Waffle

I've been wondering lately if this had ever been done: putting computer data on vinyl. It has, and it was used for the same sort of things that DVD extras are used for now.

(Via Pete Ashton's Organic Link Farm)

The chase is on again for a graphical ftp client for linux that satisfies the fairly basic (to me) criterion of not actually being harder to use than the command line. gftp just failed it (again!) in a big way. I already started having doubts a few weeks ago when I tried to set a bookmark on it. It turned out that gftp uses the evil style of configuration found in quite a few gtk-based programs, where after you click OK on a change you have to go back to a menu and actually "save changes" for real. That sort of thing always makes me wonder if linux programmers actually use graphical software. Do they just write them because someone told them that is what they have to do to get linux accepted by the masses? Still, that's a minor issue because you don't set bookmarks every time you use a program.

What is a big deal is if, when you try to use the program to upload something, it will not let you drag and drop multiple files, and indeed will treat the files on your drive, which are clearly visible in the left pane, as if they don't exist. I suppose I could have spent some time figuring out what the error was. But what I did instead was reach for the command line ftp app, upload the files in all of one minute using that, and add gftp to the list of useless apps that don't save me time in the way that a 4 years out of date version of WS ftp does.

The other day I had an online conversation with a friend, and something she said reminded me of the words to a song I like. I wanted to share these words with her so I googled for the song and found it on several sites. I went over them to see if they matched my memory of it, then sent her the link to one of those pages. She quickly reported that it contained a trojan. That night, she ended up turning her drives inside out to catch it and ensure beyond any reasonable doubt that she was clean. An awful lot of work and hassle on my account.

Now, to the best of my knowledge, I am safe from the vast and overwhelming majority of the crap that people pull on websites by the simple expedient of not using Internet Explorer, Outlook Express or, on computers that I fully own and control, Windows. I also don't open strange attachments or allow myself to be taken in by emails purporting to be from Paypal or eBay. Indeed I've been feeling so safe lately that I haven't really kept up to date with the sort of methods malware writers use to spread their crap. So I had no idea that lyric sites were a vector for these things.
Clearly this will not do. As long as I'm ignorant about these things, I will cause people like my friend to be infected by sending her links that carry malware, and I may turn out to be less safe from other kinds of attack that using Opera for web browsing and linux as my OS of choice doesn't protect me from. I may not have time to get informed, but I have less time to get infected.
What else should I watch out for?

I have upgraded Opera on the studio computer from version 7.23 to 7.50. As usual with Opera, upgrading wasn't nearly as straightforward as it should be, because existing mail, bookmarks etc. have to be manually imported (as did the registration). Also, the interface has had quite an overhaul and it took me some time to make it look the way I was used to on my own account.

Having done those things (and they're not really difficult, just a lot of busy-work), It's nice and quick. I like the addition of an RSS reader in the mail panel, and the chat client, while feeble compared to standalone chat applications, will do in a pinch.

So Jeroen: Don't panic!

From the "interface customisation has gone too far" department:

This happens to me every few months or so:

What makes this annoying is that
a) It doesn't seem to serve any purpose for me to be able to drag Paint Shop Pro's main menu to the left and show it at a 90 degree angle
b) I never have any idea what exactly I did to cause it. Presumably I dragged my Wacom pen over the menu in a way that PSP interpreted as a command.
c) I never remember how I fixed it last time, and it always takes me half an hour of tearing my hair out to find a solution in the Help files. Then I spend some more time re-customising the interface the way it was before the incident took place. At the time I post this, it's nearly 2 AM and I can't be bothered to spend half an hour. Besides, my hair is getting too thin for this nonsense.
d) there doesn't seem to be any way to disable it. Or is there?

Argh, argh argh. What were the people at JASC thinking?

I thought it was time to take the advice printed on recent EMI CDs, to go to musicfromemi.com and see where I could get me some legal MP3 (or other - I'm not picky) downloads in exchange for modest payment to compensate the artists. Because compensating the artists is a good thing.

If you go to MusicfromEMI, you get to pick a country from a map from which to download stuff. When you pick the Netherlands, you get a luxurious 4 options, all of which (eventually) take you to the same actual download site, which then tells you to stuff your shiny, new and secure edition of Opera and use something up-to-date like 3-years-old, leaky Internet Explorer 6 (actually, 5 or higher) instead. Because I like having control over the studio computer and don't even have IE on the home machine, that Won't Do.

I was, however, prepared to look further and download iTunes and use its music store. While installing, that, I was disappointed to see that it blocked other software from access to a user's iPod, but since nobody in the studio has an iPod, that was trivial. However, trying to acess the store and begin buying some titles (I had some specific ones in mind that I was looking for that are extortionately priced if you try to buy them on CD), I was confronted with this message:

Because, you know, this is the Netherlands. We all live in mudbrick huts here. We only co-patented the CD format and were only like the second fastest nation to adopt it in the 1980s, and more willing than any to pay through the nose for music. It's good policy to ignore a backward country like this one.

The only reason I had for installing iTunes in the first place was to be able to shop, so off the machine it goes.

Seriously, I want to be able to get with the times, do the buy-and-download thing and fill my computer with new music in an ethical and responsible manner. But somebody is going to have to provide me with the means to do so. And said means had better not suck.

Handy reference comparing the PNG compression capabilities of three graphics apps (bottom of page). Also an overview of commonly used tools for PNG compression.

There's still an amazing amount of FUD doing the rounds about PNG, which is unfortunate. I think the main issue now is that many artists get burned by PNG because they don't get the filesize savings they've been promised compared to GIF. The savings are there, it's just that there are so many "correct" ways to write a PNG that you can get a range of file sizes from far too large to ultra-lean. I once again recommend PNGout as a simple tool to reduce PNG file-sizes at the very last stage of image creation.

See also this short article comparing various tools.

Via Comixpedia:

The Wickline Color Blindness Filter allows you to test how your web page or image looks to a color blind person. Useful, but also entertaining, as these sample ROCR pages will show:
(large images below the fold)

GIMP 2 for Windows actually talks to the Wacom tablet like a good little application should!
This new version also has the rewritten interface that will make it easier to learn for new users. But all the cool features in the old interface are still present.
Also, it can import SVG files, but then maybe the old version could do that as well - I never needed to try.

I don't use GIMP as much as I used to, but that may change, depending on how good this new version actually turns out to be.

I am somewhat concerned about the popularity of Bugmenot. I use it myself more and more often, and I know that my Modern Tales earnings are reasonably safe against the use of this service, but it still bothers me.

The difference between the login arrangement for Modern Tales and the registration/login for sites like The New York Times, from the user's point of view, is (or should be) that logging in to Modern Tales serves a beneficial purpose - verifying that you are a paying customer - and the nytimes login does not. We don't know why the nytimes wants your identity, but we think it has something to do with profiling your behaviour and leveraging that information with the advertisers. We don't like that or benefit from it.

However, there will be people who see the two situations as essentially the same. Hey, it's easier than remembering a password, right? And that information wants to be free, right?

People, quite rightly, are fed up with having to register for everything, remember passwords and sign in. A backlash against registrations could end up hurting fee-based sites. Or am I too pessimistic? I'd like to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Update: Adam refers me to Bugmenot's FAQ which advises pay site owners to submit their URL for automatic blocking from their database. That's good. Still, I think there's something to worry about when it comes to the hearts and minds issue.

If all goes well, the ROCR.net domain will soon be registered with Go-Daddy. It should work seemlessly, but well, you never know. Some disruption may occur, especially if GANDI choose to be uncooperative.

I got a decent deal out of it. $23 for two years plus one year free. The process so far has been painless although it was annoying to click "proceed to checkout" and be faced with a page full of sales pitches and another "proceed to checkout" button three times! Can you say "bait and switch"? But then, if they're better than GANDI it will be worth it.

I should be getting back to some people on website development and web design issues. Right now, though, the thought of beginning to speculate about the possibility of thinking seriously about maybe possibly doing design-related stuff is having a hard time gaining access to my mind. I'm still refueling...

I wanted to leave a comment on Websnark but it only takes comments from Typekey account holders. Well I was going to have to get an account some time anyway, and it's easy to get one, so I went and signed up. When I did so, I noticed with bemusement and absolutely no surprise whatsoever that what I expected would be the spammers' response when I first heard of Typekey had already come to pass: Typekey had taken measures to prevent robots from automatically signing themselves up for a million Typekey accounts. The only part of my forecast that was wrong was that I didn't expect this to happen until Typekey had become ubiquitous.

CAPTCHAs, crappy servers and a terrible memory for passwords don't go together well.

Previous "I was going to like..." entries

Especially for Adam's mom and all those others who speak in chatspeak: the ROFL3000 keyboard. It comes without an @ key to keep people like that away from email. (via Pete, again)

After a comment-to-comment talk with Branco Collin, I realised that the reason why the stripped-down front page that is fed to my various websites shows up with such a large font (the default) in Firefox is that the page is broken somehow. A few passes through the W3C CSS and HTML validators helped me find the error that caused CSS to be ignored. However, both validators would be a lot more useful if one or more if the following things were true:

1. if it was possible to validate CSS if the HTML page it is on contains errors; or
2. if it was possible to set the validator to ignore ampersands, which cause the bulk of the error messages in the validator and which in a blog with multiple entries take a non-trivial amount of time to fix (meaning they're still not fixed - I checked in Firefox if what I thought was the cause of the problem had gone away, and it had, so I stopped).

I understand the need for strictness in XHTML. But the point of the validator is to help weed out errors, not to distract a developer with technically correct but ultimately useless information.

A writeup at Crooked Timber got me mildly interested in the book cataloguing program Delicious Library. Kieran wrote:

As Siracusa points out, an application designed to keep a catalog of your books and whatnot is fundamentally a boring idea. Yet Delicious Monster has managed to make it cool.

Unfortunately all that coolness is kept hidden away from the evidently incurably uncool eyes of viewers who use Opera for Linux. I saw this: [screenshot].
They can't be that cool if they can't even come up with a reasonably standards-compliant website to present their products in. And the Opera exclusion rankles even more now that Firefox is making it big.
Of course the program in question is for the Mac, but I wouldn't have minded a look at it. You know, in case they ever make a port for linux. D'ya reckon they will?

Many years ago, I developed websites for a living. I wasn't, truth be told, very good at it, but it was the tech boom and a chimpanzee could get a web design/development job if it managed to hit the < sign half the time.
One thing I found out back in 1998/1999 was that while CSS was great for avoiding "tag soup" HTML code in which your code was cluttered with <font> tags, it was unusable for positioning.
Since then, a lot has changed, right? After all, Moveable Type uses default CSS templates which also position the blocks of text, and there are many nifty websites that demonstrate perfect, swappable CSS positioning. Surely it's come of age?
Well, yes, if you ignore crappy old not-updated-substantially-since-2000-but-still-used-by-80%-of-all-web-users IE. Creating CSS positioning that works in Opera, Konqueror, Firefox, what have you has become really easy. All you need to do is swipe some code from a tutorial page like this one and modify it. If you want it to work in IE, though, you'd better not change a jot nor a tittle, or you'll find yourself banging your head against a wall trying to figure out what broke. I used the code from that tutorial site (because the CSS code in Moveable Type's templates is complicated), modified to fit my needs, in a new About Page for ROCR. I don't have IE at home but it looked fine in Opera, Firefox and Konqueror. So I thought, "let's ask my friend Mithandir if it looks good in IE", and sent him the URL, thinking that there might be a few trivial little problems. Several hours later, we still hadn't found a way to fix the broken left margin and sidebar position — at least not one that didn't break it for Mozilla/KHTML-based browsers. And Mithandir's web design skills considerately exceed those of a chimpansee so it's not just me.
Because we both have lives, I eventually gave up and made a version using tables. I also had quite a bit of content for the page to finish, so I had no more time to spend on the CSS implementation.
But I hate giving up. Does anyone reading this know how to make this CSS setup behave?

I am getting more than a bit fed up with the crapitude of @home.nl, my home ISP' over the past couple of weeks. It's easily the worst since, well, since my previous ISP, bart.nl, except that this time it's exacerbated by the fact that I am feeling a lot more helpless than I used to with bArt. Back then, I had a dialup, and if I couldn't connect or the connection dropped out, I could just dial into a different number. That would work often enough, and be easy enough for me to feel like I had some control over it.
At my workplace, if there's something wrong with the connection, I can start up a wizard provided by the Internet service reseller and perform a brief ritual that will usually reconnect me. If that doesn't work, I can walk to a room two doors away from the studio and ask the reseller what's going on. That also makes me feel in control.
With @home, under my home machine setup, all I know how to do is reboot and pray, in the hope that the problem will have gone away on its own since the last time I rebooted. Well, I could start YaST and reconfigure my internet settings, but that doesn't seem to do much. DHCP is great and hassle-free when it works, but in combination with Linux, it's a black box that a non-techie user can't penetrate in case of trouble.
I'd call the helpdesk, if it wasn't for two factors: one is that the helpdesk has one of those 0900 numbers that come with the expectation of being put on hold for 10 minutes at € 0.10 a minute. The other is that I'm the disgruntled customer from hell, only slightly better from the point of view of the person at the other end than the guy who actually comes to the office with a machine gun and shoots up the place (I only fantasize about that). I will have loudly and confidently questioned the helpdesk person's knowledgeability, work ethic, respect for the customer, problem-solving skills, general level of education and intelligence, parentage and species before they get a single word in edgeways. In my defense, I wasn't born that way; I was trained to act like that by the helpdesk staff at bArt, who at one point could only be made to acknowledge your existence if you loudly and confidently questioned their knowledgeability, work ethic, respect for the customer, problem-solving skills, general level of education and intelligence, parentage and species. They got better later on, but I never lost the habit of expecting the worst from a helpdesk and tailoring my approach to that.
I expect the outages to go on for a little while until the good, kind, eminently skilled and perfectly human people at @home find their bearings. That will mean that if there's another screw-up with my web activities as there was today, I may not be able to read any email or forum messages people send me about it. Those readers who know my phone number are advised to call me if there are any problem. I may respond a little crankily but structurally, I'll be grateful.
Now let's see if I can post this.
(posted belatedly from the studio)

I was trying to register over with Websnark, but was faced with this.

What the bugger was it? 35631w? 3563iw? 3563lw?

Finally, in despair I showed to to Timmerryn, who spotted that funny blob was the top of an f in the odd font they use.

It rather goes against the point of these passkeys if humans can't read 'em.

... I can't send email to you for some reason. Mail sent to Hotmail addresses just bounces, either immediately or after a few days. If you must contact me, provide a real, ISP-based address, or one at despammed.com or gmail.

I've been tinkering with the home computer setup a bit:
I have installed FireFTP, a Firefox extention providing an FTP client. As you may remember, I've been on a quest for a decent linux ftp client. My criteria for "decent" are modest: it should deliver the same productivity benefit compared to the linux command line ftp client as WSFTP LE does compared to the Windows command line ftp client. That shouldn't be too hard, one would think. On the one hand, the linux CLFTP is very good indeed, but on the other hand, WSFTP LE is 6 years old and was deliberately crippled compared to for-pay versions of WSFTP. But the clients that people have recommended so far all fell way, way short of that. GFTP has so far come closest, but it doesn't do batch renames or batch deletions from the server, and doesn't understand the meaning of "one directory up". I hear that FireFTP isn't very good, but it doesn't have to be to be better than what I have. I'll just use it a few times in real sessions and see what comes up.
I have also installed a whole lot of other Firefox extentions that seemed neat. We'll see how useful they are.
A few days ago, I installed the linux port of PNGout at home. What I want to do with it is re-compress all old Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comics that primarily reside on my home machine's disks. A quick test showed that I could reduce the file size by 8 percent, from a size that was itself reduced by 8-10 percent back when I converted the earliest files from gif to PNG. However, PNGout lacks a batch mode, and I'm buggered if I'm going to convert them one at a time. So I will have to beg, borrow or steal a shell script for converting them in a single batch. It's not unthinkable that this is something I could do myself, with a guide to the shell's syntax by my side, but I'd really rather not, because I'm unfamiliar with the syntax, abilities and limitations of Unix shells. It would take me a lot of time and have me pull out hair that I really can't afford to miss these days. (Update: this should do the trick although altering it to do exactly what I want could turn out to be tricky.)

(What follows is probably of less interest to ROCR readers or even regular Waffle-ites, but I'm including it as a memo to self, so that I won't forget what I've done in a few months' time)

I'm really liking the new beta versions of Opera, even though installing them meant hammering my interface into a familiar shape for me yet again. But it's worth it because Gmail now works, those appalling error dialogs are gone and there are some other changes that made me go "ooh" even though I can't remember them right now. Opera 7 registrations also still work, so I won't even have to look at their advertisements. Not that those are a huge problem. Try it out if the web is your bread and butter, or read a review at Webgraphics.
I'm also liking Opera Watch which has Opera-related news and general stuff about web browsers. It's been added to the blogroll.

Via Opera Watch: Lawrence Eng compares the marketing and branding of Opera and Firefox and is unimpressed with Opera's image-building and the reasons Opera Software offers for users to pay for the software.

Surf ad-free': Essentially, this is like saying, "you are a hostage to our ads unless you pay up".
'Free support': Just call it premium support. By paying, it's obviously not free.
'USD 15 upgrade': Essentially, "Pay now so you can pay less later"

I do not find these reasons convincing, and they did not really play a big factor in my decision to buy Opera....

Opera fans typically explain that they paid because Opera is simply a better product. I happen to agree with them, but it's a highly debatable point, and one that is not compelling to internet users not used to paying for a web browser, and who have a free alternative (Firefox) that is possibly as good or better than Opera, and seems to be getting better all the time. Instead of selling Opera as a "better product", I think it needs to be sold as a "different kind of product", designed by a "different kind of company".

Even die-hard Firefox supporters tend to agree that many of Firefox's most popular features were invented or popularized by Opera (i.e. tabbed browsing and mouse gestures). Although Firefox advocates tend to underplay the importance of it, Opera can make a strong claim that it's the most innovative force in web browser development today.

I agree, and that's a large part of the reason why I pay for the browser (as well as installing beta versions: I see it as a downpayment on the cool features they'll come up with in the next version.

Technology enthusiasts and browser geeks: read the whole thing. Mr. Eng is not a marketing professional, and it shows: he has written a readable, common-sense piece that doesn't insult the reader's intelligence.

Sigh... it's happened again. I want to log in to a site I haven't been to in a while, and out of a very small pool of low-security login/password combinations, none of them work. I can find the password in an old, disused Eudora box, but I don't know the login name anymore. If I hadn't found the password in the Eudora box, I would not have been certain that the email address I'm going to ask them to send the login name to was still valid, or indeed what it might have been.
This is now the norm for most sites. Even the limited number of logins, passwords, and email addresses that I use for sites that don't affect my financial affairs or the running of my own web presences gives a number of combinations beyond my ability to remember, and the addition of random passwords like this site turned out to have given me makes it even more of a nightmare. My first thought on signing up for any new site these days is "oh, great, a new password to forget", and it usually takes me less than a week before I need the site to email the password to me. Passwords are, of course, emailed in the clear, so each email sent makes me vulnerable to identity theft.
People like Jakob Nielsen have been writing about password usability for a decade but I don't see any real progress being made in this area. (Replies mentioning Microsoft's Password initiative will be ignored. You don't think I'm going to entrust my private information to Microsoft, do you?)

I've bought two sound-related items today: a V-string for my turntable (a Phillips whose origin is lost in the mists of time) and a SB Audigy LS soundcard for my computer, because the onboard sound card is a piece of crap.
Contrary to assurances from the shop, I'm now finding that the Audigy isn't easily supported under linux, although it can be supported with a little work.
In my experiences, a little work tends to balloon into a lot of work, so before I even start, I'm opening a comments thread for tips for installing newer versions of alsa sound and resolving the recursive dependency problems that I will undoubtedly encounter. I'll update this post with my experiences and problems as they happen, below the fold.

I'm not much of a techy. The only time I will try to change settings on my computer is when things go horribly wrong. And recently it did: I don't have a separate dvd-player, so I watch them on my laptop. Suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, some dvd's were giving Powerdvd trouble: error code f4d41436: this copy protected disk can not be played when the tv out function is enabled. *wtf* I thought, I just rented this goddamn dvd from the video store to watch it on my laptop. There's nothing fucking illegal about that, is there? Well someone seems to think so. I googled the error and got the solution on this very helpful forum. Seems XP Service Pack 2 added some unasked for copy protection. Thanks Bill. Fuck you very much.

Branko mentions that the latest release of The GIMP has some improved usability features, so I've downloaded it for the studio computer. We'll see. I need more GIMP practice, if only because I found switching last week such a daunting project. I worked with The GIMP for years, but that was ages ago. Since then I got used to working with Paint Shop Pro, while the GIMP changed and changed. Paint Shop Pro, however, has some horrible bugs and stability issues.

... at least, if you look at it in Internet Explorer 5 — not that there's any reason why you should. I'd been tweaking the site layout from home, where I don't have Internet Explorer available, and none of the web browsers that I did have available rendered it anywhere near this way.
As I write this, it's past my bedtime, and if the error shows up in Internet Explorer 6+ (not that there's any reason why you should use that either), I'll spend some of my copious spare time trying to fix it. I see no reason why the CSS should be interpreted the way IE 5 does, but if someone else does, please let me know.

I can no longer find the place where Branko asked about this, but here's a partial answer to his question why so many blogs have small fonts specified, against general best practices in web design/usability. Short version: Microsoft is to blame. (Via Opera Watch, via The Register.)

Via Operawatch, here's a site devoted to making Firefox look, function and behave like Opera. So if I ever encounter some infuriating behaviour in Firefox, I'll go here and see if I can make it act more rationally. First thing I'm going to look for is a way to move those damned tabs to the bottom where they belong.
(Update: found!)

I've been wanting a Mac for some time. I almost got one when it was time to replace my last PC last year, but I didn't have the money for a G5 burning a hole in my pocket then, or now. Indeed, I don't have the money for a Mac Mini burning a hole in my pocket, and if I did, I would spend it on things that need replacing more urgently around the house.
But I find something about them intensely desirable, whether it's a professional, high-end G5 or a lowly Mac Mini. In fact, I find the Mini more desirable, because it's almost affordable and can double as a table prop. The two things about them that I like most when I look at them in the shops are the sleek interface of OS X and the fact that those things are silent. PCs with their fans always make a noise, and Apple has come up with a desktop computer the size of a waffle iron that you don't hear in an environment where there's any other ambient sound. That impresses me.
As a result, I've been keeping up with what people are saying about Macs, ranging from "I don't see the point, and don't think they're worth the premium" to "It's one of three things that have improved my productivity by an order of magnitude" both from computer savvy webcomics folks. I've been very interested in Branko Collin's two posts about his Mac experience.
But what's really given me pause for thought is this: Eric Burns Snarks Pages, Apple's new word processing software.

This is not good. Macromedia had been up and coming as a competitor to Adobe in the fields of vector art and movie-making software, and now Adobe has flat-out bought this competition, once again bringing them closer to a monopoly position in those fields. Not good. Of course, they're not quite up there with Microsoft yet as Adobe actually comes out with decent products, but they'll be in a position to charge whatever they want, which for those of us who use graphics software is not good at all.
(Via Webgraphics)

These will come in handy during my presentation at Clickburg: a browser emulator to recreate the Web's Trilobite days, and the browser archive preserving the real things for posterity.
Ah, Netscape 0.9! Those were the days.

... OpenOffice.org's presentation software, for turning an unfinished but functional presentation into a mess of broken images. And this two days before I'm due to talk at Clickburg. Because making the presentation was torture in the first place, I am disinclined to do the work again. After all, the software might destroy my work again once I close it.
I don't like working with Microsoft products, and Powerpoint gets quite a bit of flak, but I do remember from my days working a Respectable Day Job (*crosses self in the hope of never going back to those days*) that it was easy to learn and use and actually saved what you made. This open-source knockoff doesn't even get those basic requirements right. Oh well, at least the word processor is good enough. I use the word processor a lot and the presentation software basically never.

The GIMP is really appallingly stupid.
Imagine you have an SVG file that you want to import. Its original size is something like 580 pixels wide, but that doesn't matter: the good thing about vector graphics is that you can scale them losslessly. So in the Import dialogue, you enter the new resolution (600 DPI) and the new dimensions (280 mm wide - this is for print), and you click OK. So, do you get a file that's 280 mm wide at 600 DPI? Nooooo, what you actually get is a file that is about 990 pixels wide. At 600 DPI, that's about 1 1/2 inch, which is considerably closer to 40 mm than to 280.
Mystified, you close the file, and try again. This time, the outrageously, appallingly stupid file importer has caught on to the fact that you want to import at 600 DPI, but has merely guessed that you want the canvas dimensions to stay the same and has calculated that that means you want the file to be about 3800 pixels wide. You set "280 mm" again, check the dimensions in pixels, and this time they look all right, so you import.
With the next few files you import, things go exactly as in your second attempt, but the system you're working on being Windows, you are forced to reboot before completing all your file imports.
After rebooting and opening GIMP again, the scenario of your first attempt happens again, but this time, before hitting "OK" you enter "280 mm" and then check the pixel size a few more times. Each time, the unbelievable, amazingly stupid GIMP returns the wrong dimensions, until you decide to hit "OK" and close the resulting window in a cargo cult attempt to trigger the scenario of your second attempt. That works, as cargo cult magic often does in the world of computing.

Of course, I could tell you stories about Photoshop 6.0, which while being considerably less stupid than GIMP, has the even greater drawback of hating my guts. One day, I'll build a Photoshop 6.0 out of twigs and leaves to appease it. Or I'll wipe it with a magnet. Whichever is more satisfying.

Memo to self: read this tomorrow, when I'm awake. It may just help me fix a time bomb under my websites: the fact that the width of my comics varies between 400 and 650 pixels, and will become much wider than that when the Stone of Contention reruns start.

How much common sense can a designer expect from the user?

Just a minute ago, studio-mate [censored] asked me if I had a calculator around. I said "yes, on the computer". My studio-mate said, "So do I, but it doesn't have a divider". I pointed out the "divide by" button, the one with the slash on it, and asked "what kind of a calculator would it be if it couldn't divide?"

Now it's likely that my studiomate had overlooked the button. That happens, and it doesn't mean that my studio-mate is stupid. But that question "What kind of [app] would it be if it didn't do [y]?" is one that my studio-mate might have asked [my studio-mate's gender in the possessive pronoun]self.

This situation used to happen a lot with The Gimp. Newcomers would come rushing to support forums, torn-out clumps of hair still in their clenched fists, asking "Why doesn't it do straight lines?" and GIMP gurus would patronisingly tell them of the magic key to the left of the Z (on a QWERTY keyboard). There is of course no reason to assume it's obvious that holding down the shift key while using one of the paint tools will result in a straight line. But what should be obvious to users that no one, not even in the world of Open Source software, will be daft enough to release an image creation tool that can't do straight lines.

Or shouldn't it?

Professor DeLong is very unhappy with how software suppliers for Windows do business:

I then thought that I should perhaps upgrade the McAfee virus-protection program on the machine. That turned out to be a nasty and nearly impossible process: McAfee kept throwing pop-up windows up on the screen trying to "improve" my order from $35 to $95 or $125, warning me of all the horrible things that would happen to me if I did not "upgrade" my order. Only by clever parsing of sentences and clicking the correct buttons was I able to repulse this social engineering attack. Then I noticed that the black-inkjet cartridge in the Epson printer attached to the machine was low. I replaced it--and my printer driver promptly threw a warning box up on the screen: I had installed a non-Epson print cartridge, Epson "could not guarantee print quality," and would I like to order genuine Epson print cartridges off of the Epson website? No.

I don't like it when strange movies take over my computer and use it to display adware. I don't like it when Epson lies to me about the quality of Epson-compatible inkjet cartridges. I don't like it when McAfee makes it hard to avoid spending more on virus protection than I need to.

It's a jungle out there in the Windows world. Have Microsoft and Epson and McAfee considered the long-run consequences of the reputations that they are so eagerly creating?

Ghastly stuff, but one of his commenters can top this ghastliness:

On my Windows XP computer, every use of the letters "bed" - as in the word "succumbed" in the first paragraph of Brad DeLong's posting above - is underlined as a link, to find a bed seller, I guess. Maybe the next time the word "succumbed" appears in text, I'll finally decide to buy a bed online. Likewise, the letters "mba," as in "embarass," are always an underlined link. Maybe someday soon that helpful link will lead me to enroll online for a graduate degreee in business. Oh yes, every use of the word, "business" is an underlined link too. I tried anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-adware programs, but this still lingers.

Then there's the ad that intrudes on the left margin of my screen most of the time when I open a new web page. In a year, I have never used the links featured in that margin, presumably directed to a few sites. But it just keeps happening. Recently, instead of a list of sites it has started showing flickering and moving graphics. What a waste.

At least, through much effort, I recovered my desktop image. For months, it was a gruesome black screen with a blood-red eyeball on it, and an ad for software to delete it.

I've had to learn to live with some pop-ups, because when I had the pop-up protection fully engaged, I could not send work messages from my home computer in my office Outlook system - the window in which I would write a new Outlook message was blocked as a pop-up.

Using the internet in Windows is wading through all that junk.

Did I mention that I want a Mac? I'm likely to do more coloring for money this year, and I would like to do that on a new studio machine with a decent monitor, and I might as well go for graphical-industry standard stuff, especially if it also means I'm going to avoid crap like this.

Only problem is I'm not exactly made of money. Maybe this would be a good time to point people to the Paypal button on my homepage, and I guarantee you that clicking that link won't spawn a popup or do anything ghastly...

First rule of ecommerce interfaces: After the customer has paid you, don't make him regret it, or he won't pay you again. I had a trial subscription to DeviantArt this week, and rather liked it. It runs out tomorrow.
Below is the page DeviantArt showed me today when I tried to log in:


View image

I've spent quite a lot of time in the past few months ragging on The GIMP and its usability problems. I've also had some not very nice words to say about Paint Shop Pro, which has great usability but is marred by some of the nastiest bugs I've ever seen in commercially published software. I've gone as far as to pit the two programs against one another in a steel cage death match. I'm colouring The Gang of Four in Photoshop 6, and it's only fair that I share some of my experiences with that program as well. Let me just report some of the things I've been saying to myself while working in Photoshop:

Huh? I'd already coloured that! Huh. No! Oh God, no! Not again! NOOOO! WAAAAA! What? What the fuck? How can this be? NO! Don't be so fucking stupid! Oh, God, no! Huh? Undo, dammit! Oh, wait, it works differently. Aliased zoom hurts my eyes! C'mon, respond to my key-presses! NO!

Trust me, the swearing is mild compared to what actually came out of my mouth these past ten minutes. I'll admit that most of the "huh"s are the result of hitting a shortcut I know from using Paint Shop Pro and then having something happen that's completely unrelated to what I want. But still. It's becoming very hard to see why Photoshop has become the standard app for image processing in the print world: it may do CMYK output and colour proofing well, but actually using it makes my blood boil. Easily the least comfortable application I've worked with in a long time.

On the new Opera community portal, there's a post entitled Online party: You crashed the house!
Just like Opera itself does at my house, a dozen times a day.

Snark about the outrageously poor stability of the latest incarnation of the Opera browser aside (the instability on two out of the three platforms I use is bad enough to jeopardize my ability to get work done on the web, and is making my morning forum/blog trawl a big hassle as well. So I've switched to Safari on OSX and considering moving to Firefox on Windows and Linux. Only inertia is stopping me, really), the new community site is rather nice. The blogging tools are really nice with the post entry interface and the feature for adding RSS feeds to a blog's front page being especially nifty. My Opera Page is already a one-stop shop for all my blogging and webcomic stuff. And I haven't even tried the Photo album and Friends features...

On my Opera Community blog, I posted some words on what my problems with the latest Opera release are. Most of that is only interesting if you're an Opera user yourself, but the final paragraphs indicate a wider problem with software usability:

Still, I am very used to doing things the Opera way. On my other platforms (the Windows machine in my studio and the Linux machine at home), the idea of switching, moving over my bookmarks and my passwords, and getting used to doing things differently than I have been doing since 1998, makes me slightly queasy in the stomach.

Which is why I wrote this post in Opera. Uhm, better back it up in an editor window before hitting "Post"...

This bug alone makes Paint Shop Pro a very dangerous program to work with, and I can tell you that not being able to trust software puts a crimp in my creativity. But it's still slightly less nerve-wracking than doing the same work in another program. At least the Undo system in PSP is functionally well-designed and works like it does in all other Windows programs. CTRL-Z causes an undo, pressing CTRL-Z again causes another undo. In Photoshop, CTRL-Z toggles between Undo and Redo, which is annoying and forces people to use its non-standard Undo History widget (other image editing apps now have that, but it's still non-standard within the larger body of GUI apps). Things like that interrupt my creative flow even more than the once-an-hour Undo Bug in PSP.

Basically, the software I am used to has me by the balls. I think that goes for a lot of people.

I mentioned before that I was unimpressed with the Dutch iTunes store. However, they had the new Kate Bush single available, so this was clearly the time to give them another chance.
They're still rubbish! They've got people coming in to download a long-anticipated Kate Bush album, but they couldn't be bothered to make some other rarities available for those same people to download. No "Experiment IV", no 1986 version of "Wuthering Heights", two tracks that are only available on the compilation The Whole Story. No "December Will Be Magic Again". I was ripe to buy all three tracks.
There are a couple of artists and bands that I bang on about endlessly on this blog. Richard Thompson, Deep Purple, Fairport Convention, Jethro Tull. They have a handful of albums by the former three, and nothing at all by the latter. These aren't obscure acts! And yes, there is material out there by all three that I don't have and would like to buy on an individual track basis. Makes you wonder if they want my money at all. Mind you, they do have Thompson's Grizzly Man soundtrack. Tempting...
But compared to the American store? Not good enough. Not nearly.

Some notes on my new hosting situation, so I have somewhere to point to in case one of these issues causes a problem in the near future. Probably only of interest to the technical-minded among the readership:

Just once, I'd like Paint Shop Pro to shut down the normal way, as a result of me hitting Alt-F4, instead of either crashing in the course of normal operations or crashing on exit. At least in the crashes-on-exit, my work is saved even if my MRU listings and most recent tool options are not.

Might as well wish for a pony though. Paint Shop Pro versions 7 and 8 had showstopper bugs that were almost terrible enough to turn me off the software, and Paint Shop Pro has now become a Corel product so it's unlikely that versions 9 and 10 will give me any joy.

If I could afford Photoshop CS 2, I'd batch-convert my thousands of *.pspimage files to Photoshop documents and rid myself of this poorly-coded, mis-designed excuse for a graphics program once and for all. I'd spend several months grumbling about how PS CS 2 handles vector shapes, but I'd get used to it eventually, and it would work.

Passwords are still the bane of my life *).
The last time I wrote about this, people recommended I used password management software. I downloaded one of the recommended apps, entered those passwords I could still remember, set a master password and promptly forgot it. Usually, I could remember the master password on the third or fourth try, so I got some use out of it, but nevertheless I can write off the "keep them in a local app" strategy as a failure. The password manager wasn't much use when I needed to type a password on one of my other machines, and because of my problem remembering the master password, it was as much of a hassle as guessing my passwords in the first place. Also, a few weeks ago when we reinstalled the studio PC I forgot to back up the program's files and lost all the passwords anyway. I don't even remember what the app is called.
The only thing that helps is good password retrieval functionality in online apps. I'd like to take this opportunity to boo and hiss at Skype which will not do anything for me other than send me a new, random, password. This stone-age solution would be usable if the software itself actually did what it promised and remembered its own passwords. In my bitter and recent experience since last weekend's internet outage at the studio, it does not, so in the past two days I've requested two new random passwords. The second time I remembered to forward the password to my gmail address so it won't vanish into thin air again.
iTunes, which I need to login to on two different machines to authorise the second machine to play the DRM'ed music I bought from them (I find the DRM just about acceptible at the prices they charge but may change my mind if it turns out that I can't easily un-authorise the old, erased Windows installation) does better; unfortunately their system is still defeated by users whose stupidity is as resourceful as mine, and when it is, it fights back using some stupidity of its own. To retrieve my password I have to enter my email address, my date of birth and the answer to a secret question I fed it when I signed up. Can you guess what happened when I did that? I got two out of three right.
Secret questions work when they're something dumb like your mother's maiden name or other things that you can easily remember and third parties can easily find out. Mine was too inventive (but secure). All right, that's my own fault. The correct answer is some variant of a word with one syllable missing or maybe some numbers tacked on, or some odd use of capitals. I don't know. What does irritate me is that having guessed wrong twice, I have to go back and enter my email address, and date of birth again! What's the point of that? Assuming that I'm not me, I have clearly got my hands on a correct combination of email address and DOB. iTunes confirmed to me that those data were correct by letting me go on to the secret question. So if I'm a fraud, I'm not going to enter a different combination. If I'm me, on the other hand, I'm going to get angry about having to jump through that hoop again. So "Yay!" to iTunes for getting the basics right, but "Boo!" to them for not thinking through all contingencies.
Addendum: There is an alternative. You can have them send an email with instructions to reset your password. Do I need to explain why I don't want this? I guess I'll just write it down and stick it to my monitor like everyone else, this time.

Anyway. Wanna be richer than Bill Gates and maybe snap up a Nobel Prize or two? Invent something better than passwords and you'll deserve that and more.
*) Except of course for several hundred other things that are the bane of my life. My life has many a bane. Woe is me.