeing is a really MESSY hobby. Usually I avoid it for that reason, but since this is a guild activity I thought I'd join in.

Yes, you can get different colors from the same plant, usually just varying shades but sometimes quite striking differences. It's not the fiber itself that makes the difference so much as the mordant used to bind the dye to the fiber. In an experiment years ago, for instance, I used spinach as a dye source. With an aluminum-based mordant, the wool dyed lemon yellow, but with a copper-based mordant the color was bright lime green.

Usually we dye either the cleaned fiber or the spun yarn. You can dye the finished fabric as well, but you get more even color results by dyeing the yarn. Of course if you want tie dye effects or something like batik, the finished fabric is the target.

Fleabane daisies make shades of yellow, pale orange, and tan. The curly dock is darker, at least if you use mature seed heads, and gets into browns and chestnuts as well as deeper yellows.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

Half of PC woes where *I* work seem to be because software companies do not stick to standards. They have a "better way" of doing it. Which is fine as long as your spec matches theirs. Differ from it a bit, and it's a nightmare. The number of third party applications in Windows that "need" root permissions in order to run is just not funny.

"What? Oh no, the user settings for our software are not stored in 'Documents and Settings.' They're in 'Program Files.'"

ARGH!

[cozycabbage.livejournal.com]

Wait, really? I've rarely found a program that puts things in Documents/Settings. I'd never used Documents & Settings until a couple years ago, because I didn't like how Windows would go adding all this empty, useless folders in. I just made my own documents folder on my desktop.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

Documents and Settings is as close as Windows comes to a "home directory." Environment settings for individual users are supposed to be stored here (under a sub folder of the appropriate name.) That allows admins to lock out write access to the rest of the hard drive. That's how it's SUPPOSED to work. But of course if a requirement of a program is to write changes to an area of the disk then that area has to be open for write access.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You are of course free to do whatever you want on your own machine. The thing is, in a networked environment where many people use the equipment and someone has to maintain some sort of control and order over it all, standards become much more important.

If I have to maintain staff equipment, for instance, it becomes a massive problem if Sue puts critical documents in a folder on the desktop, while Mary puts them on a network folder and John puts them all over the hard disk wherever they happen to end up. I can't possibly know or remember the foibles of each user, so we try to enforce a standard behavior so we know what to back up or preserve when replacing a hard disk or upgrading a machine. This is just common sense. Unfortunately, neither users nor programmers ever seem to get it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

"Standards are for wimps" is pretty much a widespread attitude among Windows programmers, yes. It doesn't help, of course, that Microsoft ignores its own standards too. Or that they change the rules with every release of Windows, so programs that work in Win98, WinXP, and Vista are almost bound to violate the standards of at least one.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

My manager is talking about Vista being rolled out trustwide in a few months. We pleaded "at least wait for 7."

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Good luck with that argument. The fact that Vista offers absolutely no useful advantages just carries no weight with those who are inclined to follow the lemmings no matter what.

Fortunately my boss agreed with my "Just say no to Vista" policy from the very beginning.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

I've never had any problems with printing e-tickets/boarding passes, myself; those airlines I've dealt with were all pretty sensible and didn't use anything weird to print things, and also sent you the documents by email as PDF files as well.

Of course, it's not that I have a whole lot of experience flying, so maybe I've just been getting lucky.

But yeah, dealing with people like that is fun, isn't it? I don't mind helping out people who don't know much about things I know more about, but there seems to be a correlation between a lack of knowledge and confidence in one's expertise. Whether it's because (some) people who don't know a lot genuinely don't realize that they aren't experts or whether it's because those who already think they're experts refuse to learn and thus are more likely to stay clueless I don't know, though. (This is a known effect, too.)

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Hey thanks for that link, very interesting reading :)

[schnee.livejournal.com]

You're welcome! :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

PDF files are very likely part of this recurring problem. They are gigantic. The file to print a single page can run to ten megabytes or more. In a networked environment, a huge file can produce errors at several points along the way to the printer, jamming up print queues, tying up the printer in a "processing" state for several minutes or tens of minutes, or worse.

It doesn't help that Adobe has been having security issues and keeps issuing patched versions of both Acrobat and Flash a couple of times a month. De facto standards are usually bad things. You end up with something that's garbage but everyone uses it because of clever marketing. Windows itself is a de facto standard, and a lousy one in my opinion. Adobe software is even worse.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

PDF files don't have to be huge; the ones that Iceland Air sent me for my recent flights are 89 kilobytes each, for example. If any printer's got problems with that size, I'd say it's the printer that's the problem, not the file. :)

I can't really say much about Acrobat, to be honest, because I'm not using it and haven't in ages. PDF itself is an ISO standard, at least.

As for Flash, I can't really say anything about that other than that I haven't ever really had any problems with it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I have had horrible and repeated problems with Flash. It's one of the worst bandwidth hogs out there, for instance, and has many versions which seem to be incompatible with each other.

Yes, PDF files don't HAVE to be huge. But they often are, because the programs that create them make no effort to be efficient. And PDF files are often used for the wrong reasons: to make things look "pretty" rather than to achieve practical needs.

The print layout for an entire novel can fit inside of 10 megabytes, but PDF can make the words "Hello, world" take up more space than that.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

That's true, but a tool shouldn't necessarily be blamed because it can be abused. You can also save a novel as a couple of hundred 300 dpi JPEGs, for instance, which will lead to similar problems - huge file size and an inappropriate format -, but that doesn't mean JPEGs are bad per se.

I personally think PDF has its uses, although those uses aren't specific to PDF as such; there is no reason why it couldn't be a replaced by a better/more open/more efficient/more difficult to abuse format some day.

The same goes for Flash, too. One of my biggest gripes with Flash is that it's a proprietary thing, and it certainly can be abused - and is, disappointingly often; my biggest pet peeve are sites that are done entirely in Flash for absolutely on reason at all, something that runs contrary to everything the Web is really about (and that also totally breaks accessibility while it's at it) -, but not all its uses are bad.

Of course, one might argue that it isn't necessary, and that's certainly true, but what is, ultimately?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

There was a better standard than PDF. It was called "common ground" and was created by Hummingbird Software back in the early 1990s. The files it created were similar in functionality to PDF, but as small as one tenth the size of the PDF for the same page. The basic software to create them was given away for free(!) as was the reader.

Hummingbird had bigger eggs to fry, though, and never spent much effort on marketing Common Ground. It was stomped out of existence by Adobe's multi-million dollar marketing, just as better operating systems were killed by the Microsoft Windows marketing juggernaut

I used Common Ground for about three years. Like Adobe Reader, you had to download a plug-in for the web browser or a standalone application in order to view and print the file. Even though the reader was free and could be easily downloaded, users squawked and resisted and objected to having to download it. No one ever complains about having to do the same for Adobe's huge, piggish applications. I've never understood this attitude, but it's a sort of acceptance of any outrageous thing as long as everyone else is doing it, and a resistance to a very useful thing if it is "different" from what they are accustomed to doing.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

*noddles* That sounds interesting, but I'm not sure what actually would make it a standard (as in "better standard than PDF"). Better solution, perhaps, but what made it a standard?

Mmm, and I think the reason that users generally don't balk at PDF reader software (or Flash, for that matter) is that it's generally preinstalled: if you buy a new computer for personal use, Acrobat Reader etc. is likely on it already, and at the office, these matters aren't usually your own concern, anyway.

Maybe we should all just standardize on DVI files.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The only thing that has made PDF a "standard" is that everyone started using it. The ISO standard (which Adobe violates now) was created after the fact.

These things are de facto standards rather than real ones. If people had accepted and used Common Ground, it would have been a "standard." They never heard of it, so they didn't use it, and it was forgotten instead.

The file format was available, but the reader and generator software for CG was closed source. Someone could have created an open source reader or generator from the file format definition, but it didn't last long enough for that to happen. Adobe stomped it out of existence with their heavy marketing.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

That's certainly true.

(Generally speaking, BTW, I don't think that de facto standards are standards to any less extent than formal standards, as long as there is no significant barrier to reimplementing/reusing them for other vendors; for instance, if somebody comes up with a new kind of screw but doesn't patent it, and if everyone then starts using it, I'd consider it a perfectly good (read: valid) standard even if it's not described in a DIN/EN/ANSI/ISO/... norm. Concerning computer-related standards, chances are that without a formal standard, reimplementation/reuse by 3rd parties will be very difficult at best (if not outright impossible), so standards there aren't really until they actually are made formal standards as well, but I wanted to note this, still.)

Hmm, as for CG (or PDF, or Hummingbird and Adobe), I really can't comment on the whole thing. I'm not sure how to reconcile "Hummingbird had bigger eggs to fry" with "Adobe stomped it out of existence with their heavy marketing", though.

(And also, Adobe's business tactics and ethics - or lack of the latter - non-withstanding, what *actually* made the format better than PDF? I'm genuinely curious, and - to be 100% honest - I'm also wondering whether your dislike for Adobe, their conduct and their software isn't influencing your opinion of PDF as a mere file format as well.)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I already explained that CG was a published format, it produced a file much smaller than PDF, and the coding was smaller and seemed faster. To me that's a better standard.

At the time, Adobe's format was a "secret" though it was eventually reverse engineered and then published when the cat was already out of the bag.

PDF is wasteful of time and resources. The files are huge and clunky, the processing is slow, and Adobe keeps adding "features" that seem to be mainly intended to outfox the competition, without documenting the file format changes so that others can use them in readers or writers.

True, I dislike the way Adobe markets and plays dog in the manger. I will not buy anything from them, though PostScript is included in most printers these days so I still get stuck paying for it indirectly. PostScript is another example of a very bulky, overblown standard that wastes a lot of resources.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

OK - thanks for the explanation, then. :)

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

How about a sign, "No help will be given to dullards"

"Do not use these machines for secure transactions"

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I fully endorse the "Do not use these machines for secure transactions" idea. Of course they'd still do it, but the complaints would get more entertaining:

"I didn't see the sign."
"I didn't read the sign."
"The sign was at a funny angle."
"I didn't think the sign was serious."
"The sign was offensive to me, and I ignored it. Why didn't you set up an inoffensive one?"
"I'm illiterate, and couldn't read the sign. I only use the Internet for pictures of Lindsay Lohan."
"Well, you set the sign up wrong."
"Well, you wrote the sign wrong."
"Well, you attached the sign to the computer wrong."
"I don't let no lousy signs tell me what to do, is this a case of personal revenge?"
"God has given me the right to secure transactions."

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You missed the most common one:

"I thought the sign was meant for someone else, not for me."

We have signs all over asking people not to use their cell phones in the library. These are universally ignored, and the way they shout into their phones makes me think that not only are they blind, they are also very deaf.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

The the rifle came out...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The trouble is, most of these people ignore signs. If they do read the sign, they won't know what a secure transaction is. "I'm not doing a secure transaction, I'm just checking my bank balance/buying airline tickets/trading shares of stock" would be the answer you get.

There's also the widespread assumption that all computers are the same. So whatever works on your home or office computer must work exactly the same everywhere else, and if it doesn't then someone else is at fault, not you. Like the guy yesterday whose e-mail was set up for him by someone else on his home machine. IE was set to remember the password and login for him, so he didn't even know what the values were. So when another machine doesn't know his password or ID, obviously that second machine is somehow "broken."

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

That's why people who use more than one computer as a matter of course are easier to deal with. I still say go with the dullard sign :)