The danger of superfluity

There is an application that I have been working as an employee and a consultant for five years now. In the course of development I routinely run into a dialog in this application that handles errors at a global (or at least global to the GUI) level.

This dialog is very useful, it stops the GUI bombing out totally and presents the user with the sad news that something has gone wrong and allows them to report such an error. If you are a developer it even lets you enter debugging land. Today however I came across a subtle issue with this dialog that I believe has been there for several years. The dialog is headlined with the phrase "Unknown Error".

"Unknown Error?" "What's wrong with that?" I hear you cry. Well, we're all accustomed to seeing such messages, indeed I believe this text appears in this dialog because someone (possibly even me) saw it in other examples, and I wouldn't bother to post here if this problem wasn't one that extended beyond the domain of a commercial app in a very limited market. My issue is this, what is the value of the word "Unknown"?

Does it reassure the user? No, quite the opposite.

Does it distinguish the error case? No, if it were a known error then we should either have handled it of at least linked the user back to some information about the bug (for various reasons this isn't possible in the real world scenario for this application). In practice if a user reports this bug however they will often find out that this really is a "known error" from the support staff.

So what does the word "Unknown" get us? At best it adds nothing, at worst it scares the users and can even be plain wrong. Perhaps we would all do well to think a little more about what we say to the users

On the subject of Bill Gates retirement

I've waited a long time to talk about this. I was all ready to rant and rave about the torrent of lies that the media would put out. As it turned out, however, one of the nice things over the last couple of weeks is that there have been pockets of journalists who've have taken the time to actually accurately portray Bill Gates career in the computer industry. In the past journalists and news outlets have seen fit to repeat the myths that Bill and Microsoft have propagated. On his retirement though they seem happy to point out that Microsoft is not responsible for most of the innovations it gives it self credit for, and even fewer that the general public give it credit for, and contrary to popular belief Bill Gates is not one of the greatest technical minds of his generation. What he is a great business man, and his company has succeeded by putting business first, often at the direct expense of innovation and technical improvement.

However you feel about the man however he is one of the defining figures of his generation and as an economic entity he has the power to change the world, and I'm glad to say in his retirement he intends to spend more time using his fortune to rid the world of some of it's real problems through the Gates Foundation.

As for the computer industry, well the era of Microsoft's domination is slowly ebbing away, but I'll leave it to Richard Stallman as ever to present the ethical compass for the industry in this rather nice piece at the BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7487060.stm

In this new fangled age of TrueType support in Emacs it's really useful to know the names of the Monospace fonts installed on your system in the format that Emacs understands. If you are on a Linux/UNIX system running Xorg with fontconfig installed then add this function to your .emacs file

(defun list-monospace-truetype-fonts ()
  "Provide a list of available monospaced truetype fonts on this
   machine"
  (interactive)
  (set-buffer (get-buffer-create "Monospaced Fonts"))
  (call-process-shell-command "fc-list :spacing=mono:scalable=true family | sort" nil t)
  (setq buffer-read-only t)
  (switch-to-buffer-other-window (current-buffer)))

You can set these fonts in a number of ways, currently I am getting the most joy using this form:

(defun safe-set-initial-font (fontstring)
  "Set the default frame font"
  (interactive "s")
  (setq initial-frame-alist
 `((font . ,fontstring)
   (background-color . ,(face-background 'default))
   (foreground-color . ,(face-foreground 'default))
   (horizontal-scroll-bars . nil)
   (vertical-scroll-bars . nil)
   (menu-bar-lines . 0)
   (height . 40)
   (width . 80)
   (cursor-color . "red")
   (mouse-color . "green")))
  (setq default-frame-alist (copy-alist initial-frame-alist)))

That's pretty nasty, but it gets round a bug where opening a new frame results in a different font being used.

Things that happened yesterday

Hmmm   I am aware that I should put more technical content here, trouble is I don't have much to say at the moment.   Work is dragging on with the same old problems with different hardware.   Outside work I am actively working on something  (smallish) using Erlang to get my skills in that area up to scratch before starting something else (still smallish, but bigger).

In the mean time here are a couple of things that happened yesterday.   Firstly, Nicole and I both had pictures shortlisted by http://www.schmap.com for their new Munich city guide.

Nic's photo is a day-shot she took in Karstadt, a department store in the center of Munich, it's a really cool shot.   Mine is a more typical, boring tourist shot of the Olympic centre.    We have no idea if they'll make it into the guide, but it is nice to be picked.    

Having been shortlisted I downloaded the current guide to have a look.   It's sort of a an offline google maps with tourist guide data for the points of interest.   It's OK, and handy to have on your laptop/PDA/Smart Phone when you travel I guess.    I imagine that this sort of thing will get a lot smarter with widespread adoption of always connected, location aware devices like the iPhone 3G.

In the evening we went t Tollwood, which sounds like a sleepy village in Surrey, but is in fact a culture festival in Munich.   To me it looked a little bit like the medieval festival a few months earlier, but with fewer silly costumes and more cultural diversity.   Still, it was fun and their was a good selection of food to choose from.

The defiant one.

The defiant one. - 2008-06-28 at 21-14-04, originally uploaded by tealeg.

This weekend was Silke's birthday.

I took time out from writing webstore code in Erlang using YAWS to take some photos.

A bug's life

A bug's life, originally uploaded by tealeg.

It starts with the Aphids. When we put our plants on the balcony this year those dastardly greenfly hit them with a vengance.

We tried a natural remedy, based on soaked nettles.. but without success we were left with no other option but to pray for ladybird or hover fly lavae. Just when we thought we would never get any luck we spotted the first ladybird lavae. They're ugly little critters but with plenty of aphids to munch on they soon grew big and strong.

One day they were looking very sleepy and hanging out on the leaves of a lavendar bush. The next morning they had turned into little pupae stuck to the undersides of the leaves. Just over a day later the world had some brand new ladybirds, ready to build a new generation of aphid munching predators. Hooray ladybirds!

Geoff embraces his new life

Geoff embrasses his new life, originally uploaded by Tanzbar.

Nic seems to specialise in taking shots of me in compromising positions.

Here I am at the local Biergarten (Lochham) , drinking König Lüdwig dunkels bier (my favourite German beer) and supporting Germany in the match against Portugal.

For some reason it looks like my ear was bleeding, it wasn't.

Role on Turkey.. probably not one to be in the center of München for given the reaction of the Turkish population here following their victory the following night.