Bug reports

It’s been a rough week or two in terms of hardware and software bugs.

I tried to upgrade an old installation of phpwebsite, and found that the developers left no documentation for upgrades, no upgrade path, and no explanation of an error message that, in the end, turned out to be from having php4. The developers have such contempt for people with “outdated” servers that they didn’t bother making an appropriate error message or even checking for the right php version when starting.

I used the latest versions of Microsoft Office. I don’t think I really need to say much more there.

I tried to make an animation on Photoshop. I gave up. The documentation is absurdly poor and the methods … strange. I had a great animations program a while back and I’ll have to run it on my kid’s computer (it’s old enough that it won’t run on my computer any more) if I want to make an animated GIF without going insane.

We finally got Verizon’s router working right - I think - though the tech could have mentioned along the way, “By the way, all your filters and settings will get wiped out by this.” I tried to switch from MSN to Yahoo with my Verizon account but the system doesn’t work quite right.

Sometimes, there was a way to register bugs. SPSS has an easy bug registry; so does OpenOffice though many bugs are dismissed with “What you want is wrong, anyway.” Good system, bad attitude (open source!!!) phpwebsite… is a mess in terms of any user relations. Lots of old, outdated documentation and nothing for the current versions. I think. They talked about release 10 and I was trying to install 1.52.

Meanwhile, every time my wife tries to use Allpar, she ends up frustrated with the navigation and orders me to change something.

So… I’m changing something.

You can now file bug reports at http://www.toolpack.com/allpar/bug-report.php — and if I get overwhelmed or overspammed, I’ll install a serious bug tracking system.

We’re here for you.