Chatty pony
May. 18th, 2006 06:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoAccording to LJ, this is my 500th post. What I find more astonishing though, is the fact that I'm getting very close to my 10,000th comment posted. Well, no one said horses didn't have big noses.
Yesterday afternoon we were entertained by watching a huge thunderstorm front roll by. The weather alarm never went off (later I discovered that someone had changed the station frequency, so we were listening to the wrong county) but the weather service radar map and what we could see through the glass curtain wall to the north was clear enough. Only the edge of the storm grazed us, but there was some hard rain and bean-sized hail for a moment.
The new software is running smoothly. A few complaints about the change, mostly related to filtering which is not our choice but is required by law. Everyone but politicians knows that filters don't really work. However, in switching from one system to another, the things that get blocked are bound to change. One family is saying they will write a letter to the library board complaining that they can no longer get to neopets.com.
That one surprised us a bit, both that anyone would think it was that important and that it would be blocked. I went and checked, and yes, indeed, it is blocked. The interesting thing is, the block is not from the filter software at all. It appears to be on a banned domain list hard-coded by the software vendor. An e-mail to them confirmed this, and produced a two page list of domains that were blocked. Most of them I've never heard of, but shockwave.com is on there. The issue, oddly enough, seems to be excessive use of Flash animation, which apparently overloads the system and causes throughput to plummet. As a dialup user, I can agree with that. Flash is garbage from the devil himself, wasting bandwidth and time to transfer a seven megabyte file just to put some pointless and irritating animation on your screen. It wouldn't be so bad if web designers used it to actually convey useful information, but mostly they use it for advertising or pointless frills.
So now even in its absence, Flash garbage causes irritation as we get complaints from people that "it's not working."
No work today, off to the dentist to have teeth floated this morning. Bai.
Yesterday afternoon we were entertained by watching a huge thunderstorm front roll by. The weather alarm never went off (later I discovered that someone had changed the station frequency, so we were listening to the wrong county) but the weather service radar map and what we could see through the glass curtain wall to the north was clear enough. Only the edge of the storm grazed us, but there was some hard rain and bean-sized hail for a moment.
The new software is running smoothly. A few complaints about the change, mostly related to filtering which is not our choice but is required by law. Everyone but politicians knows that filters don't really work. However, in switching from one system to another, the things that get blocked are bound to change. One family is saying they will write a letter to the library board complaining that they can no longer get to neopets.com.
That one surprised us a bit, both that anyone would think it was that important and that it would be blocked. I went and checked, and yes, indeed, it is blocked. The interesting thing is, the block is not from the filter software at all. It appears to be on a banned domain list hard-coded by the software vendor. An e-mail to them confirmed this, and produced a two page list of domains that were blocked. Most of them I've never heard of, but shockwave.com is on there. The issue, oddly enough, seems to be excessive use of Flash animation, which apparently overloads the system and causes throughput to plummet. As a dialup user, I can agree with that. Flash is garbage from the devil himself, wasting bandwidth and time to transfer a seven megabyte file just to put some pointless and irritating animation on your screen. It wouldn't be so bad if web designers used it to actually convey useful information, but mostly they use it for advertising or pointless frills.
So now even in its absence, Flash garbage causes irritation as we get complaints from people that "it's not working."
No work today, off to the dentist to have teeth floated this morning. Bai.
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no subject
Date: 2006-05-18 10:52 am (UTC)I do have control of the actual filter. I can block or unblock sites at will, something I could not do with the old system. On that, every time we caught kids looking at porn we had to call the software vendor to get the new porn site added to the list of blocked sites. This really is a great improvement.
I chose this because I will spend less time managing it, rather than more. I'd much rather be choosing books for the library and cataloging them, thank you. The old vendor did not respond to bug reports or problems at all, or did so by accusing me of "mismanaging" things. The first time I called them, they insisted there must be a virus in our servers. There was not, of course.
This vendor has been extremely responsive, helpful, and cooperative. They have actually modified the specs of their product several times at my request, and accelerated enhancements so fast that they became standard features in a week's time just because I needed them.
I don't see how you can say it violates Linux standards. The Linux is just that, Linux. There are commercial products running on top of it, and I can configure those but not alter the source code, yes. The Linux advantages are much longer run time without crashes or the need to reboot, much better security against viruses and user abuses, the elimination of half a dozed add-on security products that were needed to make Windows work in a public access environment, and a much lower overall cost, as I've pointed out several times.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-18 01:58 pm (UTC)You have used a tone in this post and it's replies that I really had not expected from you, Tivo, and quite honestly ... I am hurt. You chose from the beginning to see this as an attack, and quite unlike you you decided to simply counter that attack without thinking if it was really what you first thought.
I am not used to this behavior from you.
And I really don't like seeing it.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-18 02:05 pm (UTC)You're right. I see nothing wrong with part of a commercial product being only alterable by the vendor. That is the normal state of things with commercial software products.
If you were to see this side by side with what I just got rid of, I think you'd understand. Even though parts of it are proprietary, I have far more control than I ever had with the old setup. And even though I have more control, it is much easier to exercise that control than it ever was to do what little I could do with the old setup.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-18 04:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-18 05:02 pm (UTC)One of the problems with Comprise has been that every year they have blamed their ills on the hardware not being good enough, or the Windows version not being new enough. A year ago they went too far, demanding that we purchase a dedicated hardware proxy box, a specific and expensive one, or no longer be supported. Since we had made several previous costly purchases of software and hardware in order to retain their support, and yet their support has been worth very little, I finally won out with my pleas to go to something else. Then I had a steep uphill battle to get a non-Windows solution accepted. Now it's in place and working but I'm really tired of being called on to defend the choice. I feel that the smooth conversion (it really has been smooth considering the scope of it) and the already obvious improved reliability just in the first week should be enough to satisfy anyone, but of course folks here on LJ can't see that part of it.