Skip to main content

The joy of being tech support

For a while when I worked at British Airways I was in charge of the department that did all the support for PC users - and I was also one of BA's first PC programmers - so I think it's fair to say that I know more about computers than most people of my generation. This can be handy. But the downside is that the family regard me as official PC support guy.

This came home with a bang when one of my daughters reported one of the weirdest errors I've come across. Every time she tried to save something in Word the above error box came up. She couldn't save a single file. Even with the default Document1 filename. Yet other programs - Powerpoint for instance - were fine. Word is something she uses heavily on her course, so it needed sorting, but what could possibly be happening?

At the time the laptop was at university and I was at home, so several local attempts were made to sort it out without success. This weekend I finally got my hands on it and spent a couple of hours tidying up various bits and pieces, plus fully de-installing and reinstalling Office. End result? No change.

I was under a bit of pressure, as I had a train to catch. But three minutes before I was due to leave I had a really silly idea. And 2 minutes and 50 seconds before I was due to leave, I had fixed the problem. What it comes down to is a subtle divergence between Word, with its Windows background, and the Mac's OS X operating system, which is basically a tarted up version of Unix. Windows comes from a DOS heritage where filenames were very limited. Who remembers names that had to be no more than 8 characters in length? And there were lots of forbidden characters in filenames. Windows has loosen up since then, but there are still a number of limitations on what can appear, and this proved to be the secret to fixing the problem.

It might seem this doesn't make any sense - after all I was trying out totally legitimate filenames. But the whole path that specifies where the file is located also had to meet with Word's approval. And at some point, the hard disc of the computer had been accidentally renamed ]q - which the Mac had no problems with. But this meant that file's path, which includes the name of the hard disc, had a ']' in it, which Word didn't think was possible.

So there are three problems here the developers should have spotted and prevented. First, by default the Mac puts an icon for the hard disc on the desktop, which makes it far too easy to accidentally rename it. (Easily removed, but it's probably a mistake to have it there in the first place.) Secondly Word, like Powerpoint, should have coped with all possible Mac file naming possibilities. And thirdly the Word error message should have been a lot more explicit, rather than leaving you guessing just what it was complaining about.

Sigh. Computers, eh?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...
118 comments
Read more

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...
25 comments
Read more

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...
6 comments
Read more