Early Modern Notes

Vista. God, it sucks. And it’s installed on my second laptop.

I heart my Macbook dearly, but if it dies within the next year or so I’m not sure I can really afford to replace it straight away (this is not that improbable a scenario, sadly, even though it’s only 2 years old: in the last 6 months I’ve had to replace first the battery and then the hard drive, and now the screen has started to flicker periodically. Great OS, maybe not such great hardware).

So I’ve installed Linux Ubuntu on the other machine, so that in the event of the Macbook meltdown, I’ll have a machine that won’t entirely destroy my will to live. (At the very least, the desktop wallpaper image is fecking gorgeous.)

But of course this means a lot to learn (starting with getting wifi to work, dammit). So are there any beginners’ Ubuntu tutorials and resources that people can recommend from personal experience?

Another perspective on Wikipedia (and check out the gin analogy…):

I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus… She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.” [H-T]

And:

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. … Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.

I’m watching a fraction of the TV I did about five years ago (there is only one programme I regard as a must-watch right at the moment). Instead, I read and write. I visit blogs and leave grumpy comments when they annoy me. I write amused, ranty, serious, light, posts on this blog about whatever catches my attention. I play with wikis and other software when no one’s looking.

I still like TV; I don’t buy the view that it’s all just passive mindless consumption. But the kind of activity you can do is sort of detached from it; conversations with friends (and on blogs now too!). Which is different from the direct participation of blogs and wikis. Don’t like it? Don’t get it? Change it. Add a comment. Jump right in there.

On the other hand…

Here is a cautionary tale for students using online sources to do important assignments.

Last Thursday afternoon the Old Bailey Proceedings Online (along with other resources hosted in the building) broke in a fairly major way. Our tech staff couldn’t fix it and had to pass the problem up the line to the university computing services; it took all day Friday to get it working again. In fact, at about 4.30 on Friday afternoon, emergency notices were being prepared for the weekend.

By then, I’d already had a number of panicky emails from students who were trying to use OBP to write essays. (Monday deadlines?)

The OBP has gone down at night or, worse, over a weekend before. It’s database driven, and one downside of databases compared to static web pages is that there’s more to go wrong, especially with a big database. We’re not in a position to provide technical support outside office hours, and I’m sure this is true of many free online resources provided by academic institutions: if it falls over at 6 o’clock on a Friday evening, it won’t be getting back up before Monday.

Just because those online sources seem to be open all hours, students shouldn’t assume that they will always just be there.

To anyone who has tried to email my sharon at earlymodernweb address today (Friday) and not heard back from me: I buggered something up (don’t know what exactly) and your message may have disappeared into the ether. It seems to be working now. Please try again…

Oh dear. And after all the nice things I said about Firefox the other day.

So, it’s just crashed twice three times this morning, on top of having to be forcibly restarted twice after freezing up yesterday. (Silver lining: ‘restore sessions’. Up to a point.)

Hmm.

Update: Four times. Re-install?

Further update: Looks like it might be a problem with Zotero (I installed an update yesterday). Uh-oh.

Final update: In the interests of not putting people off The Joy of Firefox (and, truly, it does rock), I don’t think it was a Firefox problem after all. It was just that Firefox was the first application to start crashing. And then everything else was going down like dominoes… So, swivel and point at the damned computer. Some cleaning up and a reboot later, hoping it’s going to be OK. Because the idea of going through all the possible diagnostics to reinstalling the OS does not thrill me. One. Little. Bit.

The university is implementing a new computer system that will apparently do everything bar tie our shoelaces for us. (Yes, you know this can’t turn out well, don’t you?)

And so I’m reading the instructions for setting up my browser (only IE6 or FF2 allowed?… not starting too good, is it?). And the very first thing they want me to do to Firefox is to make new pages open in a new window instead of a new tab.

And yes, it’s a little thing. Except it isn’t that bloody little. FF tabs are a reasonably big deal for me. There are many reasons I use Firefox, but the tabbed browsing is not the least significant. Tabs are my buddies, and I have a lot of ‘em. I don’t want to have a load of open windows cluttering up the computer. Surely I’m not alone?

Fortunately, I’m only likely to use this system once or twice a month. If it’s really that critical, I can tweak the settings as and when. (I might even bring myself to use IE… although I’ve just remembered that I upgraded to IE7.) But that’s not the bloody point. What am I supposed to think about a computer “system” that isn’t sophisticated enough to be able to deal with a key feature of the software I work with every day and that helps me get my job done?

Annoying enough so far. But do you know what was the final straw? I wandered over to the help pages for the system (just wondering if they might be a bit more useful than most of the university’s computing so-called help pages). And apparently

[systemName] is all about you

Not to mention that it’s

putting you in control…

There’s one thing worse than being forced (by employers, institutions, politicians and all the rest) to use bureaucratic, inflexible systems that at best cause us inconvenience and at worst make our lives downright bloody miserable. And it’s being told that the aforesaid systems are not bureaucratic and inflexible at all. No, no, they’re all about us! They don’t really take away our choices and control over our lives, whatever gave us that silly idea?! They’re really putting us in control – look, it says so here!

For your Firefox:

No matter how much I love Firefox, occasionally I need Internet Explorer – because there are stupid sites that don’t work properly with FF, or when I’m testing that my site does work in IE. But I might never need to open IE again, now I have this little FF extension. Once installed, all you have to do is right-click on the page you’re in and select ‘view in IE tab’. (And I just noticed that if you right-click on a hyperlink, it gives you the option to open the link in IE too.)

The other FF extension I currently swear by is Adblock (I owe the friend who pointed me to this one several large drinks). Get this and you will never have to look at all those annoying adverts on websites ever again (graphics, anyway; it won’t block text advertising).

For your WordPress:

Live Comment Preview. I’m not sure it’s particularly useful but I quite like it.

Update: Unfortunately, my lovely new FF extension is showing that the preview plugin doesn’t work in IE. Oops. Oh, and it seems that something odd happens to the comment text box in IE when you start to type in it (it suddenly gets wider). I’ve never spotted that before and I have no idea what’s going on there. Time for some CSS investigation, I think. (fixed) Well, at least it shows the new extension is already earning its keep.

Last update, hopefully: Ho hum. Looks like live preview does work in IE… It just doesn’t work in the IE-FF extension. Ah well, nobody’s perfect. At least the extension does work perfectly for downloading PDFs from JSTOR, which has been giving me all sorts of trouble in Firefox.

Feeling all the more love for my department today: my new office computer is on the way!

OK, it’s not new exactly. But only One Careful Owner and it’s been lovingly reconditioned specially for me.

I might even go and spend more time in my office if I have a usable computer. And put up some posters and use the shelves and install some drinkable coffee and make it sort of cosy, like normal people do.

I could work towards building those architectural piles of stuff (technical term, I believe) that people hide behind when they want to be left alone.

I still seem to be getting occasional troubles with my connection, which don’t seem to be directly related to the new router and wireless network, but I wasn’t having them before…*

Twice now my connection has suddenly gone screwy in a particular way: I can ping IP addresses, but I can’t get into sites using URLs. (I did get this once before, several months ago when I first installed my broadband setup, and that was a firewall issue. That does not seem to be the problem now.) Last week, I reset my IE settings and it seemed to fix it. This time, the ISP had to reset something mysterious at their end. I don’t understand what’s going on, I don’t want to have to phone them every other week and I don’t like not knowing if the connection will suddenly screw up again.

Additional: I’ve realised something. The two occasions have been at (almost) exactly the same time, same day, a week apart (just before midnight Tuesday). I don’t know whether to see this as a bad thing (seems all the more likely to happen again…) or a good thing (might make it easier to work out what the problem is).

If anybody has any ideas what is going on and can explain them very gently in non-computer-lingo, I’d be pathetically grateful.

*Yes Conor, I know, post hoc ergo propter hoc and all that, but it looks bleedin’ fishy to me. (But after all I still only just about get the thing with the goats and the doors. Phooey to mathematicians.)

Has anybody here used Nvivo and/or N6 qualitative data analysis software? I ask because apparently I can get copies of them via the university for almost nothing, and I’m wondering just what they do and how easy they are to use. I currently have Idealist, a freetext database program (which I use a lot), and Endnote (which I don’t use half as much as I should) – what sort of capabilities would Nvivo/N6 add to those? Would they take much getting used to?

…

A few relevant things turned up by Google…

Product overview
Using Nvivo for your literature review
Get started with Nvivo 2
NVivo resources

I hate BT (OK, not really). I love the Internets.

The simple reason I could not make my router work was because I didn’t know that my usual BT ‘username’ (email address) is different from the ‘username’ you need to use to set up this sort of connection.

The reason I know this now is because there are so many support forums out there on the Internets: someone, somewhere will probably have had the same problems as you and someone else, somewhere else will have the answer.

Now all I have to do is see if I have a wireless connection when I disconnect the ethernet cable. (Anyone want to take a bet?) Oh, the suspense…

Nope. Here we go again. What fun.

GOT IT GOT IT GOT IT GOT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Just gotta fix the security now. Don’t wanna get hacked now do I?)

Will have to try again later in the week. WTF is wrong with this thing?

Attempt 1: Abject failure. I’m only here because I gave up, plugged my old kit back in and uninstalled all the new software. (So I know I can get it back if I really can’t make this thing play.)

Yes, I did read the manual, before you ask. The manual and the computer kept saying different things.

Besides, it’s perfectly normal for me to screw up installing new stuff (hardware or software) first time out. Then I work out what I was doing wrong (and yes, it usually is me) and it goes perfectly.

I hate computers. I’m going to settle down with some traditional communications technology. (A paper and then a book.) Leave the stupid computer to stew for a few hours.

Anybody else having or had problems with Firefox lately? It’s almost as though it’s frozen up. It won’t load pages (it just hangs – doesn’t timeout or anything), won’t even open new windows (even in Safe Mode). IE is working fine, so it wouldn’t seem to be an internet connection problem (which I thought I had for a while yesterday, but now I’m wondering if that was Firefox-related too).

And if this sounds at all familiar, what can I do about it? Do I need to reinstall or upgrade? I don’t want to have to go back to IE! (I keep looking for the tabs… And is there an equivalent of Ctrl-L in IE?)