I’ve been reading a few blogs/journals on various kinds of usability. The alert box focuses on web usability, but a lot can be extracted an applied to computer in general. flow|state is seldom updated, but is pretty humourous, as is The Daily WTF which has a couple nuggets, usually in the form of amusing error popups that people have submitted.

All of which have made me pay attention a little bit more to usability in terms of computing, and now I have my own WTF moment to complain about. Here at work, we use a bug tracking system, I won’t name names, but it’s got some good points, and a whole lot of bad points. It has both a client agent, and a web based agent, but I never use the web based one since one would tend to time out all the damn time, so I stick with the client one.

I also have a mouse (quelle surprise) but it’s an optical mouse, which has the nasty habit of just sort of flinging the cursor where ever the hell it feels like putting it, luckily bounded by the screen itself. Of the four corners of the screen, I wonder which is the most dangerous, also think of a maximized application. Say, like bug tracking software, where I had a bug report all typed up, but I couldn’t submit it. I was waiting on a build, and waiting, and waiting, but I have to use the thing for other purposes, and as it’s a sort of crappy MDI app, I can manage it. So then my mouse picks a time when I’m just clicking to fling the mouse off to the top right of the screen, where my click was interpreted as a click on the close button. Gasp, if this had been the web version of the app, it would have just closed the window and I would have lost everything in my unsubmitted bug report.

But ho, I was saved by the application asking me if I wanted to Save the Bug, Discard the Bug, or Cancel. I clicked cancel, which has saved me from similar problems in Word, EditPad and virtually every other program I can think of. I guess the program interpreted my cancel as being “Cancel the closure of the child window”, but then it went ahead and closed the whole program anyway, so much for the child. There, thank you, no better than web based, glad it takes space on my hard drive.

If it would just start timing me out too, now that would be shiny.

No, the story itself isn’t worth 50 dollars, the story itself involves 50 dollars.

I’ve thought about this story recently, and I see that I don’t appear to have a record of it online already, which is odd. But anyway, here’s the best that I can remember the story right now. It is always a painful ordeal trying to reconcile conflicting memories of the past with friends, so I’ll say mine is definitive in all ways except in the ways that it isn’t.

Anyway, this occured many years ago, when I was in 1A in University, or actually, it was probably in my work term at Schneiders in between 1A and 1B. I was with 5 other friends, not all of whom I can recall, so I won’t bother giving a list. But I beleive there were six of us total, and also, I know most definitely we were at Mel’s, a diner in Waterloo.

We were there, in a booth, 3 on each side, eating an late (or very early morning) breakfast I beleive. I don’t know about anyone else, but I do recall seeing a strange man in a booth further back, but I didn’t pay him much mind, until he approached us. Given the noise, my position in the booth, and my general inability to pick a voice out of anything but silence, I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying. Then he put down six 50 dollar bills, one for each of us. And after some discussion afterwards, everyone putting together what they had heard (apparently I wasn’t the only one who had trouble understanding him) he had told us to find some person to give the money to, and gave a name (which actually had two derivations that I recall between us, and we later could find neither in phone books or the university directory). If we should fail to find the person, he said, we were to keep the money, as he said he knew we were poor university students. But, he also said, if we found this person, we should tell them the numbers 6, 3, 1, and that they would understand (my mind was disconnecting from this point). Finally, one of the things that came out of our notes on the encounter, was that he said that he didn’t like men for one reason or another, okay, jolly good.

He then left the restaurant, sort of shoo’ed away by a waiter. Who then told us to just take the money and not make a fuss about it. That last bit struck me as odd, it’s like he was trying to avoid a scene or something, when a scene in a half empty diner late at night is hardly devestating for them, hell, I’ve had friends vomit over their tables. The waiter then told us that he was in earlier, gave a waitress some really large tip (in the hundreds) and just not to worry about it and to stay calm, etc, etc.

Anyway, out of the six people, I am the last, as far as I know, to still have the fifty. One person I beleive gave theirs to charity some time later, another beleives they accidentally spent it thinking it was one of their own fifty’s. Mine is still in my wallet, like decoration, like the condom. I don’t know if I will ever get rid of it before it disintegrates, it’s a fixture.

As is this story.

I bought a USB Harddrive a while ago, during a boxing week sale from Futureshop’s online store. Got it last week but I haven’t really put it through its paces. I tried a couple dummy big files to check the speed, and it’s pretty swift, but I’m just not sure if I trust it. James had one that, if I recall, gave him some difficulty (stuff vanished if I recall correctly). My brother has one that had the dire warnings that if you turn it off or otherwise unplug it before telling windows of your strong desire to do so (strong because you may try to stop the device, and windows will think better of it and decide that, no, now is not the best time, so go away) then you risk losing all your data, the drive itself, windows (oddly) and half your worldly possessions. So what about power outtages, my computer has lived through those… does it affect external drives more or something, are the manufacturers just covering their… assets?

Which reminds me, have to find room on the UPS for the plug, crazyness. Had to pull out the lamp (which was just on a surge protected plug).

Anyway, the point of this litle entry was just something I noticed in the included quick-start guide (which is listed in the box as included, as is a driver CD… what I’m sure they meant to say was that the quick-start guide was a PDF on the CD which still and confusingly just says “Driver” on it. I know, easy to get those confused, anyway, in the area dealing with the simple backup utility provided:

For important data, every month at least ‘data check’ some files after Backup Task
completed.
If possible, it’s recommended to backup your important data to other media or device
as back up copy incase of failure or accident.

I see, the very device some people would have bought to back up their internal drives to is now recommending that people backup their backup. And also, it’s recommended to backup.. as back up. incase. of failure or accident. Well, I’m sold. And I’m sure when I buy my DLT units and carts that the manual will suggest that I should back up my data on stone blocks for safe keeping, but to keep them out of that acid rain. The stone block people will then suggest getting someone with a really good memory. Not that any ’serious’ corporate or small business users should back up onto USB drives as such, but I found it funny enough to ignore that opinion.

Anyway, not sure if I should trust the thing, but I figure it might hold some of my episodes before burning them off on DVD I do download lots of… things…. things to make us go…. we look for things. (Somewhere in Hong Kong, Curtis is feeling summoned by that reference) But I should probably break it in for some general backup purposes or some such, it’s a 160GB, and my two internal 120GB ones give me 400GB of what-the-hell-am-I-hoarding capacity. The fact is, I’m not sure. I mean, I have lots of episodes of things, but every time I check the size of some of the higher folders, I dunno, it’s like all the socks I lost over my lifetime have found their way onto my platters and are filling them up. I think I might need a good format soon enough, clear away the cruft.

I remember on my P2 when I had to reformat and install XP fresh after every reboot because of… something I never quite nailed down, man, that really teaches you what you need and what you don’t. I guess I hang onto stuff just because I haven’t suffered a recent catastrophic loss of data that makes me start fresh.

Fates: That is not a proposal.

This is a picture by azuzephre who I’m guessing is the same as this guy.

Anyway, I don’t know why I find this picture so fascinating, and also incredibly sad at the same time. Sort of reminds me of some situations of my own…, not that I’ve ever eaten someone’s intended gift, but it strikes a chord with me for some reason. Also, vaguely the sense of having tried, made an effort, for something, and also ruining it all by yourself. I dunno, a simple little picture, but for some reason I associate something with it.

I made you some tea…

I’ve read this article a few times now, and it’s hilarious, and unfortunately true. It’s off an MS blog written by one Larry Osterman. The link to the article is here but I’ll post the full text just in case the source vanishes or something, this post should live on. Every time I read it I’m reminded of Deep Thoughts and the Reindeer Effect, no one knows what it is, but it would be fun to say “Gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the Reindeer Effect”. Not an exact quote, but from memory, anyway, on with the Dancing Bunny Problem:

———————————–

Beware of the dancing bunnies.

I saw a post the other day (I’m not sure where, otherwise I’d cite it) that proclaimed that a properly designed system didn’t need any anti-virus or anti-spyware software.

Forgive me, but this comment is about as intellegent as “I can see a worldwide market for 10 computers” or “no properly written program should require more than 128K of RAM” or “no properly designed computer should require a fan”.

The reason for this is buried in the subject of this post, it’s what I (and others) like to call the “dancing bunnies” problem.

What’s the dancing bunnies problem?

It’s a description of what happens when a user receives an email message that says “click here to see the dancing bunnies”.

The user wants to see the dancing bunnies, so they click there. It doesn’t matter how much you try to disuade them, if they want to see the dancing bunnies, then by gum, they’re going to see the dancing bunnies. It doesn’t matter how many technical hurdles you put in their way, if they stop the user from seeing the dancing bunny, then they’re going to go and see the dancing bunny.

There are lots of techniques for mitigating the dancing bunny problem. There’s strict privilege separation – users don’t have access to any locations that can harm them. You can prevent users from downloading programs. You can make the user invoke magic commands to make code executable (chmod +e dancingbunnies). You can force the user to input a password when they want to access resources. You can block programs at the firewall. You can turn off scripting. You can do lots, and lots of things.

However, at the end of the day, the user still wants to see the dancing bunny, and they’ll do whatever’s necessary to bypass your carefully constructed barriers in order to see the bunny

We know that user’s will do whatever’s necessary. How do we know that? Well, because at least one virus (one of the Beagle derivatives) propogated via a password encrypted .zip file. In order to see the contents, the user had to open the zip file and type in the password that was contained in the email. Users were more than happy to do that, even after years of education, and dozens of technological hurdles.

All because they wanted to see the dancing bunny.

The reason for a platform needing anti-virus and anti-spyware software is that it forms a final line of defense against the dancing bunny problem – at their heart, anti-virus software is software that scans every executable before it’s loaded and prevents it from running if it looks like it contain a virus.

As long as the user can run code or scripts, then viruses will exist, and anti-virus software will need to exist to protect users from them.

Written by Larry Osterman

As I’m just really bored, I’ve decided to post about broken google.

For the first time I’ve ever seen, the google main page image is broken, looks like they were trying to put up a st patrick’s day related one, ah well.

Here’s the screencap

As of 11:53pm, it’s still broken.

Note: This is google.ca I’m talking about here

I’m really starting to dislike this month, not this instance of it in particular, but this month in general, as a month. It contains one of the more annoying days of the year, Valentine’s Day. Now, I dislike it anyway, the day, because basically it is just an attempt to get us to buy slips of ink covered cardboard, dead and soon to be rotting vegitation, and wax covered calories in boxes shaped like stretched labia… for someone whom we’re already presumed to have feelings for. A special day seems needless, and a moneygrab. Yes.

Except, the real irritation is that it’s a day where everyone is quite visibly in pairs, and nature abhors the single. And it provides a good benchmark, a stone in the road that one finds on each annual circle to remind themselves that nothing has changed, and, in this case, are now significantly worse.

Alas, I also find that if romantic disasters of any kind happen to me, they will happen in this month too, somewhere, as they have before, have now… and dare I stoop to beleive that they are likely to happen again in future. Basically, I’m going to say I don’t know. I put a lot of effort into convincing myself that nothing good will ever happen to me, based solely on the known nothingness I have come to experience… that used to be good enough for me. But I’ve also come to hope for things so extremely that I figure they must happen, cannot help but happen… to find that it happening was so far from what was likely or even physically possible that most would laugh at the prospect. So I can just as easily beleive in the inevitability of the good as well as the bad, and although I have experienced, I feel, a lot more of the bad than the good, I guess I might as well reduce myself down to what is actually knowable. Namely, nothing.

So I resolve my soul to free, through expecting and, through some extension, hoping for nothing, for hope drives expectation. I will endevour never to expect the good, or the bad, and live in a continuous series of moments, and whatever happens, happens, and no patterns exist.

I also have to remember that wise old saying, which I cannot remember entirely, but goes something like this: No matter how great you think someone is, someone somewhere is sick of their crap.

I was taught how to play a game I thought I already knew, but of course, it originally being Chinese, I had played a bastardized version.

The short version is you shuffle the tiles, make 4 rows of 2 high stacked 18 tiles. There are some dice involved and you roll to decide where you start taking tiles (this bit gets fuzzy for me, from memory) and you take your tiles. One end of the remaining gap in the rows is the beginning, the other is the end. You take turns, taking a new tile from the beginning, and discarding another one. You can pick up the tile in the discard area only if it is the last one discarded, unless you can win from picking the last tile discarded by either player, in which case you can do that, but only if it causes you to win. Also, you can only pick up if it completes a ‘pattern’, and you must then set the pattern down for all to see, and continue with a discard.

If you have any flower tiles at the start, you must show them, and pick as many tiles from the end of the rows, and if you pick one up in the course of the game, you immediately set it down and take a new tile from the end.

To win (ignoring the complicated scoring system), you need a pair of something, and then the rest must be ‘patterns’. Patterns are either ’straights’, made up of the same kind of number tiles (chinese numbers, bams (sticks), or circles), which are in sequences of 3, no more, no less… or they can be 3 of a kind, or 4 of a kind, or something. If you pick up a discarded tile (following the rules of whos you can pick up) to complete a set, you must say something, I prefer ‘Yangzi’, which is like a Chinese Yatzee or something. Or yell ‘bingo’, or ‘you sank my scrabbleship’.

This game was bloody confusing, especially for one I thought was matching two tiles and taking them off the table, gah.

Here are the fun tiles:

These are the sticks, or bams, they are numeric, and fairly easy to understand, except the bird for number 1, which is baffling.

These are wheels, or circles, they are also numeric, colours are meaningless. At least this is easy to count.

These are the chinese numbers, and the hardest bit for me. 1, 2 and 3 are easy, like roman numerals on their side, 4 is easy enough. 5 is just a jumble of crap, which is how I remembered it. 6 looks like a little hut to me. 7 looks like an upsidedown 7. 8 is a lamda, and 9 is like a cursive r. Lovely, it’s great trying to work out if you have a straight if you can’t understand the numbers

These are the cardinal directions of the wind, and the seasons, just match them up, lest headaches set in.

These are, apparently, dragons. When I played, I thought the first was a dagger thing, the middle one was just “the ugly”, and the last one was, cleverly enough, “rectangle”

These are so easy that they are like a blind spot, see a flower, lay it down.

They tried to explain scoring, but I threatened to kill myself, so they stopped.

I’ll go play the tile matching game now.

So I made the mistake in trying to upgrade my computer yesterday, yes, should have learned, but I never do.

I went out and bought a DVD writer, an LG 16X Super Multi DVD/CD Rewriter (why do they need the super, ugh), and put it in the computer… restart….. windows has detected signigicant change in your computer hardware and must reauthenticate within 3 days. (changing one component is significant?)

So I was going to phone in the code like I did when I first bought the thing, except, where the code was supposed to be, nothing…. the screen had all the info on it, but it seems it forgot to display the code I needed to phone in. Contacting customer support helped nothing, as they hadn’t seen this problem before, and upper support claimed the computer, given it’s serial number, was supposed to be running 64bit windows which was impossible and what the hell are Staples, Proteva and Synergio respectively. That got us nowhere.

Finally, rebooting the computer seemed to fix it. I’m sick of that, no reason for it to fail, but it did…. fine, phoned in the code, authenticated windows again, and vowed to pirate ever after.

Not that any of this helped though, the DVD writer doesn’t quite work. I’ve got that drive, and also a simple DVD ROM drive not 2 years old in it, but when trying to copy a DVD disc to disc (even a DVD I had just burned myself with some test files on it) it would immediately crap out saying it couldn’t be done, but of course, gave no reason. This is in Nero Express, came with the drive.

Couldn’t even make an image from a DVD that sits in the old drive, had to move it to the writer drive to even save an image to the hard drive…. so I took some DVD my father wanted copied, a memorial movie about a company he was involved with, it had been burned too, so I figured there shouldn’t be any problem. After burning 2 copies of it via the image-to-harddisk method, here are the results.

My Computer’s DVD software:
Original Disc – Freezes and crashes DVD software when accessing some menus
Burned Disc – same thing in the same places

My parents’ new standalone DVD player:
Original Disc – Plays fine
Burned Disc – Says the disc is incompatible with the player, even though the manual says it can play virtually every format, including and explicitly the one I used.

My brother’s old standalone DVD player:
Original Disc – Plays fine
Burned Disc – plays for a while, craps out in some places, turning the player off.

That’s some consistency. I should have stopped when I was ahead (merely wanting a DVD writer, rather than having one, and wanting to tear my hair out)

At least writing simple files to the damn thing seems to work, so I can finally shift some crap off my computer, gig’s and gig’s of star trek. god I’m lame.