| last updated:08 Mar 2004 18:15 UK time |
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| JOS Statistics - Recent Comments (Comments added for week ending Sun 07 Mar 2004) | View Other Weeks |
| Windows XP deployment tips? | Sun 07 Mar | Peanuts |
| Hello. I have a small company that sells PCs via the net. The user can customize every aspect of the machine, and has the choice of buying Windows (XP), which is installed by us so the user receives the machine in a ready-to-rock state. But since every machine is almost always 100% different from one another, deploying XP is a huge pain in the ass. Ive tried HDD images, Sysprep, you name it. An image of XP doesnt like being installed on a computer with a completely different motherboard. I would be able to live with installing the thing from scracth if it wasnt for one thing: installing all the Windows Update patches is a time waster. Is there a better way to do this? Perhaps I can download all fixes (including the Service Pack) as executable files and then just run then on the new machines? Anything? Im starting to spot a few gray hair lines here. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Jason (www.mesacanyon.com) | You should be able to 'slipstream' the XP installation so you end up with a fully, (or nearly fully patched machines) Here's a link for slipstreaming SP1a, http://www.windows-help.net/WindowsXP/winxp-sp1-bootcd.html Here's a google search link for several articles that detail putting rollups, and other hotfixes in as well http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=deskbar&q=slipstream+windows+xp+hotfixes HTH, Jason |
| Authentication for Workstations - Using Win2k, NT | Sun 07 Mar | Ram Dass |
| Hi: What is the best method to used for authorizing user access for a bunch of workstations that run on NT, win 2000 and Win XP? Users will need to use a username and password to gain access to the machine. Currently a central authorization is controlled through LDAP. The workstations have not required authorization prior to this - i.e. any person could use the workstation to browse the Internet. In recent months there have been more temporary workers in the company and there have been concern that the workstations could be exploited. Is there a clean way to make the workstations authorize users through the LDAP? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Brad Wilson | Authorization -- for what? To login? Why not use a domain? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Ram Dass | I am ignorant :( What do you mean by 'domain'? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Ram Dass | BTW - I used the wrong term in my earlier post. It is for 'authenticating' users - i.e. users will need to enter a login name and password. Currently we have an LDAP - which provides company-wide authentication. The workstations are not hooked up to LDAP and currently allow anonymous access - i.e. users are not challenged to enter a login name and password. Would it be suitable to make the workstations authenticate users directly against LDAP? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Brad Wilson | I don't believe you can convince Windows to authenticate against an LDAP server. A domain is precisely what Microsoft does to solve this problem. A domain controller does, among many other things, authenticate against the domain user list. You have the workstation join the domain, and then you get centralized user list management. I know that, in the case of Windows 2000, Microsoft replaced domains with a system called Active Directory. An Active Directory server can ALSO serve as an LDAP server, so maybe one route you could take is to use a Windows 2000 or 2003 server in Active Directory mode, to replace the existing LDAP server, and given centralized authentication for all the workstations. |
| Error handling for C libraries? | Sun 07 Mar | J. Merkalson |
| How do you handle errors in your C modules? Is it ever acceptable for a general-purpose (read: has to work in both GUI and non-GUI, threaded and non-threaded environments) C library to just print errors to stderr and exit? Is it only acceptable for catastrophic errors, like if theres no more memory available or if it cant load some type of DLL at startup? I was thinking of adding an error_handler member to a library of mines main struct that would store a function pointer that I could call like this: RSSautomater->error_handler(This happened: %s, RSSErrorCode); which would call a routine that intern would call vfprintf and exit. But the user could overide this behavior by setting the pointer in ->error_handler to point to their own callback function that could do what ever they wanted (log the message and keep going, log the message and exit, etc). What are your thoughts on this? What do you typically do with your libraries? Can you point to any examples of C libraries you feel get error handling *really* right? |
| Sun 07 Mar | sid6581 | I return error codes. Plain and simple. This works for all programming languages my DLLs with C interfaces are used from. Printing text anywhere from a library strikes me as extraordinarily bad design, but that may just be me.. |
| Sun 07 Mar | dir at badblue dot com | Return an int error code, definitely. 0 for no error. Assuming a Win32 library, return existing win32 error codes so that a caller can translate them into the native language with little effort. |
| Any JoS users in Milwaukee? | Sun 07 Mar | JD |
| Hey All, Gone are the days when I used to visit JoS from India. Now I check it sitting in my aartment in US! :) Yep, I have arrived here in Milwaukee, WI last week and I was wondering if there any any JoS users in and around Milwaukee. Its always great to meet smart folks! :) Also, can any one tell me about good places to visit in and around Milwaukee. I want to make most of my stay in US! :) Thanks for your time, JD http://www.phpkid.org |
| Sun 07 Mar | JD | Typos and Typos. It's apartment and not aartment. Also, it's been 2 week and not one week I am in US. :) JD |
| Too much stress | Sun 07 Mar | Kevin Moore |
| Hi, I own a small software company and I have been working in IT for 15 years and an entrepeneur for the last 6 years. The last few months business is getting tight again and I am feeling very stressed. I have considered folding up shop and walking away from the business of being self-employed. The constant concern over revenue and growing the business takes its toll on me during the difficult down times. I was hoping people here might have some similar advice or suggestions as to how I can deal with this. A couple of specific questions: 1. Does anyone know of an online aptitude test that I could take that might offer some direction into a different career? 2. What do you all do to deal with this type of situation, specifically those of you that are self-employed? 3. Any advice or comments are appreciated. Thanks, Kevin |
| Sun 07 Mar | no name | if you want to succeed, then don't give up if you think this much stress is not for you then go and find a less stressful job or change your behaviour |
| Sun 07 Mar | Phil | What are the goals you are after with that business of yours ? Only if this is clear can advice be provided. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Nigel | As useful as the previous post is, I'd suggest seeing a career counselor. A good program will involve sitting down a few times for a few hours, perhaps with some testing, and generating a picture of what you've done, what qualities you have, what you want to go into, and what you might need to get there. Kind of like a career tune-up. Can be very useful to get a neutral opinion on things. It's getting to be much more common these days. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Tarek | My 0.02 cents : Many people are victims of stress and are not in the IT industry. Maybe if you would know how to manage your stress better ... Sorry if I'm wrong ... Anyway I hope you'll achieve what ever path you choose ... Good luck! |
| Sun 07 Mar | | Get a sales guy, give him partial ownership and responsibility for leading. It won't cure you but it helps to have someone else with you in the trenches. Pick a partner very very very very very carefully. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Seun Osewa | I agree with the point about getting partners. I'm just starting out (and probably a much younger person) and I know my constant worries would be reduced if I wasn't the only one doing the worrying. I think once one gets over the bad feelings it's a straightforward matter of looking for "ways to make business improve". |
| Sun 07 Mar | eclectic_echidna | What do you do when you aren't working? Make THAT your career. -- ee |
| Sun 07 Mar | Rick | When I was running my software business I found the stress happened when I didn't have a plan for all possibilities (i.e. the worst case), and it was basically the back of my mind nagging me. But just a simple 'if I only get 10 sales again next month, I'll need to fold by X, start looking for a job by Y, cash out Z...' was usually enough to relieve the uncertainty. (Eventually the worst case did happen, and I went to work for the Man... though went back five years later). |
| Sun 07 Mar | Joe Hendricks | Expect and plan for the down times ('worst case' as others have posted) so it's not as stressful. Self-employed here for 9 years and 3 of them have been tough. Still very much worth it, imo. |
| Recently Discovered Linux Kernel Exploit | Sun 07 Mar | Seun Osewa |
| A good overview is available here: http://isec.pl/vulnerabilities/isec-0014-mremap-unmap.txt Some discussion here http://slashdot.org/articles/04/03/07/1533254.shtml Id like to know how many people on this forum use Linux on a daily basis and how this issue affects you (what distribution you use and how you plan to upgrade, etc.). |
| Sun 07 Mar | Anonymous Coward | I use Linux as my only desktop at work, as well as on my 'home' servers, which have ports open to the 'net. I'm not terribly worried about this exploit, because it requires the user to be previously logged in. Since no one else logs into these systems, I'm not terribly worried. I would be worrying if I ran an ISP or corporation that gave Linux shell accounts on sensitive systems. In any event, I would expect a fix to be released within the next few days, at which time, I will rebuild my kernel. I run Gentoo Linux, who are pretty quick about releasing fixes for system packages. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Employed Russian | > use Linux on a daily basis I do. > and how this issue affects you It doesn't: all my boxes are behind a firewall and have no public accounts (the only people who have login know root password anyway). > I would be worrying if I ran an ISP University computer lab admins would probably need to worry a bit ... Or not: with physicall access, anyone can just boot from Knoppix-CD and become root anyway. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Giovanni Corriga | By the way, that vulnerability was already fixed with version 2.6.3. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Joe On Software (Joe) | Remember: When a patch for a Windows exploit is released, it's further proof that closed source software is evil. When a patch for a Linux exploit (any other open source software) is released, it's further proof that open source is wonderful. |
| Sun 07 Mar | no name | That was probably the worst troll in the history of this board. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | Seun Osewa, an exploit like this will probably not affect most web serving linux boxes. It may present a problem for linux servers serving public accounts (where people have rights to install and execute imported software). Preventative measures should be taken to patch it if you run a lot of unknown software (which is rare in the Linux space in most respectable projects) |
| Sun 07 Mar | Almost Anonymous | I run Linux and I don't plan on patching the system for this exploit. For the same reason as others have mentioned. I also run serveral Windows boxes and I don't patch them when every new Windows exploit comes out. But that is because they are all safely tucked away behind my Linux firewall. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | > Preventative measures should be taken to patch it if you run a lot of unknown software (which is rare in the Linux space in most respectable projects) * Most people run respectable projects, patches and additions to most respectable projects are well watched. There's the occational student who must try every short message messenger out there on sourceforge.net, but they are in the minority--most people are PHP+Apache+MySQL+Linux (LAMP) monkeys. * Distributions are carefully verified using MD5 (yum in Fedora Core 1 does MD5 on all packages) |
| Sun 07 Mar | Seun Osewa | Thanks everyone; the current mail setup on my Linux server uses one user account for each mailbox so this would have been a potential problem, but it so happens that I'm the only user. I'm glad to know this board is not only a windows and .NET-centric board. |
| Are DVD recordables as durable as CD-R ? | Sun 07 Mar | Michael |
| I have just bought a Sony DVD Recorder. It records both DVD-R and DVD+R, and it can record DVD+R at 8x. Im not sure if I should trust it for long-term (10 years, for example) data storage or not. I know that CD-R can be trusted. However, in the early days of CD-Rs, there were a lot of problems: some writers broke really quickly, after writing only 50-60 disks, some disks broke quickly (information unreadable after a few months), etc. Im thinking of switching to DVD recordable disks, but I want the data to last at least 10 years. Are DVD +/- R disks as reliable as CD-R disks ? Also, is a DVD recorded disk more vulerable to dust, small scratches, etc, than a CD? Any special precautions I should take? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Stephen Jones | I'm not at all sure that CD-R's are reliable. I've recently been cloning a few machines from Cd images, and about one CD in fifteen is created faulty. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Dan G | They are pretty good. The only thing and this was similar when CD-R's first game out is that cheap media is just that - cheap You may have to spend sometime trying different types of media to find what works best with your drive however once you do, it should be all smooth sailing |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | Using CDRs can be a real learning experience, I used to buy batches of 100 uncoated unbranded medias (CAD$30 per 100), only to learn they stick together and the reflective surface would just peel off. Now I buy a more coated surface (still noname though--like RiDATA--CAD$15 per 50) to prevent peeling and sticking. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | DVDRs are made from the same machines and material as CDRs. To be perfectly blunt, when you lose a DVD, you lose 4 gigs of data, when you use a CDR, you lose 700 megs. If insurance companies insured data, that's how they would look at the risk. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Sum Dum Gai | You risk is the same if both forms of media are equally likely to fail. It's about 6 or 7 CDs per DVD in terms of data storage, so you're much more likely to lose a CD than a DVD, even if the data loss is higher when you lose a DVD. As far as reliability goes, even on CDs there are mixed accounts. Some people have had no problems with CDs, others report mass failures after a few years. It seems to be a combination of burner + media + environment. The bad news for DVDs is that the media and burners are less mature, so if anything you'd expect them to be worse on average. I'd suggest spending a little more and getting name brand media (TDK or verbatim seem to be highly rated). |
| Sun 07 Mar | Dennis Forbes | Clearly you should stick to floppies, preferrably single-sided 720KB variants. This will ameliorate the risk accordingly. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | Or acid-paper, they are very popular and durable, however the data you store are very much open to interpretation hundreds of years from now. Do it with class, smoke signals last up to 5 minutes under the right conditions. |
| The integration of computers in schools | Sun 07 Mar | Laura Wells |
| INTRODUCTION My thesis before I researched this topic was that it is good to have computers in schools, and at home: because, they open up a world (the internet, chat rooms); and, because computer literacy is necessary in this advanced society (for example, at libraries now the catalogues are computerized instead of on cards). Computer-based instruction in schools is good, because it is a self-paced as opposed to a group-paced activity. OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT Unlike many topics in the History of Education, the use of computers is relatively new. The following timeline is taken from [Molnar]: * 1944 - First operational computer, the Mark 1, at Harvard * 1946 - The ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania. Early computers were used by science, maths, and engineering, replacing slide rules for solving problems of the size faced in the real world. * 1959 - PLATO at the University of Illinois: first large-scale project for use in education, a several-thousand terminal system serving undergraduate education, elementary school reading, community college, and several campuses. Thus, the use of computers in education is 35 years old. * 1963 - Invention of BASIC, a new easy-to-use programming language: it spread rapidly and was used for the creation of computer-based instruction materials for a wide variety of subjects and all levels of schooling * 1963 - Stanford math and reading individualized computer-assisted instruction, rather than group-paced * Early 1970s - MIT developed the LOGO programming language, accessible to children and easy-to-use, used in elementary schools * 1974 - 2 million students in the U.S. using computers; National Science Foundation set up 30 regional computing networks * 1975 - 55% of schools in the U.S. had access to a computer * 1975 - relatively inexpensive and ubiquitous personal computers replace expensive time-shared computers * 1980s - computers added to schools curriculum * 1984 -beginning of the internet, when the NSF networked several supercomputers, and schools were linked too for research * 1987 - National Geographic KidsNet created, brings inquiry-based learning to elementary school children. In 1991, 6000 classrooms in 72 countries used KidsNet, and more than 90% of teachers reported that it significantly increased interest in and time spent on science. * 1995 - World Wide Web and the Internet begins to catch on; Microsoft Windows 95 is the first MS operating system to include network connectivity out of the box DISCUSSION OF CURRENT ISSUES AND DEBATE AROUND THE TOPIC Pros Some of the pros for computers in education are: * Computers help people to manage complex (large quantities of) data: for example, spreadsheets and graphs help you process large sets of numbers, and search engines help you manage large quantities of text. In some fields this is essential, for example it is estimated that would take a person 22 centuries to read the annual biomedical research literature. [Molnar] * Word-processing and composition, because correction is easy and spell-checking helps to make the work perfect. [page 243, Kropp] * Networked computers permit telecommunications (to help learn about things that are not located in the classroom), and decentralization (so that you can access information from several sources, and learn from several learning networks). [Cummins] * Distance Education courses with my home computer, and it was a good experience (I am a mature student): it does cut down on the commuting time * Many kids like to work with computers, for whatever reason. [page 243, Kropp] * Chat rooms and email promote writing literacy (compared with using the telephone). * The Internet and online references provide near-instant access to information on almost any topic: for example dyslexia, Mars, or Monarch butterflies. * Computer literacy is a vocational skill. * Computers can be used as sophisticated modelling tools in science, maths, and engineering Cons Some cons are: * A teacher in my field placement described the children as manic, crazed, and obsessed when the computer was on in the classroom (and she was glad when it wasnt working). * Children arent adults, so the fact that computers are vocationally useful isnt necessarily a good reason for having them in the school, especially in elementary school. * There was a good example in the Failure to Connect book of a childs being frantic and stressed when playing a racing maze game on the computer; also, she wasnt demonstrating any problem-solving or mapping skills: when asked, she didnt know why she had picked up the rope in the game. In this example, the parents attitudes were counter-productive and misinformed: they thought she was using the computer properly; and were excited that she knew how to use the computer; part of her stress may have been caused by her trying to earn her parents esteem by playing the computer game well. [page 204, Healy] * Computers are tools, not goals: however, young children arent wise enough to tell the difference between a tool and a goal. * Computers are expensive, both in money and in time. To use them in the classroom requires teacher expertise: how to use a computer; what to use computers for; and, how to teach using computers. * Data received through a computer may be unfiltered and uncriticised: by contrast, for example, the books available in a school library have been carefully selected. * In groups, one kid tends to hog the computer. [page 243, Kropp] * Some children will guess, rather than attempt to learn, with a machine. [page 243, Kropp] * Computers may give the impression that information is always visual, and entertaining. [page 243, Kropp] * Computers give children no human love, support, or encouragement. [page 243, Kropp] * Businesses are trying to influence the use of computers in schools. However, businesses are geared towards profit, and are consequently not fit to influence the educational agenda. [pages 148-152, Barlow] [pages 297-299, Healy * David Suzuki says that the cry for computer literacy has been ... one of the biggest cons ever foisted on the school system. [page 148, Barlow] MY POSITION ON THE TOPIC My position on the topic is that children should be about seven years old (i.e. at least Grade 2) before they begin to use computers. Before then, they should be playing with real things, reading, and interacting socially with real people. Children may be tempted to emulate their parents use of computers; however, I think that parents should protect their children from exposure to computers until the children have acquired some maturity: * Yes, we get a lot of pressure from parents, but we believe the gains from working with computers do not outweigh the losses for four- and five-year olds. At this age they need to be pushing Play-doh, not buttons. [page 242, Healy] * After youve developed your own brain, then you can have an artificial one to play with. [mother, quoted on page 203, Healy] * People are horrified when I tell them my own [six-year-old] childs not on the computer. ... Actually, I think its our job as adults to protect them, not expose them to all this stuff. [pre-school teacher, quoted on page 203, Healy] * Buy my four-year-old a computer? What nonsense! She needs first to build up her own mind, to learn writing, math. You must realise the computer can only do what the human mind tells it to. Our children need good minds so theyll be able to run the computers! [industrial software engineer, quoted on page 206, Healy] POSSIBLE FUTURE DIRECTIONS I expect that a continuing and perhaps increasing use of computers in schools is inevitable. However, I hope that teachers and parents are aware of the many ways in which computers do not help children to develop as whole individuals, nor promote the overall educational agenda, and that they will find appropriate ways to integrate computers with education. BIBLIOGRAPHY * Barlow, Maude and Robertson, Heather-Jane. (1994). Class Warfare: The Assault on Canadas Schools. Key Porter Books Ltd. Toronto. * Kropp, Paul and Hodson, Lynda. (1995). The School Solution: Getting Canadas Schools to Work for Your Children. Random House of Canada. Toronto * Cummins, Jim and Dayers, Dennis. (1997).Brave New Schools: Challenging Cultural Illiteracy. St. Martins Press. New York. * Healy, Jane M. (1998). Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect out Childrens Minds - for Better and Worse. Simon and Schuster. New York. * Molnar, Andrew. (1997). Computers in Education: A Brief History. The Journal. http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/a1681.cfm |
| Sun 07 Mar | Employed Russian | > My position on the topic is that children should be about seven years old (i.e. at least Grade 2) before they begin to use computers My position is that the only place where computers should be used in grade school is the library catalog. All other uses are harmful to education. > Some of the pros for computers in education are: The 'pros' you listed apply to *college* education, but they do not apply to grade-school education: > Computers help people to manage complex (large quantities of) data Grade school education is not about managing large quantities of data. It is about understandging fundamentals. Whenever I see my 16-year old dealing with large quantities of data, it is because he is doing 'science project', which is just another example of 'cargo-cult science' http://www.physics.brocku.ca/etc/cargo_cult_science.html > Word-processing and composition, because correction is easy and spell-checking helps to make the work perfect. Did you ever observe a kid writing anything on a computer? Instead of thinking about what he is writing, he is contantly distracted by 'auto-correction' (I know it can be turned off, but they usually don't). The result is that 'kds cn't spel a thng', and the quality of their writing abysmal. BTW, an argument can also be made that the (sorry) state of computer programming in this country is partly due to the high availability of interactive terminals: when you had to submit your program on a punch-card deck and get results a day later, you spent a lot more time *thinking* about your program, and thinikng about it is a good thing. > Networked computers permit telecommunications (to help learn about things that are not located in the classroom) Learning about things not located in the classroom does not require telecommunications, it only requires a good teacher. > Distance Education courses with my home computer These do not work for many adults (they require great self-discipline). Percentage of grade-school kinds that are able to learn anything via distance-learning is probably extremely small. > Many kids like to work with computers, for whatever reason. They don't. They like to *play* on them. > Chat rooms and email promote writing literacy Chat rooms and IM provide a constant stream of distractions, promote very short attention span, and very poor writing style. > The Internet and online references provide near-instant access to information on almost any topic: for example dyslexia, Mars, or Monarch butterflies. They do. They also provide very dis-organized collection of information, much of which is inaccurate. And the reason kids *need* such info, is usually because they are doing the science project. > Computer literacy is a vocational skill. True. Learn them in college. > Computers can be used as sophisticated modelling tools in science, maths, and engineering That's science project again. Grade school is not about sophisticated modelling. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Philo | '> Word-processing and composition, because correction is easy and spell-checking helps to make the work perfect. Did you ever observe a kid writing anything on a computer? Instead of thinking about what he is writing, he is contantly distracted by 'auto-correction' (I know it can be turned off, but they usually don't). The result is that 'kds cn't spel a thng', and the quality of their writing abysmal.' Agreed 100%. Here's an easy study I'd like to see - go to each 7th grade classroom in a school and ask for writing samples from each of the top five writers in the class. Then ask for a handwritten essay from each of them (direct, not via the teacher) My older daughter is a good writer, but I freaked when I finally saw her hand write something - her spelling was *awful*. I immediately mandated that she would write *everything* by hand first, then type it. In one year her spelling has improved 100%. Philo |
| Sun 07 Mar | Joe On Software (Joe) | A computer in the home is a good thing. But they have no place in elementary schools and extremely limited usefulness in high school. They idea that children must begin using computers at a very young age, or else they will be 'left behind' by the rest of the world, is one of the most absurd lies ever created. The areas where American children lag behind the rest of the world -- reading, math, science -- have nothing to do with whether or not they have learned to use a computer. The school years prior to college are about learning the basics. Computers in classrooms only serve to distract and their presence in the classrom has resulted in students who are well versed in Chat, Instant Messaging and the latest video games, but have no reading, writing or math skills and little knowledge of science and history. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Aaron F Stanton | A slightly different point of view: I had the good fortune of going to a very good grade school. We had very good teachers in many subjects, and we had a computer lab with Apple 2e's in about 1979-80. We had a class completely separate from all other classes on using the computer, and we actually wrote toy programs in Logo, and the best students got to program in Basic. Thanks to that I was interested enough in actually doing things with computers that at age 10 I wrote a Zork style program that did really simple parsing of commands. It had a program that let you enter connectivity of rooms, a brief description of the room, objects, and obstacles, and it would save all that to a disk. Then another program would load all that into memory and you could play the game. For a different program I created a simple bubble sort routine - big deal, so what...but at age 10. This is all due to the presence of not just the computers but a quality teacher. Yes, kids will play on them, and IM, and search for mp3's - *IF* the system is set up to let them do it. I would suggest having the computers set up in a computer lab that aren't even networked to each other, let alone the internet. Each should have only the programs relevant to the class installed, with the rest of the system totally locked down. In the library, the computers should be linked only to the central server, not the internet, and should only provide access to the research materials approrpriate - and also a system that lets the kids know if a given book is checked out or not. Let the kids have a really basic word processor to type up reports and papers - there's no need to discriminate against kids whose parents either can't afford or won't buy a computer - but for the sake of humanity disable the spelling checker and penalize the kids who get it wrong. The problem is not just the computers - it is that the people administering them don't have the skills to do it right, and the schools that buy the machines don't have the money to hire the (much higher cost) people that do have said skills. It's also the problem of discipline - kids will find ways to waste time whether or not computers are in the room. It's not a new problem - I'm not being the curmudgeon saying 'Back in my day...' - I fully recognize how fortunate I was to have such good teachers. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Jordan Lev | I think the most important point you raise is the one about computers being a tool rather than a goal. I personally believe that computers should not be emphasized in the classroom to the extent that they are sometimes these days. I think the more important issue is 'how are our kids being taught' and 'how much attention are they getting from teachers (i.e. student-to-teacher ratio)' If the class is already doing well and has a great teaching staff, etc. then the computer could become a useful tool. But more frequently, its use it a distraction that keeps kids from learning what's really important at that age. I remember hearing a piece on NPR a few months ago about this very same topic. There was a man talking about how he had gone around to hundreds of schools (perhaps he was one of the authors you referenced -- I can't remember). He said that there were a few cases where the computers were actually helpful, but these were classes that were already quite successful and had great teachers. More often than not, though, the computers were a detriment that kept the kids from actually *learning* anything. He had a great quote: 'when you keep things simple, you allow for personal complexity to arise' -- meaning that the computer has so much complication and is so narrowly defined in how it is used and what it does, that kids don't learn to think for themselves [on a side note, this quote also reminds me of the whole HTML-as-a-simple-text-language issue -- the reason it's so great is because of its limitations and simplicity. But I digress...] Anyway, we have a whole heap of more important issues to worry about when it comes to education (in the United States, anyway), and hopefully people are realizing that 'having computers in the classroom' is not going to be the magic bullet that solves all of our problems easily. So, on to the next magic bullet... keep boobies off TV? -Jordan |
| Sun 07 Mar | Stephen Jones | Two of the biggest cons in this world are computers and education so imagine what happens when tney get together. - says somebody whose job is the use of computers in educations :) |
| Sun 07 Mar | Fred | 'High-Tech Heretic : Reflections of a Computer Contrarian ' by Clifford Stoll http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385489765/ http://www.familyhaven.com/parenting/hightechheretic.html |
| Sun 07 Mar | veal | Employed Russian is right on target. None of the original posters 'pro' arguments are valid, and her 'con' arguments barely scratch the surface but are reason enough to keep computers out. Grade school education is already rather shabby and is only harmed by computers in the classroom. The zombification of most children at home by television and video games has already produced generations increasingly swollen with morons of almost no capacity for critical thought, creativity, and human sympathy. Likewise deaden the classroom to learning and thought by introducing these visually-stimulating, random-fact-generating crutches to concentration and the the damage will be complete. (Bear in mind, I'm a computer programmer saying this, not a luddite. Computers play important roles in our society, but the education of partially-formed minds is not one of them.) The quoted parent was right that 'after you've developed your own brain, then you can have an artificial one to play with'. But a keen brain doesn't start to appear for most kids until the late teens if ever at all. The poster's position is a good one, if only she adds ten to her suggested age of introduction. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Laura Wells | Dear veal, > her 'con' arguments barely scratch the surface Did I miss something, apart from 'swollen with morons of almost no capacity for critical thought, creativity, and human sympathy', and 'deaden the classroom to learning and thought by introducing these visually-stimulating, random-fact-generating crutches to concentration'? Can you put that in terms my History of Education professor would understand? I'm studying Early Childhood Education, and have had a computer in my pre-school room in Field. I'd formed an opinion about computers for 2- to 5-year olds. It's been interesting to read your thoughts about computers for school-aged children on top of that. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Almost Anonymous | It's been my observation that most computer savy parents are againts computers in the classroom. I also fit this mold; I'm a programmer and I have a six-year-old in grade 1. Secretly, I think, most educators and parents want the computer to replace instruction. If we can put kids in front of the box and they can learn from it then we don't need as many teachers, helpers, etc. My own personal experience with computers in the classroom was fairly positive: Having a computer in the classroom in Grade 3 demonstrated my aptitude for it. My teacher told my parents that they should invest in a computer for me (c64). I might not be here, typing this, if it wasn't for that. In Grade 7, our block of time allocated for computers was spent doing the entire Microsoft Words (for DOS) tutorial. I learned all about word processors, spreadsheets, etc. That knowledge is still applicable, even today. |
| Book recommendation for state of art Web Design | Sun 07 Mar | NOP (No Ordinary Programmer) ;-) |
| Can someone recommend me the best book available these days for designing world class web pages ? Is there any general book which talk about (good/great) design in general ? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | If you go to a major bookstore, you'll discovered that just about everyone has an opinion about what makes for good web design and how everyone should do it. You might want to check out some blogs though to see what exactly is worth buying. There are TONS. I have always purchased elemental books that teaches me how to fish instead of giving me the fishes: For typography in a succinct little book: The Elements of Typographic Style - Robert Bringhurst Color is impossibly complex. So far I have cheated on color and bought books like the Designer's Guide to Color published by Chronical books. Others understand it much better than I do. For form and usability, get Joel's and Tuft and other useful books of that semblance that will teach you how to think. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Seun Osewa | If you're a programmer, I would say web _design_ also requires lots of talent and not all of it comes from a book. If you're anything like me, you might not have the time or inclination to produce an original design that's 'state of the art'. On the other hand some will argue reasonably that all you need is an accessible website... |
| Sun 07 Mar | Egor Shipovalov | Depends on how you measure 'world-class'. Today, graphical design contributes very little (if anything) to website's overall success. 'Cool' design may often impress, but it won't buy you repeat vistors, sales, link popularity, or anything for that matter, since today's surfers realize that graphical designer's skills have completely nothing to do with the value site provides. If you want to build websites that people will love to use, become good at web usability and writing. These are key values in practically any website. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Joe Hendricks | 'Designing With Web Standards' by Jeffrey Zeldman 'About Face 2.0, The Essentials Of Interaction Design' by Alan Cooper & Robert Reimann But don't forget the wealth of free examples, tips and design advice at the Macromedia and Adobe websites. |
| Sun 07 Mar | no name | NOPe |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | > Depends on how you measure 'world-class'. Today, graphical design contributes very little (if anything) to website's overall success. I would like to go out on a limp to rationalize these kinds of sentiments: the company I work for gets most of its design inspirations based partly on strategic objectives and user feedbacks--the creatives might keep the typeface consist or get the right color theme for the audience, but they are limited in what they can do to win the next web design award. The people approving these design decisions or commenting on them aren't always graphics designers, but with immediate group review (Code Complete talks about trying your GUI to the guy in the next cubicle) it is possible to get the right kind of GUI situable for a large audience (say 50 milllion people). |
| How come Yahoo contains spam and hotmail does not? | Sun 07 Mar | karthik |
| Its really puzzling. Yahoo Mail seems to have zero or near zero spam. Its months and months since i received a single spam. But my hotmail inbox has become really unusable. Spam is so so bad that i have resolved never to use hotmail again. If Bill gates had sold my address to a dozen spammers, it could not have been worse. I have had this problem in all my hotmail accounts. Does someone know how Yahoo contains spam far far better than hotmail? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Dan Maas | Just to confirm, are you absolutely sure you have not posted your email address publicly or in an online form? With am 'unlisted' Yahoo account I get Yahoo-brand spam about once a month, and that's about it. Also, perhaps your accounts are being targeted by a dictionary attack? I would think more common-sounding names would get more spam due to dictionary spammers. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Fred. | Clearly, MSN either sells adresses or publishes them in a directory somewhere but I haven't been able to find any option to prevent/delete this option. I created a new account at Hotmail to use with MSN Messenger. When I logged on the next day, already two SPAM e-mails were waiting in my Inbox. Draw your own conclusions. |
| Sun 07 Mar | KayJay | Just an observation, 'Contains'. Was misled initially. Yahoo! does fail in restricting spam, though to a lesser extent. My account receives on average 3 to 5 spam emails on a daily basis, most of which have a '@yahoo.com' or '@yahoo.co.in' as the spoofed address. I had discontinued using MSN and Hotmail accounts for almost a year now. Mostly beacise of spam, though not the only reason. In fact, my MS Passport is my Yahoo! account. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Ken Klose | I've set up two hotmail accounts, and within a day its getting spam. On the other hand my Yahoo account went for a very long time spam-free, but then one day WHAMMO tons of spam. And from that day forth, SPAM-O-RAMA! Since then I'm gotten my own domain with unlimited virtual email addresses, so everytime I fill out an online form, sign up for something, or send in a rebate I give a unique address that I can identify with who I gave it to. I've been doing this for over a year and still none of those myriad email addresses have been inundated. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Joe On Software (Joe) | >>'Clearly, MSN either sells adresses or publishes them in a directory somewhere ' I used to think the same thing, but a more likely answer is the use of a 'dictionary attack' by spammers. They simply spew out millions of e-mails using common names and collections of random letters. Since the 'from' address in the spam is fake anyway, they aren't bothered with all the undeliverable e-mails bouncing back. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Justin Johnson | I thought it was simply that Yahoo's spam filter is a lot better than Hotmail's. I receive around 10-20 spam every day to my Yahoo account, but the filter dumps it right into the bulk folder and all I have to do is click 'empty' whenever I check it. I've had the same Yahoo address for two years now, and use it everywhere I have to submit an email address. Doesn't Hotmail offer spam filtering? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Nigel | Yahoo offers spam filtering, but it's still a hassle. The free mailboxes have a certain limit, but the spam inbox still counts towards the limit. Even though I don't get much real email, I still have to clean out my spam inbox every couple days to prevent bouncing from a full inbox. I guess you get what you pay for eh. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Myron A. Semack | Yahoo has a better spam filter. Part of the reason you see spam, even if your e-mail address is 'unlisted' is that spammers will just randomly try usernames @aol.com, @yahoo.com, and @hotmail.com. Because there are so many subscribers at those domains, most of the e-mails actually 'hit' something. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Gwyn | I've got a hotmail account and have had it for several years. Zero spam. Perhaps the dictionary 'attack' is valid as you'd never ever find my surname in anyone's dictionary, even a dictionary of names! |
| Sun 07 Mar | Stephen Jones | Check out the boxes with default ticks the next time you fill in an application for a new Hotmail address. |
| Sun 07 Mar | somebody | Hotmail had a big update recently and it seems like the spam filter is now MUCH better. For example, yesterday I received 21 spam emails to my Hotmail account -- twenty went to the junk folder, one made it to the inbox. I use my Hotmail account as my random 'public' email account but it looks like these mostly came from dictionary attacks (judging from the lists of similiar addresses in the To fields). |
| Sun 07 Mar | Mike | Lip service. Notice how Microsoft has all these elaborate plans to end spam. Yet Hotmail users get a mailbox full of spam and Yahoo users don't. Microsoft talks a lot about security too. Draw your own conclusions here. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Seun Osewa | I also notice the same difference. Yahoo's spam filter seems to work better by default. I also think it's more elaborate since it allows human input and tuning ("this is spam" this is not spam") and its interface is not so bloated that you would be afraid to check your spam folder for false positives |
| Sun 07 Mar | Stephen Jones | My Hotmail account has never had a single spam message, and I just logged into my Yahoo account for the first time in three weeks and there were half-a-dozen spam messages. I don't use the spam filter in either. I can only presume that dictionary attacks are responsible for the occasional yahoo spam. Interestingly enough I get more dictionary spam on my work account that is almost never used for external email. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Kyralessa | 'Perhaps the dictionary 'attack' is valid as you'd never ever find my surname in anyone's dictionary, even a dictionary of names!' Prove it, Gwyn; what's your surname? C'mon, you can tell us. If you don't, then why should we believe what you say? You'll lose all credibility if you don't share this information. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Robert Jacobson | Just out of curiosity, I created a new Hotmail account this afternoon. The username was greated through a random password generator (24 random alphanumeric characters) so it's completely immune from a dictionary attack. Six hours later, no spam so far. I'll provide an update if the situation changes. |
| An audio newbie looking for some advice | Sun 07 Mar | Audio Newbie |
| I know there are a lot of developers out there who are into audio creation. Hopefully, some of them read and post on JOS. Task I need to record my voice to an audio file. I plan on having a friend help me integrate this audio file with a video movie that was created with a camcorder. The camcorder movie has already been transferred to a PC and converted into an AVI file and an MPEG1 file. Problem I am a complete audio newbie. I currently dont have a clue how to properly record my voice to an audio file and edit the audio file if needed. Questions I have: * What audio recording/editing software do you recommend a newbie should use? * I only own a cheap microphone that plugs into my PC. Is this going to be a problem? * Not sure what file format I should save the audio file as. Any good audio related web sites for newbies? How about books? TIA for any help given. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Inidan Developer in India | Very very basic setup. Sound Recorder - Comes with Windows. AVI Editor - Comes with Visual Studio. (It sure was in 6.0, anyway) Regards KayJay |
| Sun 07 Mar | www.marktaw.com | * What audio recording/editing software do you recommend a newbie should use? From my website: ProTools Free Well, if you're running Windows 9x or OS9, then ProTools makes a free version of it's software. The only drawback is it only supports 8 tracks. At this price it may be worth it to dust off that Windows 98 disc. Another plus of this software is that anyone can install it. Your friend doesn't have to buy a copy in order to share your sessions. So you can take your USB based sound card over to you friend's house and continue working. On January 15, 2003, David Lemire sent to me: In regard to DAW software, here are some inexpensive and/or free candidates I've come across in my searches that I didn't see on your page. I've not personally tried any of these other than a coupla minutes playing with n-Track. * FASoft n-track shareware program, try-before-you-buy option, seems to have a really good rep on AM4T. http://www.fasoft.com * Quartz AudioMaster Freeware limited freeware version of their commercial products. 'Quartz AudioMaster Freeware will allow you to record, edit, mix, share and deliver your productions driving a fully integrated 4 tracks digital mixer, recorder, sound and time line editor in perfect synch with a 16 tracks MIDI sequencer.' www.digitalsoundplanet.com * Audacity Open source audio editor. 'Version 1.0.0 is the final, stable version of the original Audacity. It is a good, simple audio editor suitable for recording, mixing, and editing ordinary tracks of CD-quality audio, on many platforms including Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.' http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ * PowerTracks Pro From the web site: 'PowerTracks Pro Audio is a professional, fully featured digital audio and MIDI workstation, packed with features for musicians, students and songwriters. With seamlessly integrated digital audio / MIDI recording, and built-in music notation, PowerTracks turns a typical soundcard equipped Windows PC into a music production powerhouse!' (From the same folks who sell 'Band In A Box'). This was discussed a little bit recently on alt.music.4-track, and I've seen positive things about it in other newsgroups. http://www.pgmusic.com/powertracks.htm Windows comes with a sound recorder program (or used to, I haven't had the occasion to use it in a while) that should be 'good enough' for simple use. ==== * I only own a cheap microphone that plugs into my PC. Is this going to be a problem? No, as long as you don't mind cheep microphone sound. If you want a super-simple hardware set up that's a step up from yours check: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/20030214.html You can also get an idea of what your sound card might sound like from his mp3. ==== * Not sure what file format I should save the audio file as. Any good audio related web sites for newbies? How about books? On the PC, WAV files, on the Mac I believe it's AIFF. These are the uncompressed formats. You could use a proram like CDex to conver the WAV files to mp3 later on. I have a whole series of articles on this kind of thing, but aimed a little higher than where you're aiming. http://www.marktaw.com/recording/HomeStudio/BuildaHomeStudioonaBudget.html |
| Sun 07 Mar | www.marktaw.com | > on the Mac I believe it's AIFF Or maybe SD2 (Sound Designer 2)... on a Mac you probably don't have to think about it... |
| Sun 07 Mar | Eric Debois | Audacity is probably exactly what you need. Since you already have a mic, download audacity and record a bit with it. If it sucks.. which is likely.. you need a better mic and preamp. Perhaps you can borrow/rent it? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Holger | In the audio field there is the saying 'crap in, crap out'. So you should try to use the best equipment you can get your hands on. - The microphone is the most crucial part. No need to go expensive but maybe a friend has a Sure SM-58 he can borrow you? When you really want to buy a mic for yourself go to a music shop and get the cheapest SM-58 lookalike. Don't buy a microphone at a computer store. - The second most important part is the A/D converter. In most cases you will use your soundcard but if you can get something external, use it (cheap is OK). You won't get a good signal when the converter is in the same box as the hard drive and the graphics card. If possible buy this at a music store and not at a computer store. (Computer people are very immusical, they make loud machines.) No matter what equipment you use the following applies to all: - When recording don't hold the mic in your hand. Try to get a stand for it. - Turn the input level of your A/D converter (your soundcard) as high as possible without distorting your voice. Speak louder than normal (this might be weird at first but don't be shy). - Don't expect to get it right on the first take but have your recording software running in case you might nail it immediately. Musicians always run at least a DAT recorder just in case. - After you recorded your voice normalize the sound file so it will be as loud as possible. Every audio software can do this, the command is called 'Normalize'. - Don't get fancy with compression (audio compression, not MP3 compression). You can make things very bad if you don't know what you do. It's best to just leave your voice the way it is because the human ear is very aware of changes made to the human voice. - If you have too much background noise experiment with the noise gate. Again, every audio software can do this, the command is called 'Noise Gate'. This way you can't get rid of the noise but you can silence the recording during the pauses. Make the decay rather long, it will sound unnaturally with a short decay. Don't overdo this effect! - If the background noise really disturbs you, you should record again and speak louder. If that doesn't help you have to get your hands on better equipment. Well, that's almost all you can do. You should always keep in mind how you will use the sound and if you really need an expensive microphone or not. And don't overdo the processing afterwards, normalizing should be enough. Please excuse my english grammar. :-) |
| Make Me Disappear | Sun 07 Mar | entell |
| OK what I am going to talk about is very much out of context, but so is The Apprentice. :) I just came from a David Copperfield show. It was well worth the money we spent getting the front row seats. It is an entertaining, funny show with lots of mind bending tricks. In case you never saw any of his shows, live or on TV, he has two basic type of tricks. The first type is the let me pick some random people, have them write/pick random things and guess what those things are. He throws balls or fresbees to the audience to pick people and have them be part of the show. I am not sure exactly how he does it, but I think these types of tricks are pretty much staged. I guess he plants his own people and aim really well. When he cant get it right he ends up saying Sir, give the ball to the lady closest to you (this happened quite a few times). I can at least live with this answer. The other type of trick he pulls is making things disappear. We are talking about cars, motorcycles and people from the audience (13 to be exact in tonights show) once again randomly picked. I cannot explain this type of tricks with any scientific reasoning. I mean the only thing between you and the objects that disappear are a thin sheet of cloth. You can see under, around and in some cases even behind the area where things vanish. In one part of the show, he takes this guy (who is an insider I believe) and supposedly transports himself and the guy to a remote island. I dont care whether he makes it to the island or not (they make it look like he does), but before they disappear, they are on a steel platform, and the platform extends to the middle of the seating area right above the audience. He stands inside a telephone booth size wooden construction which is at the end of the steel platform. The wooden construction does not obstruct our view of what is inside and around it. He pulls a white big sheet over the construction and in a few seconds he is gone with the other guy! Later he reappears in the middle of the audience above some seats! #1 how the hell did he escape from the construction which is in the middle, over the seating area while everyone is looking straight at it? #2 how the hell did he reappear in the middle of the audience? I know I wasnt looking at where he reappeared, but what about the people who were sitting there? Were they all his own people planted to those seats? I dont know. When he made the 13 people from the audience disappear, even if they somehow walked out of the steel construction where they were seated in the middle of the stage before they disappeared, some of the people he picked were old, and they took a while even to be seated. There is time after they pull the sheet over the construction and before they pull it away again, but I cant figure out how they would have just left the stage without us seeing it all.. Not to mention that these people were holding flashlights which were moving when the sheet was pulled over the construction they were sitting in. Who were waving those flashlights which also disappeared together with the people! Can anyone explain these vanishings and reappearings? They are going to drive me nuts! p.s. Sorry about this completely out of context post, but I just had to. |
| Sun 07 Mar | anon | entell, you are from Pittsburgh? |
| Sun 07 Mar | braid_ged | Maybe not much insight but i once had a conversation with a retired magician and he said : 'With big tricks it's usually the obvious but difficult solution. If an elephant disapears from behind a curtain and you think 'There is no way they could have done that unless they had a massive crane lift it out or a fork lift truck drive up from a trap door.... how the hell did they do it. They had a massive crane lift it out or a fork lift truckdrive up from a trap door.' |
| Sun 07 Mar | braid_ged | Ah... The key to magic, I am told, is distraction and the fact that the trick always happens at a time other than when you think it has. For example 'How did they get out of that box is plain view ?' They were never in it. Mirrors or projection etc.... The trick occurs not when the audience is focused on it.. but when the magician is telling a joke or introducing some distraction. Magic is about distraction. |
| Sun 07 Mar | www.marktaw.com | There's a series on TV "debunking" a lot of these tricks. You can probably rent them too. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Simon Lucy | For most static illusions its a 45 degree mirror or set of mirrors. Distance or travelling illusions, such as seeming to be in one place and then another are usually accomplished using doubles or twins. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Rick | That video series I think is called the Masked Magician or maybe Mystery Magician. They'll show a modern illusion of the type you saw, then move the camera in back, do it again and show you how it worked. And it's always really obvious, like she disappeared from the box because she never got in the box, she just crouched down on a ledge behind it and hopped off behind the curtain as they spun it around. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Mark Pearce | Entell, You don't need to analyze - just enjoy the mystery! http://pennandteller.com/sincity/penn-n-teller/articles/fire-eating.html Mark |
| Sun 07 Mar | somebody | I think the show was called something like "Secrets Revealed" and on TV about five years ago. They had a magician who was supposedly well-known and was referred to as the "Masked Magician" (since he claimed that revealing his identity would ruin his career). Eventually, he was unmasked and turned out to be some guy that no one ever heard of. He did reveal some interesting tricks but they never scaled well to the Copperfield level. |
| Open House Help | Sat 06 Mar | Elephant |
| Okay, if Im coming in from out of town for the open house, say D.C., whats the best way to get to Fog Creek, and what would you recommend for hotels? What if I take Amtrak in? Any and all recommendations are more than appreciated. I like nice hotels, but I dont want to shell out an arm and a leg. |
| Sat 06 Mar | The Walrus | How about a homeless shelter or a YMCA? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | Youth hostels and bed and breakfast. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Simon Lucy | Is there going to be a competition for the furthest travelled or the most imaginative/circuitous route? No, don't worry I'm not going. I do though have a mental image of squads of Joel lookalikes showing up and there being a sudden market in plastic face masks. |
| Sun 07 Mar | mb | hey, shouldn't this be in the 'new york' forum? looks like their offices are about 4 blocks north of the train station. exit on the 8th avenue side and walk. from the bus station you'd have to walk south about the same distance. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Elephant | I would have posted it there, but that's now the ask Joel forum. I suppose it would still fit there. |
| VMWare virtual machine as primary environment | Sat 06 Mar | VMQ |
| Im in the process of reconstructing a copy of my working environment on a new laptop and will be going through that process again soon with a faster desktop PC. Yuk! Any thoughts and experiences about running a VMWare virtual machine as your primary environment? So instead of installing development tools, email client, productivity applications etc. onto the native O/S you build your day-to-day working environment inside a VM. Advantages: easy to move your entire working environment between machines, for example to a laptop or a faster PC just by copying the VM. Easy backups too. Disadvantages: a slight performance hit (but does this matter with todays fast hardware?) |
| Sat 06 Mar | Joel Spolsky | Great idea but at 2 GHz on the main CPU, it's still a little too slow, I think. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Brad Wilson | I develop only inside of Virtual PC now. My host PCs run the most appropriate OS for personal use (Windows XP), and then I can select from literally dozens of available development environments as I see fit (matrix of OS vs. compiler vs. other things like what versions of individual software is installed vs. additional required development tools like SharePoint). I've been doing it this way for about 6 months now, and I cannot image doing it any other way now. This is just too flexible. Plus, my desktop has 2GB of RAM, so it's a breeze to not only get my development tools running in one VPC, but clean client and server environments in others, and have it all running at once. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Brad Wilson | Oh, and I do it with a 1GHz P3 and 5400RPM drive on my laptop, too, and it's still extremely usable. |
| Sat 06 Mar | erics | Yup, I do this pretty often as I have multiple clients who require multiple, incompatible development environments. I'm usually using VMWare for linux work under Windows XP, but I sometimes run Windows under Windows as well. Performance is ok for development but drops off markedly your VM starts needing to page to disk. I should note that I'm running an older 1.3GHz 128M RAM laptop. More memory would certainly improve the situation. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Brad Wilson | Yes, plentiful RAM is a requirement to make this work. I just upgraded my desktop machine (P4-2.8/800), and put 2GB of ultra-fast RAM into the system. Now I can run a literally insane number of Virtual PCs without swapping to disk. A strong recommendation for non-laptop users: get a second disk, and put the virtual hard drive files on that second disk, separate from your OS & paging file. Even on an external Firewire or USB 2 drive, that can make a pretty substantial difference in disk performance, which is admittedly the weakest point for both VMware and VPC. |
| Sat 06 Mar | dood , | we run our builds on a vmware machine. WE can build anywhere , and if hardware has problems we move the build vm image over to new machine. cj |
| Sat 06 Mar | Philo | [psst, Brad! One word: SCSI] |
| Sat 06 Mar | K | I develop on vpc's on a laptop (1.5ghz Pentium M with 1 G RAM) and it is a great way to do work. On the laptop I keep the VPC's on a USB 7200 harddrive w/ 8M cache. It is important to keep the VPC's on a harddrive that does not contain your host OS. The other benefit is that in team development you can bring a new person on to the team in less then half a day. Definately worth looking into. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Li-fan Chen | VMQ, you are right on. Basically you should only run the bare minimum on your host pc, this 1) reduces registry/dll hell to the point where you'll rarely reinstall; 2) keeps it stable And then stack on the goodies in your virtual host. You should still backup (either the VM files or ghost what's within) and use the rollback feature to undo what mysterious shareware might have done to your system. Performance wise, it's good enough for most office work. For GUI less linux remote administration/programming, I would say anything faster than a P3-800, For same machine GUI development, anything faster than a P4 2.0GHz should be more than adequate (depends on what you do though). You won't want to run 3D rendering or Premier in it, however, keep the serious long-runs and raw crunching out of it as much as possible. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Li-fan Chen | > You won't want to run 3D rendering or Premier in it, however, keep the serious long-runs and raw crunching out of it as much as possible. YMMV. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Brad Wilson | [psst, Brad! One word: SCSI] psst, Philo! One sentence: 3ware SATA hardware RAID smokes, for half the price of SCSI, when the drives are physicall the same! :) |
| Sat 06 Mar | Brad Wilson | '[...] keep the serious long-runs and raw crunching out of it as much as possible.' Actually, this is precisely where VPC excels. The CPU performance between VPC and host is nearly 100% equal. Where you hurt the most is disk. So, computationally expensive (but not data intensive) things works just beautifully inside a VPC. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | I would go with Brad on this, basically this is what it will translate to: longer compiles, not because of CPU power waste, but disk access waste (lots of files are created, translated in any given major compiles). |
| Sun 07 Mar | Egor | I do 100% of my development inside VMware on 2GHz Celeron with 1G RAM. WinXP as host, RedHat Linux as guest (very minimal X environment, no KDE or something, so I give it 256MB). GCC compilation times seem to be on par with PIII-500/256/ATA33, (which I also use for same builds, so I can compare). So, as you see, slowdowns are significant. Things like traversing directory tree are also much slower. But my disks are virtual, I guess you can get a lot better performance from raw partition access. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Brad Wilson | There are a couple different options to combat that. The raw partition access is a very good one. Another option available in VPC (and presumably VMware) is to make the "virtual disk" a fixed size on the host disk; i.e., it doesn't grow. Much of the performance penalty associated with disk access is growing the on-host file size for the virtual disk. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Brad Wilson | Also... 'GCC compilation times seem to be on par with PIII-500/256/ATA33' I was previously a VMware user (paid twice, for 2.x and 3.x), and switched to Virtual PC, because I found the performance with Virtual PC is absolutely outstanding. My slowdowns are nowhere near as bad as yours seem to be.. The downside, obviously, is that the host for VPC must be Windows, whereas you can host VMware with Linux (which is a seemingly better host choice, given its relatively low hardware requirements). On the other hand, VPC can be hosted on the Mac, which last I checked, VMware could not. I'd say anybody who's evaluating VMware for something like this sort of owes it to themselves to get the timed trial version of VPC and do an A/B performance comparison. |
| Sun 07 Mar | anon | I have to agree. Virtual PC is much better at running Windows operating systems (can you say undocumented hooks -- just kidding folks! I don't want to troll), especially in the area of i/o throughput. There was a review going round a couple of weeks ago that confirmed this, if I find the link I post it. You can run non-Windows OS in Virtual PC 2004, and the networking side of things is handled in a much nicer fashion, without the extra adpators and bridge protocols that VMWare uses. Just my fraction of a Euro. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | I have never tried VPC, sincerely hope I am not missing out :-) Yes, VMWare is infatuated disk optimizations (but it has a crush on memory and processing power too). In order of preferences: 1. VMWare GSX running on Google's 13000+ linux servers 2. A complete scsi subsystem, accessed as a raw partition 3. A separate physical scsi drive, all to the virtual os as a single raw partition. 4. A separate physical ide drive, all to the virtual os as a single raw partition 5. A separate ide drive with separate partitions, one used by host os, one used by virtual os, 6. Same drive as host OS drive, dedicated raw access on a separate partition 7. Same drive as host OS drive, preallocated virtual disk 8. 7. Same drive as host OS drive, dynamic sizing of virtual disk The more you go out of your way to help this along, the more your VMWare will speed up. |
| Gwyn's "Why won't you show your cards?" | Sat 06 Mar | Philo |
| In http://discuss.fogcreek.com/newyork/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=1730&ixReplies=27 Gwyn asked why Joel wont reveal how his business is doing, stating that in the UK everyone has to, and it doesnt hurt them. In poker, you rules for five card stud are that each player gets one hole card and the other four are dealt face up in front of them. In five card draw, each player is given five cards face down. If youre in a game of five card draw, you dont ask one of the other players to lay down four cards because it works just fine in five card stud. The trick is that everyone is on the same playing field. In the US, small, privately-held companies dont have to reveal their business beyond normal public filings. For Joel to show all his cards on an internet message board would put him at a massive competitive disadvantage with other businesses here in the US. My advice - dont wander over to other peoples games and insist they play by your rules. You can ask, but they can also say no. (but if you want to join someone elses game, you should be prepared to play by their rules) Philo |
| Sat 06 Mar | Nick | It should also be noted that in the US there are commercial resources to gather info on private companies. In large companies, most purchasing departments will run a D&B report on new vendors if they are small and/or privately held. D&B provides basic credit reports on companies. I've never seen the contents of one, so I'm not sure what other info is entailed. So, even for private companies, some information is publicly available. Here is an example of what you can order: http://tinyurl.com/3ga7e |
| Sat 06 Mar | Nick | Also, Joel has inadvertantly provided other information about his company. Fog Creek employees have 'Fog Creek Software' in their posts to this forum. The only posts I've seen with the extra signature line are from Joel and Michael. So, you could speculate that Joel and Michael are the only two full time developers, making it a small company. On the other hand, Joel hires developers who are smart and get things done, and therefore don't waste their time in message boards like the rest of us. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Simon Lucy | In the UK all you have to do if you're a small company is post a set of unaudited accounts. If you aren't a limited liability company you don't even have to do that. |
| Sat 06 Mar | The real Entrepreneur | 'Anyone that really wanted to know the details of Fog Creek would have no trouble obtaining such information. ' Which is yet *another* reason why Joel doesn't need to disclose information if he prefers not to. If you want to know, then *search* for it. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Mitch & Murray (from downtown) | D&B reports are not exactly accurate. This is not a good way to evaluate how a company is doing, what their revenue is, etc, if that is what you guys are thinking of. On the other hand, there have been various business questions asked of Joel that he has just flat out blown off. Example: A (long) while back Joel ran an article on how he dumped Digital River as their payment processor / ESD provider and cooked up their own stuff. Fine, no need to give Digital River their reseller discount anymore. Someone asked later how they did with respect to fraud - online fraud is a BIG problem with doing your own order processing, outfits like Digital River (and their satelite companies) have skills and experience in this area, that is what you are paying for. Not a peep. I can't imagine Joel writing a story for MSDN about all his major screw-ups like Eric Sink did. The guy (Joel) is a cheerleader for his own bidness, and that is about it. Think I'll pose the online order fraud question on 'Ask Joel' and see if he ducks it once again. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Joe On Software (Joe) | >>'For Joel to show all his cards on an internet message board would put him at a massive competitive disadvantage with other businesses here in the US.' Utter nonsense. This is a perfect example of excessive paranoia masquerading as 'protecting your business'. This is the same type of nonsense that has been rampant in government agencies (sepecially the federal government) for years. The most trivial information is classified as Top Secret. If someone obtains the source code to City Desk and starts producing a knock off product, obviously that would be bad.. But I cannot think of one single peice of information about the company that would be harmful if made public. Please explain how revealing the number of people employeed by Fog Creek Software would put them 'at a massive competitive disadvantage'. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Joel Spolsky | We have a policy of not revealing any information about our e-commerce system because that would make it easier to hack. In particular I'm not going to tell you what we're doing to reduce fraud because people trying to defraud us would use it to circumvent our fraud reduction measures. Sorry. Nor am I going to tell you what bank I use for credit card processing or what software, all of which would just make it that much easier on someone trying to steal from us. (And if you were planning to rehash that stupid misinterpretation of Bruce Schneier, please restrain yourself: just because the development of new cryptographic algorithms benefits from openness does not in any way imply that the implementation of fraud detection and prevention measures benefits from publicity. We've gotten our credit card fraud rate down to zero with some clever measures that, frankly, if people knew what they were they could start defrauding us again. Yes, I'd rather have measures that would still work even if people knew what they were, but such things don't exist, so I welcome the advantage that secrecy provides.) We have a policy of not revealing sales figures primarily because we believe it would attract entry (i.e. competitors). We don't publish the number of employees that we have for the same reason, but you're welcome to come to the Fog Creek open house and count 'em yourself. In all these cases, there's a difference between 'if you ask me I'll tell you' and 'if you ask me I'll publish it on a web site.' For example, I wouldn't be happy if someone decided to hack Fog Creek and intercept all our credit card payments, redirecting them to their Swiss bank account, and I sure as hell do not need to give them a map, available with a conveniently high Google page rank, explaining how we process credit card transactions and making it just that much easier to steal from us, but again, come up to me at the open house, introduce yourself, and I'll happily show you the whole process and give you references for all the vendors we use. Just because we don't like to provide a complete online reference describing every aspect of Fog Creek's operation, doesn't mean we're obsessively secretive or hiding something. We don't have that much to hide, anyway. Occassionally some snarky troll says, 'why should we listen to what you say about software development if you refuse to divulge how much money Fog Creek makes?' as if that were the only way to judge whether the contents of my writing on the web makes sense. Judge what I write on its merits, not on whether Fog Creek makes money or has lots of employees. I'm not sure why these snarky trolls can't just judge whether my ideas are valid or not on their own, without reference to external sources of 'authority.' And finally I have generally found that when somebody asks for something you're not planning to tell them, you're much better off ignoring them than just outright refusing to give them the information, because you wind up in stupid arguments like this one which can easily be avoided by not engaging the trolls. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Philo | Sorry if you think it's stupid, Joel, but I felt that the 'why don't you reveal everything about your business when everyone in the UK does' was an interesting mental disconnect worth addressing. And Joe, you can't compare what governments do with what small businesses do - the question is 'who are they accountable to?' Philo |
| Sat 06 Mar | Aaron F Stanton | I posted this in the other thread, and I'll post it here too: I think maybe Joel has decided to let his actions speak louder than words about the internals of his company. His company has two products, one of which is on version 2 and the other of which is on version 3. This gives a very strong indication that his company is self-sufficient. He clearly states pricing for the products. A bored Sunday reading through the archives or a search will yield this post http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000026.html dated December 2, 2000. That's over three years out of date, and if you add to it the fact that his company recently had new office space created to their own specs and is hosting an open house, I'll think you'll find that he's doing fine. The exact internals are not necessary. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Gwyn | 'Sorry if you think it's stupid, Joel, but I felt that the 'why don't you reveal everything about your business when everyone in the UK does' was an interesting mental disconnect worth addressing.' Philo - that's a bit kiss-arse isn't it? I don't remember you proposing it like that! It was more a defence of why Joel shouldn't reveal it and your presumption about why that might be. I suspect that, in a global market, it might be interesting so see how all the American companies hiding their information might be adversely affecting UK companies that don't have that luxury.... or maybe not eh? Joel, that was quite some rant. Looks a little defensive maybe but well done anyway! Two 'snarky trolls' and a plain old 'troll' just for me. Although 'snarky' means 'irritable' and I suggest you actually meant 'irritating'. > I'm not sure why these snarky trolls can't just judge whether my ideas are valid or not on their own, without reference to external sources of 'authority.' I think it's fair to say that your ideas are generally presented as a statement of fact. So you have to accept being challenged. > And finally I have generally found that when somebody asks for something you're not planning to tell them, you're much better off ignoring them than just outright refusing to give them the information, because you wind up in stupid arguments like this one which can easily be avoided by not engaging the trolls. Actually not true. You may end up in a different (possibly interesting) discussion about why you wouldn't tell someone something but it's a competely different message you send by saying 'I don't reveal that because...' rather than ignoring it which comes across as 'Oops, that's an awkward question' I personally don't buy the 'it would attract entry' argument. You mean when people find out how successful you are that they're suddenly going to decide that there's money to be made in bug tracking systems or content management systems? Hmmm. But that's just my view. People in the public-eye professions (like actors or musicians) often whinge about the amount of public attention they get but, hey, get over it, that's part of the package. And likewise, when you sit yourself up on a public pedestal (for whatever reason you choose) you have to accept that part of that job is to deal with the awkward questions. You don't have to like it but you shouldn't be surprised that it happens. Trying to protect your image by only letting out what you consider good publicity is doomed to failure I'm afraid. You need a different approach. I and another person asked you questions 'Do you have any insight into working out product pricing' on the 'Ask Joel' forum. You didn't respond to either of them. To the outside world it looks like 'Joel knows everything' because those questions never appear but you could answer those questions with an honest 'I'm afraid I can't help you on that'. In the short term this may work but as a long term strategy it'll start to undermine you. Noone expects you to have all the answers. But people like other people to be honest about who they really are. This breeds trust and good long-term relationships. Now this thread has the potential to show insight into the mind of the man who created FC and JoS. And this is interesting in itself. |
| Sat 06 Mar | saberworks | http://discuss.fogcreek.com/newyork/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=1389 |
| Sat 06 Mar | The Ted | 'We have a policy of not revealing sales figures primarily because we believe it would attract entry (i.e. competitors).' Isn't the CMS & bug tracking fields ALREADY heavily competitive? |
| Sat 06 Mar | Brad Wilson | Yes, except that they have product differentiation. They're not bug tracking. They're easy to install, simple to use web-based bug tracking. That was enough of a differentiation for us to buy it. They're not CMS. They're lightweight site management for people who don't want to (and shouldn't have to) know HTML. Again, that's enough of a differentiation to make some sales. 'Own your market space. If you can't own the market, make a new one, and own that instead.' |
| Sun 07 Mar | VP | SPOON!!! |
| Sun 07 Mar | Richard P | Yeah. There are a lot of bug tracking and CMS tools. However, if everyone knew how much bling Joel was making, they would spend $$$ to research just what people like about Fog Creek products and make a near clone with a super-marketing-must-have feature tacked on. Almost every bug tracking software I've seen is overly feature-wridden. I haven't used Fog Bugz, but I get the impression from the marketing that it is lean-and-mean. Almost every CMS system out there is either just a set of perl scripts and some XML files or a huge, bloated, Java AppServer behemoth. CityDesk falls nicely in the sweet spot. So yeah, I think Joel's explanation holds water. |
| Sun 07 Mar | no name | Google only returns 850,000+ hits for "web based bug tracking", so clearly there's room for competition. :} |
| Sun 07 Mar | no name | Or 64,500 if you put it all in quotes. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Brad Wilson | Right, because the REALLY important part is that it's web based, not that it's simple to install or easy to use, right? :-p |
| Sun 07 Mar | :} | Probably only 30,000 of those hits claim to be simple and easy to use. The rest claim to be powerful and feature-packed. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Kyralessa | 'Google only returns 850,000+ hits for 'web based bug tracking', so clearly there's room for competition. :}' http://search.csmonitor.com/search_content/0227/p09s01-coop.html |
| Sun 07 Mar | | Yah, I know you can't rely on google that way. I was just pointing out that there are several web based bug tracking systems that bill themselves as simple and easy to use. Even a lot of free ones. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Brad Wilson | As someone who is in favor of free (we use Subversion and CruiseControl.NET, for instance), I'll say that I've never EVER seen a free bug tracking system that was as good and simple as FogBUGZ. If there were, I'd be using it. Just because they claim 'easy', doesn't make them easy. FogBUGZ really _is_ easy. |
| Sun 07 Mar | | 'Just because they claim 'easy', doesn't make them easy. FogBUGZ really _is_ easy' Does the same hold true for YOUR claim? |
| Sun 07 Mar | no name | Here's the real question: does an admission that Joel is worried about attracting competitors (and thinks his sales figures would do that) mean that we should all rush out and write our own CityDesk clone even without knowing the precise numbers? Or does it mean the market is so small that a second company in the same market would probably mean both would go under? :) |
| Sun 07 Mar | Brad Wilson | 'Does the same hold true for YOUR claim?' Of course. You don't know me. Why should you believe my claim, when it's so simple to form you own opinion? That's what the big lump of gray is for, the stuff in your skull. :) |
| app research | Sat 06 Mar | entell |
| Anyone know of any good software out there to do the following: * An alternative to MS Outlook Is Eudora dead? Thats really the only one I can think of. Do you guys know/use other ones? * Bookmark management I am a bookmark junkie. I have hundreds of them, but keeping track of them ala IE is a horrendous job. How do you guys do it? Your suggestions may include commercial software as well as shareware and freeware. Thanks! |
| Sat 06 Mar | Almost Anonymous | I use Eudora! It's not dead yet... |
| Sat 06 Mar | x | I use the Mozilla mail client - it suits all my needs just fine. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Dan Maas | mutt user here. Command-line mail clients aren't for everyone, but fine for me :). |
| Sat 06 Mar | Liam | I prefer Outlook Express to Outlook.... It is quicker .... |
| Sat 06 Mar | Greg Hurlman | What are you looking for in an email app that isn't in Outlook? |
| Sat 06 Mar | Clay Dowling | Mozilla's Thunderbird package is very nice. It's very similar to the Mozilla mail component, but because it doesn't carry all of the Mozilla backage it is very fast. I've been very happy with it, and in general I don't like GUI mail clients. |
| Sat 06 Mar | entell | >What are you looking for in an email app that isn't in >Outlook? Greg, There is nothing more I am looking for. I just don't like Outlook 2000. Outlook Express is no better either. They are clunky, too many features and such. It also seems to crash a lot on me. I use the e-mail account my ISP provides me. Half the time Outlook doesn't realize it when new e-mail arrives. Sometimes it thinks the same e-mail is new twice or more.. It is just a silly app. I use it because it came with MS Office 2000. I was too lazy to find and install anything else, but I am very fed up with it at this point. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Insert half smiley here. | Pegasus Mail is a reasonable email program that's free. It claims to store your mailboxes in Unix MBOX format, so you should be able to switch to something else if you don't like it. (It has its own proprietary format too, but there doesn't seem to be any obvious way of getting this exported, so beware.) I've been using it at home for about 18 months, and I used an earlier version about 8 years ago when I was at university. It's been trouble-free, and Norton Antivirus works with it. It does have a clunky UI, however, and a few cosmetic problems when scrolling messages and message lists. And when there were email problems with my ISP, it downloaded all my messages about 10 times each. And your mail filtering rules sometimes have to be set up twice -- once for your inbox (for future mail) and once as a general set to use to clear out any mail currently in your inbox that you want filtered. But other than those, no major complaints. One feature it doesn't have, which I find useful in Outlook, is a way to quickly get to the message you sent in reply to a message in your inbox. But it will at least tell you whether you replied, which is (for me) the most important thing :) |
| Sat 06 Mar | Greg Hurlman | You *might* want to check out this: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/04/157219&mode=thread - grated, it's a /. thread, but at least you're guaranteed to have everything but Outlook discussed as a viable solution. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Benji Smith | I've been looking at Columba ( http://columba.sourceforge.net/ ) for a long time now. My company uses outlook, and that's what I use, but I'd definitely like to give Columba a try. If you do get a chance to check it out, post back here with your opinion. |
| Sat 06 Mar | hoser | Another vote for the Mozilla family of mail clients. The only thing it won't do (yet?) is schedule integration w/exchange servers. There is a calendar app, but its not compiled in by default. For just email use, mozilla mail rules are much more useful, and the spame filtering - while not perfect - works reasonably well. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Robert Jacobson | Have you considered Oddpost? It provides a web-based email application that does a good job at emulating Outlook, without all of the extra fluff. http://www.oddpost.com/ |
| Sat 06 Mar | entell | Thanks for all the suggestions! I'll give them all a try as soon as I can. I really can't wait to throw Outlook out the window. There seems to be no suggestions for a bookmark manager though. You guys don't use them? Don't know any? |
| Sat 06 Mar | Insert half smiley here. | I've not seen any bookmark managers. Every now and again, I copy my favourites (with Explorer, not the dreadful IE bookmark 'manager') into a new subfolder of the favourites menu. I copy those I know I'll use often back into the real favourites, for easy access. Any new ones I add into the main favourites. I also copy more from my backup into the real list as and when I need them. Then I repeat the process when the favourites list gets too large. It works surprisingly well. It's amazing how few I actually visit :) |
| Sun 07 Mar | entell | I couldn't find any bookmark managers either. I was planning to write one up, but not sure if it is worth the time. I think it is for my own use at least, but don't know if anyone else would care about it. |
| Sun 07 Mar | one programmer's opinion | entell, As far as a decent bookmark manager is concerned, I recommend that you visit a few shareware websites and while there doing a search for bookmark managers. There are so many on the market you really need to download a couple of them and try them out for yourself. I also recommend choosing a bookmark manager that allows you check for valid URLs since URLs have a tendency to die over time. |
| vxworks device driver | Fri 05 Mar | Adi |
| I am a beginner for device drivers development and i want to write a device driver for vxworks. Could anyone suggest a good site or book that could be a good Get-Started. Thanks in advance, Adi |
| Sat 06 Mar | son of parnas | vxworks has example drivers. They are pretty standard. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Vivek | You'll need the following concepts clear when you write a device driver. Vxworks drivers are explained in the Programmers guide ... http://rt.db.erau.edu/experiments/vx/toc/TableOfContents.html |
| A 20 minute usability review of City Desk | Fri 05 Mar | A Regular poster from India |
| Product: City desk starter edition. Operating system: Windows XP Professional. Dell Pentium 256 MB RAM An excellent product. I thought i would do a task analysis and probably a statistical study taking this as a example. But i came across very wierd things which are very basic usability flaws IMHO. The intital points are silly. But i would shout the roof down at any programmer who made some of the mistakes cited later on. But then again, i am a novice to city desk. Maybe there was some reason for doing it this way. Again, on the whole the usability is good. I did my masters in usability engineering. But this product had many basic flaws. The Microsoft usability standard at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwue/html/ch06g.asp is not implemented properly. You would say, FUCK MICROSOFT. But the problem is, people expect software to work the way MS works. Again this is just an initial impression. Its not a detailed study. And i am no city desk expert. So you could say, this is not well informed study. On pressing the windows shortcut key, the right mouse menu pops up in the most inconvenient position ---> Top left hand side. It should be where the caret should be. Logical and simple. If you are visually impaired, you will have a hard time locating where the menu popped up. I am not sure why almost every product has this bug . Or this is a feature? The Find Next has no shortcut key. You are compelled to use the mouse. Hardly intuitive.On a closer inspection, it has a shortcut key, but is not visible. Why do you expect me to type out all the letters on my keyboard to find the shortcut key?. The textboxes have visible shortcut keys but pushbuttons dont. Also Checkboxes dont have shortcut keys. Or is this a windows XP feature. Font Sizes. It shows font sizes from 1 to 7. Next to 1 it says Smallest. Yeh. I remember Arithmetic well enough to know that if there are numbers from 1-7, 1 is the smallest. The main thing is, if i want to set the font to 8, the letters distract. It forces me to read the words smallest or largest. Aricles, Properties, Extras . No way to navigate between tabs using the keyboard. The font is also quite unpleasant. You wont see tabs with that font. On the bottom(Status text) it says 478 words. Helpful. But if you are like most people, you will find that a combination of number of lines and number of words make more sense. For example 30 lines, 300 words. In fact, people find it difficult to think in lines too. The best is Number of Pages with number of lines (like MS Word) It is an editor, but on pressing the Insert key does not show whether its an insert or in overtype mode. Very basic IMHO. This is usually found in products like microsoft word and yes, i do use this feature. When i type F1, nothing happens. Does not bring up the help system. I dont know whether its a problem with my edition. Other products installed seemed to work on the F1 key. Save and Close--> Again not intuitive. How many of you actually click the Maximize button on launching citydesk?. Why does it not come up like you expect it to come up? Splash screens are not meant for the purpose Joel is using them for. To repeat , Splash screen is meant to show the user something to look at when the application loads, though the main purpose is often lost. In Citydesk, the splash screen is shown after the application loads. Why have a application window for each window?. This can have unpleasant consequences. I go to city desk main, go to MS Word and to city desk article. On closing the city desk article, you expect to get back to city desk. But it takes you to MS Word. Atleast, simulate a MDI window, even if you dont use it. Some dialogs have Help , others have Learn More. Difference?. Small thing, you can ignore this one. The Ok and Cancel buttons should be in the bottom right hand side of dialogs. There is a specific reason for this. It should not distract you from the dialog contents. Similiar find boxes ought to be consistent. In the Edit Variable window, you bring up one find -replace box. In the main city desk article, another find-replace box. Cant you call the same box?. In the Edit variable Box, the Edit menu is disabled when the screen loads. This should not be done. Why?. A visually impaired user may not notice that the Edit menu is disabled. He may not see the edit menu at all. A better solution is to disable the sub menus. This way, the user will know that it may be enabled on navigating to the next control (Multiline).Again, pushbuttons have no shortcuts, but text boxes have. In the Edit Variable Box, why show scrollbars if there is only one line?. This is distracting. The horizontal scroll bar **always** distracts. It should be shown only when the text length exceeds screen space. The Edit Variable Box comes in the Top Left Hand Corner. Nope. It should come in the center. Forces the user to shift focus. I have heard of the windows standard on placement of dialog boxes. Should be mostly centered. But there is little reason to put it on the top left hand side. The HTML View has a caret size thicker than the Normal View. Smart programming?. This is quite noticeable. Also why change the font? In the main City Desk Explorer view, Windows short cut key does not work. Very basic IMHO. This is the first thing i look when i evaluate usability. Again, the Find-Replace Boxes have a little problem. The text box width is not consistent across different Find-Replace dialogs, although there is no evidence that the length of the text the user enters changes from one dialog to the other. The Find-Replace box in the HTML editor does not select the selected text by default. By this i mean that if Joel is highlighted in the article, i expect Joel to show up in the Find-Replace boxes. Basic, IMHO. The captions with the pictures in Find-Replace boxes have to have the first letter capitalized. Looks better. And is windows standard. In the Insert-Link dialog (External URL Text box)(, if the URL is too long, you are better of seeing the first N characters rather than the last N characters. I mean, you save it as www.amazon.com/sadasdasda/asd/ad/a/das/d/asdsasdadas What do you want to see the next time, is it www.amazon.com... or adadadasdsadad Long URLs can easily be viewed in this article. Provide the URL as a tooltip. This is what Microsoft recommends and what is commonly followed. In the Insert Link box, on navigating using the tab key, the radio button value changes from To a citydesk... to To an external URL. And no Joel, I know you think that this is smart. BEcause the user did not select anything, smartly change the value. The basic windows rule is that you should not change values in any fields when the user navigates. Read the MSDN article on usability. Tab order does not work in the Insert Link. It never seems to go to the Link appears in... checkbox. In the insert picture box, on clicking Import File, you get a unpleasant minor usability shock. The dialog is no longer visible when the Insert Picture comes up. Why?. Imagine if Microsoft Word window disappeared when the Save As dialog comes. I mean, there is no earthly reason why it ought to go off your vision radar for some time. In the Insert picture dialog box, The space between the Alignment frame and the picture is much larger than in the Link frame. I mean, see the space between Link and The image is not a link. There is one more problem. All the objects need to be centered within the frame. In the Link frame, the space between the frame and the first object is much larger than the space between the frame and the last object. This is glaringly obvious. The tab order is totally haywire in the Insert Dialog Box. Set the focus to the combo box.I expect it to go to the Import File and then to the Alignment frame. But it never goes to the alignment frame. And no Joel, although i am your fan, this is inexcusable. The problem with this design is that you can never navigate to the alignment frame by the keyboard by tabbing. Also, you cant navigate to some other fields. I noticed a very strange anomoly in the Insert Picture box. None of the radio buttons have VISIBLE shortcut keys, but the shortcut keys work. Put an Ampersand before the titles to indicate that there is a shortcut key.Even when i press the alt key, the shortcut keys are not visible. And no joel, there cannot be any earthly reason for this. Provide some kind of a shortcut key to navigate between windows in city desk. Usually, this is Ctrl+F6. When i click on Insert Audio, the file types show All Files. It should show Audio Files. A tooltip for Add pushbutton shows Add. A tooltip for Delete shows Delete. Whats the point mate?. Dont provide them at all or provide some meaningful tip. In Template Properties, i cannot navigate to the non-disabled checkboxes at all. On a closer inspection, i can navigate but i cant see that it has navigated !!! Windows in city desk open in all sorts of positions. One needs to look around the screen to see the place where it has opened. Keyboard navigation is haywire and wrong in citydesk. I respectfully recommend. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwue/html/ch06g.asp And yes Joel, i know users who do all stuff on their keyboard who get irritated by such things. I mean to be helpful, and i hope you fix these. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Matthew Lock | The best test of Citydesk's usability is that I could set up a site for my company, and marketing could add pages themselves after about 5 minutes training. AND not keep coming back to ask questions about how such and such worked. I can't think of any other low end CMS systems where that would be possible. |
| Fri 05 Mar | A Regular poster from India | I hope no one mistakes this post. I am not saying City desk is bad . 99.99% good and 0.01% defective is still a great product.Please dont mistake this post. Its just what i looked for. Respectfully |
| Fri 05 Mar | A Regular poster from India | The reason for this post is to get into a harsh usability war. I want someone saying "This is the reason for this" rather than saying "City desk is great". That way we all learn. Sorry for the third post. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Likes long walks, short piers | It's all relative. From my usability experience, City Desk does not appear to be aimed at casual or inexperienced users. Rather it appears geared toward speeding & simplifying the tasks of building & maintaining web content for those already familiar with the equivalent manual methods. From this perspective, City Desk is a relatively friendly tool. |
| Fri 05 Mar | The real Entrepreneur | I think this illustrates a good point: The success of a business depends on doing many things well, not doing one thing perfectly. (I.e., need to have effective markeing AND sales AND prices AND product ) Everything is a tradeoff. Likewise, producing a successful product depends on doing many things WELL, not doing one thing perfectly. If you do manage to get one thing perfect, the 'cost' of that perfection comes in reducing the success of the other features. Think of the company or product as a chain. It's only as strong as it's weakest link. PEOPLE CAN BE MYOPIC People often focus on thier own area of expertise (programming, the look of the program, sales, whatever) and think that that PORTION of the company IS the company. IF only they could get that part RIGHT, then it woudl be a success. OVERALL, IT'S A STRONG CHAIN Joel has gotten every piece of the company working fairly well. He has gotten most of the program working fairly well. Certainly room for improvement, if any piece was perfect them it would mean he spent too much time of that piece. He'd have one VERY STRONG link and, consequently, other weaker links. MY GRIPE Personally, my biggest gripe is that it's so hard to convert an EXISTING website to Citydesk. you basically have to cut and paste the whole site a page and image at a time. If my site were small enough to do that, I would not need CityDesk. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Perpetual Newbie II | Regular Poster and you carried out this study for what purpose? Practice? As a CD _user_ there a number of things that I, and from posts I've read in the CD NG - many other _users_ would like to see FC spend their time on. You pick up on exactly … ahh ... none of them. Although you came close a couple of times :) You did mention a few glaring items (not that any of them have either affected my ability to use CD or ever even been noticed for that matter) the most obvious being F1-Help. VB and HTML-Help, which is what the program uses, have never gotten on well – not a good excuse, I agree. On the 'Maximize' item - God I hate people who have to 'Maximize' every GD tool, utility or program they open. Especially on a multi-user machine. 95% back-ground. It's the only time I curse Form persistence. Yea, I know - off track - just a rant. I'm not about to argue 'usability' with the learned. Here's my 18 month review (just what you didn't want) It works great, I'm very productive with it and although there are a number of new features and fixes I'd like to see just about every item you mentioned, to me, is pure fluff. It doesn’t meet every anal item according to some MS document … BFD, I could give a fiddlers fart! Sorry, I got off track, what was it were studying here? |
| Sat 06 Mar | Seun Osewa | I think these are meaningful points that can help turn make a great product even greater; afterall software is about continual improvement over time. |
| Sat 06 Mar | John C | Regular poster, you've not written a usability review, you've just nit-picked small flaws in the GUI. If you want to review the usability of CityDesk, then use it to create and maintain a website and write about how good it was at doing that. I don't care if there's no 'Find Next' shortcut key, I care that it's top notch at maintaining a website... |
| Sat 06 Mar | Karl Max | Why do Joel's cronies defend him so much? This bloke... he's pointed out inconsistencies in the UI, coming from a company whose chief has written a *book* on UI design. To this post, you should either say, 'no, you're wrong. These are NOT UI problems' or say, 'yes, you're right. We'll fix them' or at least 'we know about it, but we did it this way because...' |
| Sat 06 Mar | Stephen Jones | I don't use City Desk but I'd like to answer a couple of points. --''Save and Close'--> Again not intuitive.' ----- There was a long debate over this a few months back. You might do a search and find the thread. It's one of the design decisions that will inevitably piss-off a fair proportion of people. The placing of the right context menu at the top left of the screen is the Windows default placement for some things, such as the display. I't not clear on any numerical scale whether 1 represents the smallest or the largest. You have to point it out. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Jeff Watkins | I think what I object to most about the OP's post is his tone. This is not a review. Nothing about his tone indicates objectivity. To me, his tone sounds like he's desperate to highlight his own knowledge of the subject (usability) rather than truly explore the design decisions (if indeed they were) behind certain aspects of City Desk. While I haven't ever used City Desk (it doesn't run on the Mac), I can base the following on my background building software: every software product has bugs and visual bugs are often easier to find. Had I adopted this tone back when I made a living doing usability consulting, I wouldn't have had many repeat customers. Oh, one more thing: I think the use of IMHO (In My Humble Opinion) is ludicrous. If you call attention to it, it most certainly ISN'T a humble opinion. |
| Sat 06 Mar | anon | Umm, with regards the 'hidden' shortcut key for 'Find Next', isn't that just a case of Control Panel | Display | Appearance | Effects | "Hide underlined letters for keyboard navigation until I press the Alt key" being turned on by default in Windows 200 0 and XP ? |
| Sat 06 Mar | Insert half smiley here. | I disagree. I've not used Citydesk, and I don't really care about whether it's good or bad, but my complaint is with people who dismiss these so-called trivialities out of hand, or claim they don't matter when the program as a whole works well. As a blindingly obvious point, if the program as a whole didn't work well, the poster would probably have been moaning about something bigger. You don't complain about tab order, disappearing dialogs and strange menu positioning if you have bigger fish to fry. But these things are what turn a good program into one that's tiresome to use. You can beat the poster until you're blue in the face, but it won't stop inconsistent tab order and lack of keyboard shortcuts* from being a pain in the arse. A program that does just what you want will still cause your blood to boil, if keypresses don't do what you expect and obvious little things have simply been ignored. (And it's not like your expectations aren't borne of using a wide range of other Windows programs.) The slightly aggrieved tone is not a problem. No need to hold back. Minor annoyances like these create anger and frustration, and the fact that many people don't seem to notice (or, if they do, don't think it important) means you have to put your point across forcefully. Joel seems to have a pretty thick skin anyway. * -- those being problems that bug me in particular. I can't speak for the Citydesk-specific problems. P.S. context menus appear at the position indicated by the cursor for the device used to activate them. (Err... got that? :) For the desktop, there is no text caret, so keyboard-activated context menus appear at a default position. For a text editor, they should appear at the caret position. The caret indicates the screen position at which typing will have an effect. This is the same as the context menu appearing at the mouse cursor when you press the right mouse button. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Insert half smiley here. | Anon -- sounds like the shortcut doesn't appear at all, so it's probably not that. I seem to remember that in the absence of any defined (with &) shortcut characters Windows will pick a default set for useful controls based on the first letter of the last text static before the control in the tab order. So maybe that is what's happening. |
| Sat 06 Mar | A Regular poster from India | I apologize to Joel for my tone. No excuses on my part. Maybe i got carried away. As for nitpicking, I was about to type in something on Indians not putting proper commas in resumes here, i shall desist. I hope he refrains from below the belt punching from his altar. I am not an anonymous coward who blasted a fine product. I did give my E Mail. Joel knows who i am. And lastly,I shall refrain from impolite langauge. |
| Sat 06 Mar | John Topley (www.johntopley.com) | 'Aricles, Properties, Extras' . No way to navigate between tabs using the keyboard. You can use Ctrl + Tab to go forwards or Shift + Ctrl + Tab to go backwards. That's a standard Windows shortcut for tabs. |
| Sat 06 Mar | there's a new one everyday | 'Masters in Usability Engineering' I got one of those in my cornflakes this morning. I'm sure Joel is happy to reap the rewards of all your unpaid efforts though, well done! |
| Sat 06 Mar | Ben Combee | I found the list of issues enlightening. There are several kinds of usability -- deep usability, surface usability, and functionality. Software can be good but still have flaws in these areas, and I think most of the criticisms the poster made are valid, although mainly in the surface area. The good thing about these is usually, they can be fixed fairly quickly without having a big impact on other parts of the program. I think the list was also useful for other developers as a reminder of areas of your program you might not consider; I've seen lots of apps with poor handling of keyboard navigation. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Joe On Software (Joe) | >>'Why do Joel's cronies defend him so much? This bloke... he's pointed out inconsistencies in the UI, coming from a company whose chief has written a *book* on UI design.' Exactly. Instead of attacking the messenger, how about responding to the message. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Joel Spolsky | Thanks for the list! Actually we'd love to have you as a beta tester for version 3.0. This is exactly the kind of detailed feedback we LOVE in our beta tests... it's all little things that can be fixed in 1 minute each :) When we start the beta test for 3.0, I'll announce it on Joel on Software, and I think we're going to have to figure out some major reward for the most useful feedback. (During the 2.0 beta we got so much useful feedback of this sort from one user, we sent him a 512 MB upgrade for his computer. Also, half the bugs he was reporting were a result of his using a 64 MB computer ;) |
| Sat 06 Mar | saberworks | Sounds like you shouldn't have sent him an upgrade, then :) |
| Sat 06 Mar | Withheld | Actually it was my 128 MB machine and I was delighted and totally surprised when I got the memory in the mail. I'm not worthy. |
| Sat 06 Mar | A Regular poster from India | I want to respond to some of the usability objections raised 1) 'Aricles, Properties, Extras' . No way to navigate between tabs using the keyboard. Someone pointed out that it can be done by Ctrl+Tab. Right. But how many users would know this?. Best is to add a Ampersand to the first letter. Users can recognize this. No user will read the MSDN manual where it is given. 2) Umm, with regards the 'hidden' shortcut key for 'Find Next', isn't that just a case of Control Panel | Display | Appearance | Effects | 'Hide underlined letters for keyboard navigation until I press the Alt key' being turned on by default in Windows 200 0 and XP ? I did press the Alt key. Still not visible 3) The placing of the right context menu at the top left of the screen is the Windows default placement for some things As mentioned earlier, this bug is not unique to City Desk. Almost every product i have used has this bug. You may argue that most of them are minor. TRUE. But top notch usability means you get the work done without opening the help manual. I mean open the find-replace dialog. Should work like any other find-replace dialog. Some one who selects some text and goes to the find-replace box will expect to find it there. A golden rule is: Never invent your own controls/own way to do common things. The most intuitive products work likeyou expect it to work. This is the reason i think the Lotus Infobox is the greatest thing that happenned to usability (atleast for lotus). Not a single struggle. Even the icons are so intuitive thats its a pleasure to look at it. And lastly, thanks to Joel for taking it in the right spirit. I hope i have the time to test 3.0 and give good feedback and help a little bit and contribute and make citydesk a better product. Thank you all |
| Sun 07 Mar | Ken Klose | Joel, All your Beta Testers who make significant contributions should at least get an autographed copy of your book. You are a famous author after-all. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Stephen Jones | Do beta testers get a free copy of City Desk (that is to say the one that has all the bugs fixed?) |
| Sun 07 Mar | John Topley (www.johntopley.com) | 1) 'Articles, Properties, Extras' . No way to navigate between tabs using the keyboard. Someone pointed out that it can be done by Ctrl+Tab. Right. But how many users would know this?. Best is to add a Ampersand to the first letter. Users can recognize this. No user will read the MSDN manual where it is given. I don't think you should do this. It's totally non-standard and would just make the application look odd. The fact is, most users don't even know what the underlined letters mean in Windows. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Perpetual Newbie II | Stephen http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/BetaTest.html see Item 8. |
| Windows XP SP2 Will Break Your Apps. Part Deux. | Fri 05 Mar | Joe |
| http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/windows/story/0,10801,90849,00.html |
| Fri 05 Mar | Nate Silva | Damned if you do, damned if you don't... |
| Fri 05 Mar | pdq | What's "part deux" about this. It's the same story they've been saying all along. Am I missing something? |
| Fri 05 Mar | . | You're exactly write, Nate -- Microsoft put security as a far and away secondary priority for years, and now they're facing huge market pressure. In finally, belatedly, reacting they're finding that some of their prior practices were overly liberal, breaking some partner apps. They _are_ damned if they do and damned if they don't, and it's a house of cards that they made for themselves. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Chris Ormerod | [[Another product that Microsoft needs to update is its .Net Framework. The new memory protection features in SP2 require developers of certain |