Software

I'm fuming at the moment: at a piece of software that I use on a regular basis in my work: they've changed their interfaces over the years, and had been thoughtful enough in the past to keep the old interface around for people like me: the old interface is less glitzy, but far more powerful than the new interface. However, when I installed the latest version on my 64 bit machine, I discovered that they have decided not to support the old interface on top level hardware.

So that had me fuming, and writing nast-e-mails to the software company.

Then (after more glitches over a week or two) I spent some time working last night, discovering bit after bit of useful information related to some stuff I've been doing: getting more and more excited about some interesting details that turned up, until, two hours later I realised that what I was seeing was impossible.

And so now I'm putting in bug reports (on a part of the software which was probably written twenty years ago -- fortunately I know the person who probably wrote that part of the code, so I have sent a bug report in that direction!) rather than working on something exciting. It's a very serious bug, albeit one that appears not to have appeared in the past twenty years --- I wonder how much it has happened and caused errors in people's research!


Yours, putting a bug in the company's ear,
N.