Screensaver

I wish to complain about the user interface of the KDE screensaver used under Centos 4.4. The relevant part of the screensaver control panel is this:


Notice that you can set the start time in minutes, but the password locking must be entered in seconds? WTF? And no, you can't just type over "seconds" and replace it with "minutes" -- I've tried.

Some tasks really do need to be specified down to the second, but starting a screensaver is not one of them. Why would anyone seriously need to specify that the screensaver locks the screen in 121 seconds instead of two minutes? As functionality goes, allowing the user to specify the time in seconds is silly, but it doesn't do any harm. But requiring the user to use seconds is just ludicrous.

And bad luck if you don't want the screen saver to lock for two hours, because 1800 seconds -- 30 minutes -- is the maximum value it will accept.

The good thing and the bad thing about Linux is that you can pick any one of many different distributions. No doubt other distributions have more sensible screensaver configuration screens. But Centos is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is aimed squarely at the corporate market. If you're a corporate user, chances are good that you'll be using this unimpressive interface rather than the nicer versions found in (say) Fedora Core 5 or Ubuntu. And that just reinforces the meme that Linux isn't ready for the desktop yet -- which simply isn't true.

Panic

Bruce Tognazzini, known for writing about computer user interfaces, also writes about non-computer interfaces and man-machine interaction. He wrote an essay about how the design of John Denver's light plane killed him. Here he writes about panic and how it interacts with technology like scuba gear, airplanes, and computer mice.

Thought of the day

Courtesy of Mrs Impala, who is using the LookXP theme with icewm on her Linux PC:

It is easier for a rich man to pass through the eye of a camel than for an end user to find the fraking text editor in the Look XP "aplications" menu.

Well, actually she didn't say fraking, but I've been watching a lot of Battlestar Galactica lately.

LookXP, for reasons which presumably made sense to a programmer who had never actually used a PC, grabs all the KDE and Gnome "Start Menu" items (many dozens or hundreds of items, split over a dozen or so submenus), merges them, shuffles them, sorts them according to the phase of the moon, and dumps the entire listing of hundreds of applications into one enormous scrolling menu.

Putting a bad interface into a graphical menu doesn't mean you have a good interface, it just means you have a bad interface in a graphical menu. I don't know what that's so hard for a certain kind of developer to understand.

Web feedback form

A friend of mine who preferred to remain anonymous passed this on to me, with permission to post it for the world to see.

He had been trying to purchase a product from Officeworks' website, but the site said it was unavailable over the Internet, only direct from stores, and to call a number to find out which stores had stock. Unfortunately, the number they gave wasn't connected.

So he tried to send them a message via a form on their website. Naturally enough, being a multi-bazillion dollar company, the software they are using is broken, and it deleted his message when he tried to send it because he didn't fill in enough information. Which led to this message being sent:

This is my SECOND attempt to send this. The first time was to notify you that your catalog contains an error. Product ID CHH5606 says "Not available at all locations, call 13 15 05 for details" but that phone number is not connected. First rule of successful marketing: get your own phone number right.

I'm also writing to say that your brain-damaged software deleted my message when I clicked send, just because I didn't specify my last name. YOU DON'T NEED MY LAST NAME TO ANSWER AN EMAIL. If I wanted you to know my last name, I would have told you.

And even if you did need to know it, it is rude and stupid beyond belief for the software to delete everything I typed because I left something out. What sort of C-grade pile of crap software are you people running? You probably spent tens of millions of dollars on it too, and the moron responsible for the project probably got a promotion. What a joke.

Damn straight. In fact, according to Australian privacy legislation, Officeworks is skating on awfully thin ice if they force people to leave their name in order to make a random enquiry. Imagine doing that to a phone enquiry -- "I'm sorry sir, I can't answer your questions unless you tell me your full name."

You would think Google never existed

What is wrong with the Telstra web designers? Using the on-line White Pages and Yellow Pages is like going through a timewarp to the bad old days before Google showed the right way to run a search engine.

I'm trying to do a White Pages search for a name, in a known suburb, so I specify the name and the suburb. What does Telstra's search engine do? Totally ignore the suburb and give me results from all over the place. How very useful.

So I specify the name more precisely -- let's call the business "Acme Technologies". Now, anyone with the sense of a little green apple would do what Google does: do an AND search, returning results containing both "Acme" and "Technologies". But not Telstra. They do an OR search, so I get hundreds of results, every business with either Acme or Technologies. Do you have any idea how many companies include Technologies in their name?

Let's just say more than a few.

To add insult to injury, the search page has the gall to say "We have found a large number of results and tried to return the most appropriate." Least appropriate would be more like it.

Internet 1996

Remember what the Internet was like in 1996?

It's probably best you don't.

Much to my chagrin, few websites from these early years have been successfully archived, and many of the best preserved ones were created by fast food and soft drink corporations because they were some of the earliest adapters of the internet. They viewed the medium as a chance for inexpensive advertising and invested dozens upon dozens of dollars into it. The results are tremendously humiliating.