The Vent and Rant Thread

[Katsunami]

I can see that more and more people who have started school after 1995 are getting into the workforce. How? Because spelling in the Netherlands is atrocious. It's not me being a grammar nazi, or someone to become angry about a spelling mistake here or there. Everybody makes mistakes or typo's now and again, me included. However, this is getting ridiculous. People aren't making mistakes; they're just guessing. This isn't language evolution; this is language dilapidation.

I see mistakes on packaging in the supermarket. I see mistakes on traffic signs. I see mistakes on websites of big companies, and even in official letters. (Sometimes, even in letters coming from the government.)

First: the dreaded "D/T" spelling problem... even though it is not difficult to get this correct. There are two simple rules to follow, and you'll ALWAYS get it correct. In this case, people are just guessing. I'm seeing people putting "D"'s at the end of words that only end in "T", or the other way around, or completely changing the meaning of a word, or creating spellings that don't even exist as a word.

Hout (wood)
Houd (to hold)

Hond (dog)
Hont (doesn't exist)

Brood (Bread)
Broot (doesn't exist)
Broodt (doesn't exist)

Or they are messing things up at random

Gebeurt ("Het gebeurt nu." -> "It happens now.")
Gebeurd ("Het is gebeurd." -> "It has happend.")
Gebeurdt (doesn't exist)


Let's just say... if you follow basic primary education and the first year of secondary education in the Netherlands, you should have had the two rules and the one exception to get this stuff right hammered into your head. Follow those rules, and there is NO GUESSWORK.

Second: Spaces. Dutch is NOT ENGLISH. We do not split words. If you do, you can, and often will, change the meaning.

"Computerscherm", NOT "computer scherm" (computer screen)
"Brandweerwagen", NOT "brandweer wagen", CERTAINLY NOT "brand weer wagen" (fire truck)

And yes, you stick EVERYTHING together in Dutch.

Two English sentences:

"After his promotion, he is now a commander of an aircraft carrier."
"After his promotion, he is now an aircraft carrier commander."

Dutch versions:

"Na zijn promotie is hij de commandant van een vliegdekschip." (NOT "vliegdek schip")
"Na zijn promotie is hij een vliegdekschipcommandant."

And changing the meaning of a word happens as follows:

"Ik heb driejarige paarden te koop." -> I have horses for sale and they're three years old.
"Ik heb drie jarige paarden te koop." -> I have three horses for sale and they're having their birthday.
"Hij is een langeafstandsloper." -> He is a long distance runner.
"Hij is een lange afstandsloper." -> He is a distance runner (who happens to be very tall).

This stuff isn't difficult. In the Netherlands, you stick stuff together... apart from (some) exceptions.

Third... I could go on and on.

I've ranted about this before, but the problem has increased at least tenfold since then. Back then, there weren't mistakes on packaging, street signs or official letters; and now there are. It won't be long (another 10 years I guess) before we can just abolish official Dutch spelling and tell everybody to just do WTF they feel like.

[Rumpelteazer]

It's too hot! In my bedroom it's now 28,2C (almost 83F). Today it was 30C outside and after a couple of days of high temperatures the inside of the house has also heated up. Lowest temperature tonight will be 19-20C, still warm. But over the next couple of days it'll cool down nicely.

Living in a house with thick walls can be blessing when high temperatures only last a day or two at most. But once the building warms up it takes a while to cool down again. I expect that tomorrow night will also be uncomfortable. Yesterday was also warm, though a couple of degrees cooler, but it was a dry heat. Today got humid and at the moment it's raining and there's lighting (not much thunder going on), so it's become really sticky. I don't think I'll get much sleep tonight.

[poohbear_nc]

Home made AC = fan blowing over a basin of ice -- cool down your bedroom?

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

Home made AC = fan blowing over a basin of ice -- cool down your bedroom?

I've done it! 83F or so...that's too warm to sleep properly. I've done 80F, but...83 is gettin' mighty toasty, especially for you folks who aren't used to the heat.

Hitch

[HLS]

I have a window ac. I put a fan by the hall to channel the cool air in the back bedroom. works great. I try to not use AC that often for who can afford a high summer utility bill. I usually leave window open with fan on the window at night and use ac only during the day. draw back is that insects get inside. yes i have a screen but the little bugs get in anyways. old building and thre are probably small gaps.

[BetterRed]

Sustained overnight temperatures over 30°C are dangerous, especially for the very young or elderly. In 2003 Europe had its hottest summer since just about ever, over 70,000 excess deaths in couple of months.

If you can't get into A/C building, sleep outside on a verandah or balcony under a mosquito net. Putting a hand in a bucket of ice also helps.

IIRC we have a plan to open up cinemas and shopping centres.

BR

[Rumpelteazer]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

Home made AC = fan blowing over a basin of ice -- cool down your bedroom?

I tried with frozen bottles of water, but it didn't work. I got a Dyson fan, and tried on both the narrow and broad setting. I think that compared to a regular fan with blades the beam isn't narrow enough.

Originally Posted by Hitch

I've done it! 83F or so...that's too warm to sleep properly. I've done 80F, but...83 is gettin' mighty toasty, especially for you folks who aren't used to the heat.

Hitch

I was still awake at 3am and it was still 28C, it eventually cooled down to around 26C and I did doze for a couple of hours. Luckily we don't get many nights like this. Tonight will be an early night.

Originally Posted by HLS

I have a window ac. I put a fan by the hall to channel the cool air in the back bedroom. works great. I try to not use AC that often for who can afford a high summer utility bill. I usually leave window open with fan on the window at night and use ac only during the day. draw back is that insects get inside. yes i have a screen but the little bugs get in anyways. old building and thre are probably small gaps.

My parents got an AC for the livingroom and set it up on Thursday night. I spend most of yesterday in the livingroom and I think that was one of the problems; I wasn't used to the higher temperatures, like the day before. I have thought about getting an AC, but they are expensive to buy and to run and I won't use it more than a couple of times a year to cool down my bedroom at night.

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Sustained overnight temperatures over 30°C are dangerous, especially for the very young or elderly. In 2003 Europe had its hottest summer since just about ever, over 70,000 excess deaths in couple of months.

If you can't get into A/C building, sleep outside on a verandah or balcony under a mosquito net. Putting a hand in a bucket of ice also helps.

IIRC we have a plan to open up cinemas and shopping centres.

BR

The past two summers were hot, last year almost 40C during a heat wave. We live in the city center, so I can't sleep outside. Using a spray bottle of water helped. Usually I put a small bottle with water in the freezer and use it to cool down at night, but I had forgotten to do that.

Although the wind direction was right last night, it was pretty much wind still. But it's picking up now and there's supposed to be little sun today. Day time temperatures will be around 24C. Which should mean that although the house won't cool down much it shouldn't heat up much if any either. Tonight it'll cool down nicely, my bedroom will still be warm but not unbearably so, I hope. For the next week temperatures of just below average are predicted (around 20C) with cool nights, which is fine by me.

I'm working all day today, and although there's still a shipment waiting to be unpacked I'm going to take it easy today and drink lots of water.

[Hitch]

We've done two books on Thermodynamics/physics and now one on advanced Mathematics, for customers, in the last 12 months. Not your typical stuff, in my line of work, right?

So...WHY oh WHY is my current mathematician, who is FAMOUS, btw, telling me that he cannot figure out how to use our basic WORD form, for edits???? (It's a simple table, in Word, with self-numbering rows. You fill in the blanks and that's it.)

GIMME A BREAK. You have theorems NAMED AFTER YOU and you can't figure out how to use a Word form?

Hitch

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

We've done two books on Thermodynamics/physics and now one on advanced Mathematics, for customers, in the last 12 months. Not your typical stuff, in my line of work, right?

So...WHY oh WHY is my current mathematician, who is FAMOUS, btw, telling me that he cannot figure out how to use our basic WORD form, for edits???? (It's a simple table, in Word, with self-numbering rows. You fill in the blanks and that's it.)

GIMME A BREAK. You have theorems NAMED AFTER YOU and you can't figure out how to use a Word form?

It's all what you are used to. I had an interesting exchange in email with a UK Professor a while back. He (and those like him) use LaTeX, which is just the thing for typesetting mathematics. There are an assortment of editors explicitly designed to write and edit LaTeX documents. He found himself required to use Word by his publisher.

Computer developers use Distributed Version Control Systems. These are essentially shared online code repositories, that let developers in different geographic areas collaborate. The most popular one these days is an open source effort called Git, originally created by Linux author Linus Torvalds.

In a DVCS, a developer writes code, and "commits" it to the repository. Another developer working on that code "checks out" the version in the repository, and makes changes, then commits the changes back to the repository. The repository code analyzes what is different in the new commit, and saves only the parts that changed as a "diff" to the original. A developer can reconstruct the code at any desired point by checking out the original and applying all the diffs up to the desired state.

Program code is contained in text files, where creating diffs is easy. Text files are line based. What lines changed? Save only those as a diff. Binary files are another matter.

My correspondent was trying to figure out how to store Word documents in Git with versioning. In older forms of Word where MS was still using a proprietary binary format (that changed with every new release,) it essentially wasn't possible. These days, MS uses an XML format as underlying storage for all their applications, and XML is text based. If you can get to the XML, you might be able to stuff it into Git and do proper versioning.

I mentioned this, but he couldn't locate the XML. I had to tell him MS wrapped the Word document in a Zip file to save space, and he would need to open the Zip file and extract the XML to do what he wanted. He was clueless about what Word did, because he never had to deal with it before. Word was not what folks in his field used to document results.

(I never did find out if he got anywhere with it. You can stuff Word documents into Git, but it will treat them as binary blobs. The sort of versioning developers want, where you can look at diffs to see what changed in a new version can't happen, because diffs won't exist. DVCSes let developer attach comments to commits about what they did, but that's not the same thing.)
______
Dennis

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

It's all what you are used to. I had an interesting exchange in email with a UK Professor a while back. He (and those like him) use LaTeX, which is just the thing for typesetting mathematics. There are an assortment of editors explicitly designed to write and edit LaTeX documents. He found himself required to use Word by his publisher.

Computer developers use Distributed Version Control Systems. These are essentially shared online code repositories, that let developers in different geographic areas collaborate. The most popular one these days is an open source effort called Git, originally created by Linux author Linus Torvalds.

In a DVCS, a developer writes code, and "commits" it to the repository. Another developer working on that code "checks out" the version in the repository, and makes changes, then commits the changes back to the repository. The repository code analyzes what is different in the new commit, and saves only the parts that changed as a "diff" to the original. A developer can reconstruct the code at any desired point by checking out the original and applying all the diffs up to the desired state.

Program code is contained in text files, where creating diffs is easy. Text files are line based. What lines changed? Save only those as a diff. Binary files are another matter.

My correspondent was trying to figure out how to store Word documents in Git with versioning. In older forms of Word where MS was still using a proprietary binary format (that changed with every new release,) it essentially wasn't possible. These days, MS uses an XML format as underlying storage for all their applications, and XML is text based. If you can get to the XML, you might be able to stuff it into Git and do proper versioning.

I mentioned this, but he couldn't locate the XML. I had to tell him MS wrapped the Word document in a Zip file to save space, and he would need to open the Zip file and extract the XML to do what he wanted. He was clueless about what Word did, because he never had to deal with it before. Word was not what folks in his field used to document results.

(I never did find out if he got anywhere with it. You can stuff Word documents into Git, but it will treat them as binary blobs. The sort of versioning developers want, where you can look at diffs to see what changed in a new version can't happen, because diffs won't exist. DVCSes let developer attach comments to commits about what they did, but that's not the same thing.)
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Dennis

Yes, you could stuff Word into Git, but then getting it back out and getting the XML back into a viable Word document, not so much. Honestly, to be boring, using plain old Track Changes would be better.

I realize that people are accustomed to different things. But that's one of the reasons that our form is DEAD SIMPLE. I mean, we use the same sort of thing that Random House uses, Createspace used, etc., to try to keep it easier than easy.

When someone says to me that our instructions are "too complicated," 99% of the time, with anyone of normal intelligence, that really means "I'm too lazy to read the instructions."

What chaps my ass is that 99% of the time, our customers have a) never done this before; b) never used an eBook before or c) never proofed a PDF in Acrobat before; c) don't have the eBook-reading software on their computers, and need to acquire, dl and install those (part of the instructions) and d) have NO idea what to expect with any of the above.

Our instructions have to encompass ALL of that cruft (which I bloody well resent), and they do, including updating them constantly to meet whatever new thing Amazon or Apple, etc. do. To then get told that despite the fact that they came to use completely unprepared, and still haven't bothered to learn anything at all about any of the above and then expect everything to "just magically work," without any effort at all...yes, that makes me psycho. ("Yes, I want to be a publisher, with making zero effort at all to learn any of those jobs, tasks, duties or knowledge, and worse, I'm going to expect YOU to do all that for me.")

Grrrrrrrrrrrr.

Hitch

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Yes, you could stuff Word into Git, but then getting it back out and getting the XML back into a viable Word document, not so much. Honestly, to be boring, using plain old Track Changes would be better.

Assuming you could get the XML into Git, reconstructing the Word document at any given point isn't a problem. You are simply applying changes in the XML to the original commit, and when you reach the desired point, stuff the result into the Zip file that the DOCX document is under the hood. The trick is doing that in an automated manner in both directions. (I have no idea how one might script it.)

And Track Changes tends to fall down as the number of parties working on the document increases. If it's back and forth between author and editor it's one thing. Beyond that it becomes quite another. Git stores ID of the committer, a date and time stamp, and a comment explaining the commit to each update.

An old friend is noted open source advocate Eric S. Raymond. He wrote an open source tool called Reposurgeon, intended to automate as much as possible lifting code out of one repository and putting it into another. His goal was the eliminate the CVS form of DVCS most folks had used in his lifetime, and migrate code in CVS to something else, with Git as the default. Getting the code migrated wasn't that hard. Properly migrating the commit comments and tying them to the commits they commented on was another thing entirely. He was mostly successful. Some manual work would be involved in fixing the stuff Reposurgeon couldn't handle, but that was expected going in.

And he participated in migration of some repositories in use for 20 or more years with gigabytes of content. He had a machine he called the Great Beast of Malvern built to do the conversion, with 64GB of ECC RAM (later upgraded to 128GB) to do the work, so the conversion could all happen in RAM and you didn't grow old and grey waiting for it to finish.

There used to be an outfit called Component Software offering a version of the older RCS VCS software which they claimed could properly version MS Word and Excel files back when MS was still using binary file formats. (RCS was not a distributed VCS, and this assumed you were storing to a local repository on your machine.) I played with it a bit, mostly to see just what they had done to make is possible.
______
Dennis

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Assuming you could get the XML into Git, reconstructing the Word document at any given point isn't a problem. You are simply applying changes in the XML to the original commit, and when you reach the desired point, stuff the result into the Zip file that the DOCX document is under the hood. The trick is doing that in an automated manner in both directions. (I have no idea how one might script it.)

And Track Changes tends to fall down as the number of parties working on the document increases. If it's back and forth between author and editor it's one thing. Beyond that it becomes quite another. Git stores ID of the committer, a date and time stamp, and a comment explaining the commit to each update.

An old friend is noted open source advocate Eric S. Raymond. He wrote an open source tool called Reposurgeon, intended to automate as much as possible lifting code out of one repository and putting it into another. His goal was the eliminate the CVS form of DVCS most folks had used in his lifetime, and migrate code in CVS to something else, with Git as the default. Getting the code migrated wasn't that hard. Properly migrating the commit comments and tying them to the commits they commented on was another thing entirely. He was mostly successful. Some manual work would be involved in fixing the stuff Reposurgeon couldn't handle, but that was expected going in.

And he participated in migration of some repositories in use for 20 or more years with gigabytes of content. He had a machine he called the Great Beast of Malvern built to do the conversion, with 64GB of ECC RAM (later upgraded to 128GB) to do the work, so the conversion could all happen in RAM and you didn't grow old and grey waiting for it to finish.

There used to be an outfit called Component Software offering a version of the older RCS VCS software which they claimed could properly version MS Word and Excel files back when MS was still using binary file formats. (RCS was not a distributed VCS, and this assumed you were storing to a local repository on your machine.) I played with it a bit, mostly to see just what they had done to make is possible.
______
Dennis

I freely admit, stuffing XML back into Word, in the way you're describing, is beyond my paltry skills. I agree, TC in Word, with multiple authors is a disaster looking for a place to happen if you have inconsistent file hygiene.Hell, we had a customer that "only" communicated back/forth between himself and his editor, 20x times, using TC and suffice to say, thousands (literally) of edits later, we're still fixing his final print layout files. The TCs just...got corrupted, or lost, or...something and we didn't realize that he quite literally didn't even know what TC was, or that it had even been used, until it was too late.

So, overall, I don't disagree. I simply wish I could find a less aggravating way to get this all done.

ETA: I'm just unusually tired today. I'm going to leave the office any second, but this week feels as though it's been a year long and I'm actually feeling it physically.

Hitch

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I freely admit, stuffing XML back into Word, in the way you're describing, is beyond my paltry skills.

The trick is getting it to the point where skills are not required.

I have programmers editors here designed to fetch code from an online repository so it can be worked on, and when you're done, automatically commit the changed version back to the repository. (It's a little more complicated than that. In any large project, there will be developers with commit access, and others whose submissions must be approved by a project owner before being committed. But that happens after the code is saved back to the repository, and doesn't change the workflow.)

Economics Nobel laureate Ronald Coase talks about "transaction costs". He's quite right, but the thing people need to recall is that "costs" aren't just money. Amazon makes its fortune in part on reducing transaction costs. There was a go around here a while back when a poster talked about getting a title from Amazon for their Kindle which was in the public domain, and outrage he had paid Amazon for it. I (and others) pointed out that what was being paid for was the labor of the uploader who got the text from Project Gutenberg, massaged it into the format used by the Kindle, and put it on Amazon. Sure, the OP could have grabbed it from PG, but with his Kindle he could access Amazon at any time, pick what he wanted, pay for it, download, and read. That convenience was worth money to him. He was trading money for his discretionary time.

This is the same sort of thing. DVCSes and editors designed to load from them and save back to them reduce transaction costs and ease development. The tricky stuff in doing it has been abstracted away, and the developer doesn't need to think about it.

Word won't benefit from this unless and until someone can automate the complexity of getting the XML from the DOCX file into the DVCS, and recreating the DOCX file at the desired point from the XML in the DVCS. I don't see it happening any time soon.

I agree, TC in Word, with multiple authors is a disaster looking for a place to happen if you have inconsistent file hygiene.Hell, we had a customer that "only" communicated back/forth between himself and his editor, 20x times, using TC and suffice to say, thousands (literally) of edits later, we're still fixing his final print layout files. The TCs just...got corrupted, or lost, or...something and we didn't realize that he quite literally didn't even know what TC was, or that it had even been used, until it was too late.

I know an assortment of traditionally published authors who learned their craft on other software, and only maintain Word because it's the submission format everyone in the industry expects. You can generate an MS Word document using Libre Office, but people were reluctant because LO did not previously support Track Changes properly. (I believe it's better now.)

And not being aware TC existed is a particular case of a common problem - aspiring craftspeople who never learned to properly use their tools. I'm afraid I'm not terribly sympathetic with their woes. That's what you get for being ignorant. Learn your bleeping craft!

So, overall, I don't disagree. I simply wish I could find a less aggravating way to get this all done.

I don't blame you, but don't believe there is one.

ETA: I'm just unusually tired today. I'm going to leave the office any second, but this week feels as though it's been a year long and I'm actually feeling it physically.

You have all the other stress floating around due to COVID-19 in addition to the usual idiocy. No surprise. Go home and relax.
______
Dennis

[BetterRed]

@Hitch -- in my experience an awful lot of boffins don't get SIMPLE.

Re co-author interaction. Last year some legislation drafters I know started to trial Confluence to manage their work. Been very effective in recent times when they've been working from home - it hooks up with Slack which they love.

BR

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@Hitch -- in my experience an awful lot of boffins don't get SIMPLE.

Re co-author interaction. Last year some legislation drafters I know started to trial Confluence to manage their work. Been very effective in recent times when they've been working from home - it hooks up with Slack which they love.

BR

Red:

We already have Teamwork PM. When I switched over to it, in 2011, we thought "oh, boy the clients will love this! they can log in, see the tasks/milestones, leave messages on the messaging (email) system, upload files, etc." Right? EASY-PEASY, right?

Frack no. Within a year, we revised the entire system, so that now, it's all email all the time. We changed it so that the customers can simply send emails to the dedicated email address for the project, (e.g., "LovesSavageFury@messages.teamwork.com") and send files to the files section by the simple expedient of attaching them thereto (or use our dedicated WeTransfer account). Why?

Because they carried on like we stabbed them. "This is too complicated!" "oh, no, I can't deal with all those tabs, I don't know what to do!" (And on and on and on...). Believe me, we tried how-tos, videos...NOTHING worked.

We have PDF handouts, for everything. I have FAQs that could be published books in and of themselves. Online, in PDF format...canned replies...

God, I wish it had. But noooooooooooooooooooo.

Hitch