I hate the scrolling text. If I need to use the recovery partition, I probably need to be able to see the screen without so much pain.
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I just booted up my office PC for the first time ever to do some software testing on Windows. Promptly greeted with a certificate error that prevents me from logging into the computer at all.
Womp womp.
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So… How long are we talking since the last authorized user logged on? I mean, I have machines disabled at 90 days of not checking in and purged at 120.
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I suspect that’s it. I keep it stored behind some armchairs in the reading nook of my lab space. For day-to-day, I use my Mac laptop, and for heavy lifting, usually a 16 core Linux box in my office. I only plug it in to test the build of some software I’m an author on on PC.
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Speaking of not making users feel exasperated, does anyone have a good reading on having software automatically add to the user’s path? I’m writing a plugin on a piece of software to take advantage of an existing graphical user interface (RStudio). For experienced user, adding something to the path or installing it to usr/bin or whatever is easy. But I’d like to have cmake optionally add to the bin or append to path. Never done anything like this, and I’d like to read up on it.
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That sounds like a cool project. 
I’m not familiar with cmake, but if it has any sort of post-build/post-deployment hooks for custom scripts, it’s fairly straightforward to manipulate your PATH variable with a bit of PowerShell (ok, maybe not straightforward, since it seems like there’s usually four different ways to do the same thing in PowerShell, but not too difficult).
For temporary change to the current user session, it’s basically:
$env:Path += ';C:\path\to\my\assembly.exe'
For a more permanent change, you have to update the registry, but it’s not too bad either. See the cmdlets Get-ItemProperty and Set-ItemProperty. This link is a decently concise overview: https://codingbee.net/powershell/powershell-make-a-permanent-change-to-the-path-environment-variable
That’s for Windows, obviously; I have no idea what you’d need to do for linux.
The reason I know about this is because I once had a machine with so much stuff installed on it that I exceeded the maximum length of the PATH variable, which in turn caused rather interesting and non-obvious side effects. Really basic things like ‘ping’ would stop working. I spent days chasing down the wrong problems before I finally figured out what the real issue was. 
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The nice thing is that you can generally rely on linux users to know how to update path. Mac is a mixed bag, but permanent updates to the path are easy. Windows is just so confusing, though.
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Yeah, I’ve found that “know your audience” is just as good advice for software developers as it is for writers.
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And that’s the tricky thing with scientific software. Probably 75% of the audience has a POSIX system of some kind. The other 25% are on Windows of some stripe. 64 bit. 32 bit. Has terminal. Doesn’t. Our install stuff is generally quite smooth, but I think we need to make appending to path an option, particularly now that we support both Python (Jupyter) and R (Rstudio) based GUIs.
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I got this working yesterday, and it is super fucking cool. Now, users can take advantage of an already tested and stable user interface to do scientific computing with our software. We can eliminate all traces of our old GUI from our repository, so that we don’t have to spend developer hours building and maintaining it. More time for us, no tech debt, smaller repo all while growing the user base.
Very excited. Made the integration plan this morning detailing what install instructions and tutorials need to be added.
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So 2 of my doctors want me to call them.
…
Relying on phones is already an accessibility failure.
…
And they know I have hyperacusis, so it’s worse. I am also feeling very sick due to the noise bombardment, from construction, low flying helicopters, and everything else. But I tried to call, and am feeling very much sicker, with awful earaches and a migraine because of the phones, a pain-tone before messages, and hold music. I didn’t get through in either case.
Phones are not accessible.
Yes, they comply with section 508 accessibility requirements.
No, that doesn’t make them accessible, that makes the requirements inadequate, because they were designed to grandfather in existing practices.
…
Trying to contact a doctor shouldn’t leave patients sicker.
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This is stretching the definition of USER, but i needed to rant.
GUID. Globally Unique IDentifier. Cool. So every machine with a UEFI BIOS (that sounds redundant, but just saying UEFI as opposed to BIOS seems to confuse people, but I am digressing)
EXCEPT when you have lazy manufacturers that utilize a Generic GUID. Is that not an oxymoron?
Well, regardless I now have 14 machines in my environment with the GUID of 03000200-0400-0500-0006-000700080009.
Day to day, won’t be impactful, until someone wants to image machine 15 and everyone will be scratching their head why this machine won’t PXE boot like they have for the last two weeks.
I’ll log a knowledge base article on this, but it is such an edge case, I doubt anyone would check the KB when this happens again.
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Manufacturers do lazy shit like this all the time. Sharing MAC addresses, serial numbers, SMBIOSIDs, and so on. With GUIDs it’s especially lazy, since the chances of collision are so remote and it’s not like it’s hard to generate them.
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So yesterday I had a vendor ask me for a style guide for my mockups.
And that’s cool, except we have asked this same vendor for style guides in the past, when they’ve been the ones making the mockups, and they have not provided them, claiming they don’t exist.
And, furthermore, some (er, most) of the things they want in the style guide are already annotated in the mockups. Or else we should have a collaborative discussion to hammer them out.
“Collaborative” is not how this vendor works, though. They rob the client’s teams for information and then claim it as their own, or else they poke holes in anything that isn’t completely airtight and patronisingly explain how to do it (you should see the email requesting the style guide), or else they make up shit to cover what they perceive as “gaps” without asking if it’s really a gap or not, then make long faces about how much it’ll be too rework when we get to the review and the client asks WTF all the extra shit in the screen is.
Oh yeah, and if I document ahead of any contingencies, I’m “dumping” unnecessary artifacts on them and slowing down the project, wasting resources and time.
Then, when their shitty choice finally is “done”, internal people at the client’s have to fix it or mitigate around it, and get to be perceived as a “delay”.
Upper management loves them though, because they suck up and keep telling us how progressive they are. They have an office downtown in an old Victorian building with exposed brick walls, dontcha know.
(I would love to work in a space like that, so I especially resent being treated like a troglodyte on the one hand but expected to churn out all the work to make these vendors look good on the other hand. Especially since we could have done it in house faster and cheaper.)
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PREACH!
[Deleted rambling diatribe that I shouldn’t even have thought about since I’m taking a day off on doctor’s advice]
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A colleague and I got our prototype running. We can plug in to this existing UI, and use that UI to generate living code documents, or static documents (example here), or use it interactively in RStudio. I’m super excited, since RStudio is one of the most common ways biologists interact with computing. Rest of the team, who don’t teach often, are more ‘meh’.
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OMG I wish we could use stuff like that at work. We’re still in Word documents.
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We don’t have a lot of choices - going between languages, etc. I’ve recreated all the Word docs I need at work in LaTex because I’m that colleague.
But also, I recently submitted an article to a journal that took it straight from an online tex editor, did the copy-editing, and then sent me a proof, completely typeset under their style manual. Mark up languages are the future. I’ve lost precisely zero person-hours to document reformatting on that article.
Edit: The next step is to replace some aging (~10 years) java scripts for post-processing results with R scripts that can be run either stand-alone or with these notebooks.
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At my partner’s new-ish job they are rolling out some software that (in theory) makes filling out insurance applications faster/easier.
She had experience with the software’s previous incarnation whose name was changed, but feels like the same software. So, because of her experience, her boss has her in on some of the development meetings.
So the meeting had my partner, her boss, two developers and a couple of sales weasels on the call yesterday and my partner kept pushing back on the company asserting that “the software can’t do X.” Where X is a more common situation than what they are saying the software will do.
First thing on the call today the company admits it can do X. Great. Moving forward my partner then inquires how they will handle situation Y & Z. (Again, the previous incarnation of the software did this). She will find out in tomorrow’s installment after they said they needed to “take it offline.”
When I picked her up today, her first comment was, “When I’m the smartest person in the room, we have problem.”
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Respectfully to your partner, as the representative user she is the smartest person in the room.
But the sales and dev people should at least be the second smartest (after the boss), and it doesn’t sound like they were.
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