As with anyone else, my ordinary use of a computer sometimes presents me with problems for which the obvious references, such as documentation from a program’s manufacturer, provide no satisfactory resolution or even an explanation.
Also like many, I do not use any software for very long without thinking that my experience of it might be improved. The solution is often a readily accessible option, most notably to disable some feature that perhaps does make the software easy to use if what you want to do with it happens to be something the manufacturer had in mind as typical and you can fall easily enough into their mindset, but which I happen instead to find annoying. Sometimes what I want is a setting that I find soon enough by clicking some button labelled Advanced or after working through some other sequence of clearly presented user-interface controls whose exploration could hardly be described as novel. Sometimes what I want turns up from looking through documentation that the manufacturer distributes separately from the software, e.g., as a so-called power user’s collection of tips, tricks and tweaks. For much software however, it’s hard to escape wondering whether problems are solvable by knowing of useful configurations that the manufacturer has left undocumented (or not documented well or documented obscurely).
Fortunately, my interest in computers is not with using them but with developing techniques for analysing software. If I encounter a problem in ordinary use and am sufficiently exasperated, these techniques are available to me to determine whether the problem is a bug or a feature, and then to do something about it (e.g., to patch the faulty software so that the bug no longer troubles me). Alternatively, an analysis conducted for its own interest may predict some behaviour that surprises and which looks like being good to remember, whether as a potentially useful feature or as a quirk that might better be avoided. Either way, given time and whim, the outcome may get written up here. Be warned however that time and whim have been in short supply and most of these application notes are by now quite old.
For an aside on the attitudes, beliefs and even prejudices that underpin these application notes, see Attitude to Software Flaws.
Copyright © 1997-2005. Geoff Chappell. All rights reserved.
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