Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: .....and then there's folk who want to flee from Apple.....

It looks a bit cluttered to me - or do those panel things at top and bottom autohide if you want them to? and then there's the latest idea of cluttering up the title bar with extra controls.

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.

In the context of this article SMB also means Small and Medium-sized Businesses.

TLA overloading is a bitch.

Re: The title is optional

Try the handling charge ploy.

Re: ringing up

This was an alumnus annual so I doubt there was a website. And given the current habit of dragging all manner of JavaScript with an ever greater fan-out of dependencies, all unverified, I'm not going to go looking for and clicking on random websites.

It wasn't difficult to find the phone number of the college concerned.

Re: The un-deading command

Written in Pascal, of course.

That really isn't the best way to handle it. Banks (or whatever it was) can be difficult when you go the official route - his executor closing the account. They will certainly be a great more difficult if they learn that access was gained by false representation.

"Another pension provider requires me to get a proof-of-life signed by a JP or a doctor every now and then."

One of mine requires a person of suitable standing such as business owner. My semi-retired bookseller neighbour did that. Another included a relative in the list; after checking it turned out that a spouse was acceptable - I don't know why because they would have a vested interest in the pension provider not being aware that the pensioner was now visiting the great Post Office in the sky.

Re: The title is optional

I've mentioned a similar circumstance before. I eventually stopped the mail by ringing up and telling them there would be a £10 handling charge for all mail returned in the future.

Re: The title is optional

Related to the De'Aths

Re: In the UK we have the DVLA

"Seems I dodged a bullet there,"

So did I.

During COVID my BiL was terminally ill with cancer. His car reg. was up for renewal or SORN. His non-driving wife, despite having worked as a secretary didn't know what to do and in any case they didn't have a computer. It had got to about the lst available day when something had to be done. She told me the DVLA (actually the NI DVLA) reference so I went online for her to enter the SORN. He died a few hours later.

Re: Psychographics

Psychobabble.

Re: Psychographics

s/Oracle/Usual suspects/

Re: Psychographics

Why the joke alert?

Re: And the answer to the question is

The usual trade-off is time/quality/budget, pick any two. But that doesn't work when you're developing new technology as there are so many unknowns. You get to pick one: quality, the spec you want to meet and the real timescale and budget to achieve that become what they are. If you don't like the way they're working out the only option is to cancel. If you cancel you get nothing of your primary objective although you might also get some by-products in the form of the technologies that emerged from your development process. In the latter respect it would be interesting to know what products, possibly everyday products, emerge from the JWST.

I suppose the beancounter interpretation would be that as it exceeded so many of its design criteria it shouldn't have been as expensive as it was but that's just beancounters. The nature of something that you can only test properly when it's in orbit means you have to hope you can go and fix it if it doesn't work properly first time as happened with Hubble. This one's not Hubble so nobody's going to fix it. Nor are you likely to get to build a Mk II if the original has a problem.

Re: Exchange

That presupposes a company standard way of doing things that meets the companies needs.

That sentence implies quite a lot of preparatory work. What stands out here is that all too often that's not been done so either there's nothing to teach or what's taught isn't guaranteed to meet the needs.

Re: Exchange

"Therein lies a potentially big problem...e-mails should be regarded as transitory, not as formal records"

Why?

In the sort of situation you describe there are likely to be additional documents of some nature with the emails as covering notes, just as they would have been exchanged by letter post back in the day. But also in that situation Alice or Agatha and Bob or Bill, whoever are authorised to act for their companies, can agree on a final version by email.

I've written elsewhere in these comments that the significant unit of communication is the thread, not the individual messages. In the situation you describe the back and forth emails between managers will actually keep track of the changes. They might not be able to handle any more rigorous form of change control but email with its threading will be the one thing they can and will handle.

Twenty years ago we were doing business whereby additions to a contract and consequent additions to the agreed data dictionary, inter-developer discussions of additions to the XML schema and test data were all carried out by email. Only samples of the final product required anything more. It wasn't difficult and it didn't lead to any problems even though one of the other parties was one of the notorious Usual Suspects in the realms of outsourcers.

Make sure users have the options needed are matched to the UserID. However, don't do this they way I once saw - just one interface to the entire suite so it included all the functionality.

Re: Exchange

How many times do we read this?

And why? Because email clients are badly designed. Their defaults for handling read mail are unhelpful to non-existent. To some extent it's because email clients originally started out as message handling systems. Usually they now manage to link messages into threads but all to often that seems to be an afterthought and not a core function (see 3 below).

How about something fairly simple:

1. The inbox is a list of unread messages. The moment a message is read it is removed from the inbox and cannot be replaced.

2. The Trash is a queue of messages or threads waiting to be deleted according to some set of rules - time or quantity related doesn't matter so much. Once the criteria are met it's gone for good. While it's in there any message or thread can be retrieved.

3. The unit of interest is not the message, it's the thread/discussion/conversation/call it what you will. Messages are their components. A singleton message - one with, as yet, no reply - is simply a component of a thread with one item; all threads start this way. Placing sent messages in a separate "Sent" folder where they won't get matched up with their replies or the messages to which they themselves are replies is just stupid.

4. By default all sent and all read messages initially get placed in a common folder. We'll call it something such as "Current". The contents of Current are presented as threads, not individual messages (see 3 above).

5. We don't want Current to grow indefinitely (the clue's in the name) so we'll have some sort of ageing rules to move threads that haven't been added to or read for some time into less current folders. The ultimate such folders will be archives, probably on a yearly basis.

6. In addition to such core management the user can devise any additional organisation they please, hierarchical, cross-referenced or whatever. For extra points such folders can be represented in the OS filing system. That means that if you cave a folder for Project Rhubarb you can drag the email client's folder of email threads relating to Project Rhubarb into it as a sub-folder. Or when you opt to create such a folder in the client you can elect to place it there.

7. Some of 6 could be automated by rules - all emails from example.com addresses can be set up to go into Example Inc's folder. All emails from the banks' email addresses go into the relevant bank's folder in the Finance folder and so on. There's a mass of possibilities for helping and guiding the user to good practices.

8. Nothing described above need represent the actual storage of the threads and the messages which are their components. That can be done by using a plain old database. The client's folders are just pointers into the data. The "threads" in the OS folders are just files that contain sufficient information to tell the client where to find them on a read-only basis.

9. If the users really want to shove a file back into the Inbox to deal with later and can't, then maybe a Pending tray could be provided.

Suddenly IT were deluged with irate staff wanting to know what had happened to features they used in Office.

"Sorry, not an IT decision. You'll need to speak to $GuiltyParty."

Re: Exchange

Maybe not yours, but whose job is it?

Re: Lotus 1-2-crash

There's a variety of manglement (usually most of them) who can't grasp the difference between a demo that only just works and a product that just works. Always build in a few crashes or at least gaps in the demo so you can say "That's because we can't implement it properly in $DemoVehicle. It'll be OK when we write it properly in $TargetVehicle".

Re: Bug Finder

Ditto, but I don't think my talents with self-service checkouts are unique.

Re: Microsoft phone support (baggy-pants edition)

a live DJ "hosted" the on-hold experience

There's always something somewhere out to make on-hold worse. Usually it's recorded messages telling you that you can use the web-site whose failings drove you to try to phone in. But a DJ person with verbal diarrhoea would take some beating.

Re: £ in passwords

Raspbian - Debian derivative for the Rapberry Pis. The Pi, the product of a UK company, yes?

Debian, keyboard set to UK, no problem with £ at command line, never has been as long as I can remember.

Raspbian, GUI application such as KWrite, LO etc. no problem with £.

Raspbian command line, keyboard set to UK - doesn't like £ at the command line or programs such as vi run from the command line at all. To be fair, it's some time since i had occasion to set one up so it might have been fixed in later versions.

Re: Exchange

Let's remember here that the users are (hopefully) using the stored emails to conduct the business the company exists to conduct. They should be enabled to store and find the documents they need effectively.

In the past big filing systems would have all sorts of weird codlings so that the discussion about production problems of the gimball-bracket spacers for Acme-co's MarkII version 2 widget, 1983 model was DDDLK/X23X/9782/3 so that if you knew that you could go straight to it and if you didn't know that you were in trouble.

Shouldn't it be possible to provide users with something better? Perhaps knowing a folder name, even a hierarchical folder name isn't the answer. Maybe it is the answer. But shouldn't it be IT's job to do something radical such as find out what the requirements are, what the constraints are and devise something that works?

Re: Exchange

"Did you know there's a maximum subfolder limit in a Microsoft Exchange mailbox?"

Once upon a time business communication was largely by bits of paper. Big companies received lots of bits of paper. They filed them in folders. They files the folders in filing cabinets.

If they needed more folders they bought more folders.

If they needed more filing cabinets they ... well, it depends: they might take the view that only really important stuff older than X years needed to be kept and the rest was dumped; they might take the view that it was important to keep old stuff but access time wasn't important so it could be bundled up and stored in some cheap, off-site location; they might just buy more filing cabinets. Whatever the choice extreme storage was a matter of company policy.

Now we have allegedly wonderful electronic systems replacing the paper. It takes less room. It should enable companies to manage mail more efficiently than it did in the days of paper and what happens? Storage is limited by vendor decisions and individual users are setting their own storage policies because companies (perhaps rightly, based on expectations of better faculties) don't.

Re: A Tad Of Paranoia And A Pinch Of Preparation Is Always Helpful......

That depends on whose stick and whose computer are involved.

So why didn't they....

"This is because unlike earth dust it has not been subject to water so it has sharper edges than Earth dust which tends to be rounded."

I thought wind-blown sand on Earth was very rounded.

Re: Thanks NASA!

Atheism is, of course, a belief system and has its fundamentalists ("There is no God and Dirac is his prophet"). Agnosticism, not so much.

Re: Net zero in home automation

"For those people who did buy the extended warranty, what happens when they phone up in a couple of years to say it has stopped working?"

A very good question. The answer's probably buried deep in the T&Cs of the extended "warranty" denying all responsibility for failure of the vendor to supply the service. If they missed that trick and have to make good on all these warranties there's going to be business available for lawyers.