May 2009 Archives

While helping Elissa with her thesis presentation, I got really annoyed at PowerPoint for its incredibly stupid habit of saving external data as absolute paths. Yes, I know absolute paths are unavoidable on Windows. However, that doesn't mean you get a free pass on user experience!

The problem boiled down to having external sound files in the document. You'd import the sounds, test them out, and be happy. Then you'd move to another machine and oops, sounds may or may not work. Three very intelligent people in the ento department were utterly baffled by this behavior. Things would work, then randomly stop working. I knew immediately that the issue was the fact that the ppt and sound files were being stored on a flash drive, and that different computers were assigning different drive letters to the drive upon insertion. So if it happened to get the same drive letter, everything was fine. But if the drive letters differed, then the sound files wouldn't work.

What's ridiculous about this entire situation is that the sound files were relative to the PowerPoint presentation! This is a very common use case, especially for people who put presentations onto a flash drive. So why not store two pieces of information in the file format? An absolute path is very quick and easy to work with, but relative paths aren't difficult to generate or parse. Save them both so you have a fallback in case drive letters change.

This isn't just a problem for Microsoft. Anyone developing an application for Windows should keep this in mind. There's no excuse for your application failing to perform properly just because the user happens to plug their flash drive into another computer. Bugs like that are a great example of why many people think computers are "magic." Consistent results are the key to making a good user experience, and PowerPoint utterly dropped the ball. Don't make the same mistake in your own applications!

Lis passed her defense with flying colors! :-)

Her little brother, Lawrence, and I went up a bit early to hang out with her on Tuesday. Mostly to make sure the presentation was all in order (PowerPoint + sounds = terribad problems) and to calm her down. She was halfway between panicked and excited, for obviously understandable reasons. But she knew she'd do alright! At 2pm the presentation started, and it lasted about 40 minutes. For being nervous, you sure couldn't tell it from where I was sitting! Everything went swimmingly well. Then the audience got to ask questions. And it was a fairly large audience for a defense -- a packed house! There were about 25-30 people there, which was really nice to see. The questions weren't unexpected. It was the usual sort of stuff that Lis would get when presenting things like her poster. So she fielded the five or six questions without a problem. Once the audience was done asking questions, then everyone had to leave except Lis and her committee so that they could ask her questions. Obviously that went well -- they signed off on everything!

It's kind of strange how two years worth of constant stress, sweat and labor all boiled down to about two hours of talking. But Elissa made it through, and she'll be graduating on June 13th with her Masters in Entomology from one of the top-ranking schools in the world!

Congrats! I'm so proud!!

I've been pretty terrible at blogging lately, but that's because Elissa and I have been super busy. She defends her Master's thesis today at 2pm! The last two years worth of struggling all pretty much end today. She's been sitting on the thesis itself for a few days now (she never leaves anything for the last minute!), and today's all about presenting her research to colleagues and her committee. Once she's done with her presentation, everyone gets to ask questions. Once the general public is done asking questions, we all have to leave so Elissa can do one-on-one with her committee members. They're basically going to ask more questions. After answering their questions, they sign off on her thesis and she'll be done!

I cannot describe how proud I am of Lis. This stage of her life has not been a cakewalk by any means. It's a very intensive program, and she's had to work extremely hard to get where she's at. But she's gotten there, and done it with grace and style -- true fashion for my wife!

Way to go sweet-pea!!!!

Like most remote employees, I have to deal with forms via PDF files fairly regularly. This isn't usually a problem, except for two minor details: 1) I hate wasting paper with printing crap out and then scanning it back in, 2) I don't have a printer or a scanner at home anymore. But this is the computer age, surely there's a concept out there that can assist me! Oh yeah! Just edit the PDF file. It's a simple concept really. Use the typewriter tool to enter in whatever text I need to enter in, and then import a picture of my signature (from way back when I had a tablet PC and stored off a signature image) for any places that needed a valid signature. Sounds reasonable, right?

Wrong.

Not because the technology isn't there, but because it isn't readily available in a reasonable format. PDF is the "free" way to deal with portable documents. But thanks to Adobe, that's become "only when reading." Everyone, even F/OSS programs, have jumped on the "pay for this basic editing functionality" bandwagon and it pisses me off. PDFs are ubiquitous, just like text files have been. Imagine just how frustrating your life would be if Notepad (BBEdit, whatever your poison) decided to only let you view text files. If you wanted to edit them, it'd save with an illegible and pointless watermark over it. It's ridiculous.

I spent almost an hour today looking for a free PDF editor that would do those two simple things (fill out text fields, import a picture) and couldn't find ONE that could do even that little. FoxIt, which used to be my favorite free PDF viewer and editor has decided to start whoring itself out with ridiculous toolbars, and multiple versions of the product with various plugins, etc. Worthless because importing images means you get watermarks. CutePDF, which used to be the gold standard before FoxIt, won't even install for me because they're too lazy to make a UAC compliant *installer* for the application. They actually have the balls to tell you to turn off UAC just to install their shitty software. Wow. I also tried some off-brand PDF editors, including Bullzip (which is just a print driver, and that doesn't solve my problem), PDFill (which watermarks even simple editing like typing in fields) and a few others.

Quite honestly, with all the incredibly terrible software that's out there in the PDF market, I was tempted to just give Adobe some money for a version of Acrobat that allows me to edit PDFs. Then I realized I'd just be supporting the stupid concept that I hate anyways. Don't call it a portable document format, because that's not what it is. Document implies reading and writing. Call it a portable viewing format, because that's all it is.

There's probably some obscure piece of software out there that does exactly what I need it to do (and if you know of it, please let me know -- my requirements aren't hard: edit text fields, import an image, save to PDF with no watermark). However, after an hour and a pissed-off blog entry, I'm not interested in searching much more.

Once I move back to MN, I'll be buying a printer/scanner/fax machine.

Sorry about the lack of updates this past week! I got back from France last Thur (the 30th) pretty late at night, and have spent most of the week trying to get used to life again. It's been super hot out here in SoCal, and that drives me bonkers. But I'm also readjusting to the timezone difference, and been working pretty hard on stuff for 4D.

But that doesn't mean there's not exciting news! We've finalized our moving date, and have gotten a moving company. We're leaving California on June 15th, and both of us are incredibly excited about it.

I was originally figuring that we'd get a U Haul to tow behind the truck. But they cost 700$ for us to rent for the week (for a one-way trip), and the cost of a moving company is only a few hundred more than that. Totally worth the extra cash not to have to monkey around with hauling stuff.

We've already got a ton of plans for things we're looking forward to once we get back. In fact, we've started a list on my white board. :-D Leinie's, puppies, fishing, hiking, gardening, lemonade sipping on the deck, and sports are all up there. I'm also thinking of picking up some husky hockey season tickets, if possible -- I miss good hockey (the Ducks just don't do it for me).