Posts by Terry 6

Re: beancounters were checking lists of Office licenses against users and...

Excel can be used in very simple ways. And then more complex functionality can be mastered as and when needed. It's initial state it's just a ready made table, which immediately places the user one step ahead of creating a WORD table. It then guides users to use simple formulae, or they can readily be looked up, to, say add a column of numbers, or count the size of a list, when they want to seek an easier way to do the job. And it can be used to create a simple flat database by using the columns as fields, (something that used to be available in simple database software that seems to be pretty much extinct now) but is bloody difficult and rather excessive to implement in ACCESS. In other words, Excel has a nice smooth, gentle learning curve for ordinary office workers with a job to do ( and is understandable by managers).

Re: Highlights an ongoing problem

Not Understanding the User Base's Requirements

That's kind of where I left the world of computing.

For a couple of decades there were no "proper" school IT staff supporting primaries.

It was types like me, semi-trained semi-amateurs who ran staff training and supported schools.

Towards the end the schools and my own teaching service had proper local authority IT teams to call on and servers and fancy stuff like that. I slowly began to be less necessary in that role.

But just when I thought I could forget about it and just concentrate on doing my own real job various kinds of new educational and and administrative programmes started to appear. The one thing they had in common is that they weren't teacher friendly. Either not doing the job that was needed or just failing to work for teachers. Classic problems such as having a compulsory field that only made sense or needed information that was only available to, say, the social work team.

Or a really good piece of educational software that defaulted to saving kids' work in a restricted area ( programme folders) where there was no save access, and also suppressed error messages so that no one knew where the work had gone ( which was basically into thin air). Added to which access to the teachers' section where they could change the default was somewhat obscure, to say the least. It took enough teacher time learning the educational aspects of how to use the programme with the kids without a whole extra burden of trying to figure this out. Needless to say a lot of software never got used in any of the many schools I used to visit.

So I found myself trying to a) help teachers around this ( including changes to defaults where possible) and b) sitting with the designers and administrators of the software and saying things like "No teacher, or indeed anyone who wsn't a Social worker/Psychologist/etc would ever think that this sentence meant what you seem to think it means." or "You can't make that a compulsory field because teachers don't have that information" and so on.

But the biggest group was software that just didn't do what the teachers needed it to do, because someone somewhere didn't realise that this wasn't how teachers worked. One, I can't remember what it was, needed teachers to be able to leave the classroom "just for five minutes" for some kind of setting up tasks. Like, yeah, you can just leave 30 7 year old kids when you felt like. What ever it was it never got used.

Re: HP

Having written the previous...

I thought I'd look at he Brother website to see when tehy last updated the drivers. Though their software had been telling me that it was up to date,when I last checked. I found a slightly more recent driver. (2016).

So I installed it. Just like with the HP of many years earlier it killed off the old driver, but then refused to install- insisting that there was a driver installed already ( clearly not version aware).

Printer no longer working I had to go through the usual steps.

Remove all software from previous ( still. in place).

Nope.

Go though registry and manually delete every relevant reference to Brother.

Then it would install.

Do the writers of driver software never test their stuff in the real world.

Re: Out of tree error

Double spacing was required in my student days (typewriters) and single sides was the only way (and also required).

I guess the PC is still just a clever typewriter to some.

Re: HP

Yup. At home an agieng basic laser (Brother HL-1110) for all the routine black printing. A Canon inkjet printer/scanner for colour, which we don't that use much

The people who wrote it said that it would take them weeks to fix, at a cost of ~£5k

Is this how the industry works then?

You sell a duff product and demand loads of cash to make it do what it should have done anyway. That being said, even bloody Microsoft send out fixes each month. Free.

Re: Simple Software Fix

This is just a simpler version to typing a passcode on a phone. You type the key that has the character on it, It is one of four [ 2 abc] for example. But it doesn't matter . And with a car reg it's only 1 of two each time.

That being said, long preceding this, the area round St. Mary's hospital Paddington had parking meters along the front of the hospital that, from one short section to the next, had different parking charge schemes, with different combinations of change required. So the chance of having the right money for your visit, and getting on a meter that took your change, and being able to get the appropriate time period were slim to none.

There was a team of wardens that quite literally went round in circles, continuously. ticketing people who had given up and parked where they could. This being a hospital most people weren't regular visitors who'd know the drill or could just take their time and wait for the right meter. ( Don't give birth yet, I'll be right in when I've found a meter that takes 10ps )

Re: Where did the money go

Yes. I made a mistake typing my car reg no. at the Dartford crossing.(Used some letters from a car I had a few months previously)

Got the letter, phoned and they said the penalty stood, but I could just pay the fee. It's only about £3.

However they don't credit my card with the £3 that went against a non-existant vehicle number, though I had the email confirmation it had been paid.

Two issues, then.

1) I had a confirmation that a fee had been paid at the correct time for a reg number that was mostly correct for mine, but they can't just reconcile the fee paid to the reg number that did cross at that time when requested to. A pretty trivial bit of work.

2) They did not refund a fee paid for a crossing that was not made (by the reg number).

Re: whoops - wrong disk

Yep, back in the time of floppy discs used to make 3 backups of our work files on a Friday. Straight copying in them days and only took a few minutes. Rotating 3 sets of discs so that the b/u would be over an earlier one. One day I copied the bloody things the wrong way. I think I got distracted. Luckily it was the second copy. So I very carefully and with everything crossed, restored from the first one and started again.

Oh btw. Just this very day I restored an image to my home PC which had had a hissy fit for some reason. I'd been running System Restore, which fell over and took out a fully working version of Windows, instead of restoring things that needed to be restored. (My Thunderbird set up. I'd been trying to go back a version and it mucked everything up. It's like they plant depth charges to stop you doing that). The Win10 version of a BSOD. (The one that reassuringly tells you it can't start Windows so it will switch off the computer instead). Grabbed my Macrium boot disk and went to the most recent of the various images I keep stored in a partition on a second internal HDD for just that purpose*. So at least I know that works.

Now I think I should make another boot disc too. Can't be too careful.

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*Also on a USB external HDD. And on another external USB HDD that I swap with every couple of weeks.

Re: Even without RFPs

That's kind of the opposite. But a lot of Brits we do also do that thing too. Demanding a named brand when any old stuff will do. Notably Paracetamol - requiring, even demanding- Anadin instead of the generic,. Both containing 100% Paracetamol.

And of course, back in the olden days IT had to be IBM

Re: RFP writers?

This is no different to writing job descriptions to get the person you've already selected. Sometimes, of course perfectly validly- as when someone's been doing a temp job for months and you are required to advertise the perm job.

But open to abuse, too.

WANTED Support assistant with 19 years experience of being the MD's niece etc.

Re: Effectively I still use Netscape 0.92

Ah, interesting. eionmac

I use folder rules to put work, shopping, freelance work, family, retailers, etc. into the required folders under the unified inbox. Because I have more folders than addresses, by a factor. I'm guessing you have your own domain with unlimited addresses or aliases, so can generate an email address for each use case.. But that's still too much of a faff for my taste.

I just have a small collection of free email accounts - I'm not relying on email for my livelihood so have no need to pay for accounts. And which email address I use only partly depends on purpose. Retailers I need to contact will always get my gmail account with a +recipient-name as part of the address;as in my.name+Tesco@gmail.com . But otherwise I rely on a filter rule to place emails where I want them to be.

Re: Effectively I still use Netscape 0.92

I have wondered over the years whether Thunderbird was trying to be like Outlook, Outlook Express, or Outlook.com. Somehow it seems to miss the good points of each as well as avoiding the poor ones.

It gives me the single log-in for email and diary across assorted devices, so that I can pick them up on my phone, PC, laptop and tablet. But the calendar client isn't great and I have to use a 3rd party sync tool (TBsync) to enable this across the devices.

It has some basic filtering, which does for me, but that isn't great either.

And it sort of allows a unified inbox*, so that I can see most of my emails at once, irrespective of the address, though not all because imap won't, and it doesn't make that particularly obvious either.

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*Is it just me? Does everyone else with several email addresses want a different inbox for each of them, instead of just having a set of folders under one unified inbox, so that all emails for, say, purchasing go into that folder whether it's from a supplier or a co-worker ( when I worked f/t- mostly just friends and family now). But emails about admin would go into that folder, meetings into.........and so on.

Re: Perhaps

That is how it should be.

Maybe El Reg commentards have more than our fair share of self-important PHBs. (Maybe that's why we wash up on these shores).

Re: installing discipline in the senders of email, that is a wholly different matter...

Filters.

The (only) reason I miss Outlook is the sophistication of the filters.

Thunderbird isn't nearly as good for the If/or-then-else type of filter rule.

Re: Would anything of value be lost if Twitter was gone?

There was a brief window of time when companies who'd just about perfected ways of avoiding being told about customer complaints* could be contacted on Twitter and shamed into sorting out the problem they'd caused. But then it all got big enough for them to work out ways of bullshitting or ignoring that, too.

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*We all know this, probably suffered it too. But it needs to have the light shone on it.

Big companies don't want to pay customer service staff. So they hide or remove phone numbers and email addresses. Instead there's a web page with a tab that says "Contact us" that leads to a page of FAQs that have no relevance to anything that anyone would care about. followed, possible only after you've clicked on one of these, by a link that says "Need more help". This takes you to a generic Help page. On that page, carefully hidden, will be a contact us link. Which leads to the FAQ page.........

Re: No file exists...

It's funny how developers can do this sort of thing. There's a publisher of educational software that a few years back produced a programme for schools that defaulted to saving the kids' work in the programmes folder. Which was on a locked down network in most schools. And the settings within the programme were also locked down behind a password and concealed from the users/teachers' view. And the error messages were suppressed. So the teachers didn't know that kids' work (or hopefully their trial work, familiarising themselves with the software before letting the kids loose on it, though I wouldn't bet on that) wasn't being saved because the programme was trying to save to a locked down location.

So one more good bit of educational software sat ignored in most schools because it was effectively unusable.

That's what I thought. But then my PC and its s/w are all legacy. Updated from Win 7 and retained at Office 2010 (because there's f all useful to me since even before then).

What!

Is that the default or something? Not using local drive to save? Since when was this.

Is that a new step down from the stupid "documents and settings" folder, or whatever it's called, that puts all the data in subfolders of the Windows: drive and pretends they're somewhere safe?

Re: Class action suit in 3... 2... 1...

Sounds good. But then we hear about big organisations losing their data to ransomware......