12.29.04

Please Help: Tsunami and Quake Relief

Posted in Culture and Society at 3:01 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

As best I can determine, any money you donate will go entirely to quake/tsumani relief. If you’d rather, you can donate to the Red Cross/Red Crescent via Amazon with a single click. The British Red Cross page, with a direct donation link is here. Oxfam UK is here. CNN has a list of sites from agencies accepting donations here. If you’re thinking of buying something from Amazon, do it via Crooked Timber; they’re donating all their Amazon commissions to relief.

Donate to the International Response Fund

12.17.04

Sometimes, it is the User’s Responsibility

Posted in Software, Rant at 6:42 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

I’m generally a user advocate, but there are limits to even my patience and understanding. For instance, users who knowingly use beta software pretty much are out on a limb. Users who use Beta software as part of an active, primary production system are, well clueless. Dori Smith linked to this post from Mary Hodder regarding losing data (in the form of subscription feed data and post data) using a beta of an application. Now, frankly, if she’d just been unhappy about losing the data, I’ve have been far more sympathetic and understanding.

But I’m not at all sympathetic since Mary Hodder posted what I can only see as a public attack on Ranchero Software, the developer of NetNewsWire, a beta of which Mary Hodder was using. Having decided she liked it “better than Shrook” she decided, based on the beta, to buy NetNewsWire. Here’s an excerpt of what she wrote (the entire post is linked above):

When they synced [I think she misunderstands syncing and how NNW works] my local copy of NetNewsWire with their server, to make sure I’d paid for the license, they lost all my data from the previous 30 days.

I emailed them. And they knew they blew it, offering a refund, and said they’ll fix this eventually. But they don’t understand! I’m tracking data on tons of services, people, companies, websites, blogs, projects, as well as reading feeds. This is fucking social media after all, people. And it’s my work, professional and academic. It’s a huge part of what I do. This is aweful [sic]!

Just so we’re all completely clear about how risky this kind of user behavior is, I’m going to enumerate the sequence of mistakes, mistakes that Mary Hodder made.

  1.  She’s using unfamiliar software in an active production environment.
  2.  She is using unfamiliar software that is clearly labeled as beta software. She could have downloaded 1.0.8 the current stable version at any point and used it, but she chose to use the beta.
  3.  She apparently doesn’t make daily backups, even of her production data, data that she herself says is for “my work, professional and academic.”

Mary Hodder clearly blames Ranchero Software, yet she herself made very poor poor choices at several points. Ranchero, to their credit, not only apologized for a bug in their beta, they refunded her money (yes, that’s right, she was purchasing a software beta). You should note that Ranchero has placed the beta download link on an entirely separate page on their site, a page that is clearly labeled as a beta download page. What’s more, right at the top of the page it says:

Warning!

Beta software has bugs! Nasty, vicious bugs with great big, sharp teeth!

Don’t use beta software unless you’re clear on what “beta” means and you’re comfortable running beta software.

You can’t be much plainer than that. But Ranchero, like the good citizens and good developers they are, have a second warning. They explicitly advise making a backup, and tell you how:

This is a beta, and you may want to go back to NetNewsWire 1.x. Before installing the new version, back up your preferences and data folder:

Preferences:

~/Library/Preferences/com.ranchero.NetNewsWire.plist

Data folder: ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/

But the final touch is this bit here from Mary Hodder’s original post:

ANSWER: I’m paying for the Shrook license now, because I need a backup, because I can’t trust NetNewsWire. But I will have Shrook’s data from two months this summer, added to current data, which [sic] a huge 2.5 month hole in the middle.

Because she “can’t trust” a beta, she’s going to use a product she’s already said she doesn’t like as well. Moreover, not only is she using beta, which is, by its nature, is buggy and unfinished, like all beta software, she’s not using it in an intelligent fashion. What she really should be using is a local database, perhaps DevonThink, or any number of other similar products, but she’d still have to learn to make backups. If it’s critical data, back it up daily, even hourly, and in more than one way, using more than one kind of media.

One of my old bosses, when I worked in development, was known to refuse to sell our software to some users, because in his judgement, they didn’t deserve it, or they weren’t smart enough to use it. I think maybe he had the right idea.

Update: I notice in the comments to Mary Hodder’s post that she says “Also, I didn’t download this from their site. It was sent to me to try. .” That’s an engraved invitation to disaster.

Update: Mary Hodder has had some second thoughts and toned down her attack, no longer referring to Brent Simmons as a moron; good for her— it changes the entire tone. I’ve mollified my own tone as well, though my essential take is unchanged.

12.15.04

Mellel Holiday Sale

Posted in Software at 12:15 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

I wanted to let y’all know that Redlers Software is offering special holiday pricing on Mellel. Right now Mellel $29.00 for a regular license, $23.00 for an educational single user, and $49.00 for a “family” license for five users. Mellel is perhaps best described as a “scholarly” word processer, though that doesn’t quite do it justice. I’ve written about Mellel before; I’m using Mellel for my disser- thing because of Mellel’s support for Unicode fonts. But though Mellel departs in some ways from the usual word processor metaphors, for instance end notes and foot notes are thought of as inhabiting “streams,” but it includes all the standard things you really need in a word processor, and incredible foreign language support, including Hebrew, Chines, Japanese, Arabic, and everybody’s favorite, Etruscan. There’s a list of features here. Mellel is feature rich, but not feature burdened; it’s worth taking a look at if you’re interested in writing and not fiddling with a word processor.

12.01.04

Is Apple Joining the List of Corporate Bloggers?

Posted in Blogging, Macintosh at 8:51 am by Lisa Spangenberg

Apple seems to be experimenting with “student blogging” on the Higher Education section of their website. Here’s the initial post:

We’d like to welcome you to a new community site for students to hear from other students about their observations and Mac-related stuff.

We’re starting off with a recent graduate from the University of Colorado, Dave Morin, who is now working at Apple. We will introduce a couple of student bloggers soon. Every few months we will welcome new student blog authors as they share their experiences.

The main blog page is here. While I’m glad to see Apple’s experimenting with web logs, a sensible thing to do for many reasons, including the presence of a web log server host in Tiger Server, I’m not sure that, based perhaps unfairly, on the two entries posted, Apple, or their initial blogger, really understand blogs, student bloggers, or corporate blogging. It’s not like Apple doesn’t have some good internal models to follow. Still, it’s a good sign.