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Thursday, 4 March 2004  |  aseigo

ah... finally in my new house and it's feeling good... now to start putting the wraps on various bits of code i have laying around ... committed small things to kjots and kcm_kicker the last two days, and have bigger chunks of kscd, kicker, TOM and systray patches awaiting my attentions. i also have that bookmark code lypie's been patiently waiting for me to commit. =)

in other news, i finally read that piece by [link:http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html]ESR about CUPS[/link] that i keep seeing referred to hither and yon. the poor abused users just love it when a luminary says that it's the software's fault, not theirs ;-) ESR's piece was right, to a point. i did find some funny things in it though.

"GUI tools and voluminous manuals are not enough." he says. then he goes on to bitch about them and prescribe we need better GUIs and manuals. i think he meant to say, "Crappy GUIs and incomplete manuals are not good enough." i understand his frustration, but really, he ought to use KDE's printer dialogs. they are a lot easier and more accurately documented than the tripe he evidently felt compelled to use. they aren't perfect, but i don't feel sorry for his plight when he purposefully chose to use poor software. even Aunt Tilly would tell him that a craftsman choses his tools carefully and with quality in mind.

ESR says that it isn't the fault of one software project (CUPS) or one OS vendor (Red Hat), but this is false. he says other software products get it right (MS to some extent, Mac more so), which means that Red Hat (in this case) got it wrong. but there are Linux software projects that get it More Right(tm) than Red Hat, and there are Open Source software projects that do care about usability and prove it with actions. i too could bitch about how hard Blackbox is to use for Aunt Tilly, but i realize that Blackbox isn't for Aunt Tilly.

i mean, on the one hand i totally empathize and agree with ESR. on the other hand i think he kind of missed the point and ignored his options.

that said, the kprinter wizard really needs to be able to get the printer type from the CUPS server when a remote CUPS server is selected.

luv and hugs, ajs