A Rap @hyatt Customer Service Request

It's 2am and the wireless is down
@Hyatt ... #pycon
That's why my face is wearing a frown
Even though I'm at ... #pycon

I love all these Canadians
And Montreal is cool
But don't you know how not to run a network
fool?

If I were a rapper
Then you'd have to call me Milton
Because frankly I get much better service
@Hilton

I'm a businessman myself
And I know we're hard to please
So kindly please allow me
To put you at your ease

Your people are delightful
And as helpful as the best
I want to help, not diss you
I'm not angry like the rest

The food is amazing
And the bar could be geek heaven
If only you weren't calling
For last orders at eleven

We're virtual and sleepless
So we need your help to live
And most of us are more than glad
To pay for what you give

But imagine you're away from home
And want to call your Mom
The Internet's our family
So you've just dropped a bomb

I've had my ups and downs with Hyatt
Over many years
But never felt before
That it should fall on other's ears

I run conferences, for Pete's sake
And I want to spend my money
If only I could reach someone
And I'm NOT being funny

PyCon is my baby
So I cherish it somewhat
But this has harshed my mellow
And just not helped a lot

We're bunch of simple geeks
Who get together every year
We aren't demanding, I don't think
Our simple needs are clear

I don't believe that I could run
Your enterprise right here
It's difficult, and operations
Aren't my thing I fear

So please, don't take this badly
But you've really disappointed
Which is why a kindly soul like me
Has made remarks so pointed

We will help you if we can
We know you pay a lot for bits
But I have to know if web sites
Are receiving any hits

You've cut me off, I'm blind
And so I hope there's nothing funky
Happening to my servers
While I'm sat here getting skunky

Enough, I've made my point
So I must stop before I'm rude
The Internet's my meat and drink
You've left me without food.

trying-to-help-while-disappointed-ly yr's  - steve

Help Files Should Help, Right?

Microsoft Documentation Sucks
God knows I've had my complaints about Microsoft documentation in the past. Often about manuals consisting mostly of descriptions of the following nature:

Threep Nardling
To nardle threeps, select the Threep tab and check the Nardling checkbox.

Frankly this kind of documentation is worse than useless - it elevates statement of the bleeding obvious to new heights, and frustrates all users with at least one eye and half a brain. If you don't know what a threep is, or when it might usefully be nardled, the implication is that you are in the wrong place (though quite where else you would be expected to go for this information escapes me).

Ubuntu/Gnome Documentation Sucks
That said, I hope I am setting myself up for a fall here. I've just installed a number of Ubuntu 8.04 virtuals (because I want to be compatible with a client environment, since you ask), and I have been having problems getting the network interfaces to behave. So I go to the help file for the GUI-based networking tool so kindly provided, and the main portion is filled with this sort of idiocy:

The really annoying piece is that I went to the help file to try and get an understanding of the roaming mode, only to discover that this steaming pile of placemarkers* masquerading as documentation contains zero mention of the one interface feature I needed to know about. They could at least have had a section saying "Check this box to put the interface into roaming mode".

I am really hoping that this documentation has improved a lot in the two versions of Ubuntu that have been released since 8.04. If not, then it's time somebody (either at the Gnome Foundation or at Canonical) started to give some serious attention to documentation. Help files that don't help are a major source of end-user frustration.

Somebody, please put me out of my misery and tell me that this nonsense is gone in more recent releases. Otherwise I might just have to go home and bang my head against the wall.

The Real Problem
All of this is merely subsidiary to the real issue, which is how to I get a VirtualBox Ubuntu guest running under a Windows Vista host to track changes in the Vista internet connectivity. It seems like every time I change locations I have to spend time tweaking settings on the virtuals, rebooting uselessly and generally poking things until I get them to work without any clear idea of the eventually successful strategy.

So, dear lazyweb, please help me. If there's a manual that explains this I'd be happy to make a donation to its author. The open source world should, in my less than humbe opinion, value good documentation as much as (or more than) good code. Once you get past the obvious, the docs help you more than the code.

* Admit it, you though I was going to write "dung" there, didn't you? I am trying to eschew the obvious.

United.com Fail Again

I really love this one. Forget that when I go to the main site my browser already knows how to fill the Mileage Plus number and the password in already. OK, so they are using another domain to try to get me to pay ($1,400+!) to upgrade to Premier status. This is just so wrong. Why can't I put fricking spaces or dashes in the account number if it helps me? Are they really so hard to ignore? Give me a break.

Don't people realize it's this kind of obtuseness (in the middle of a journey, under great stress) that makes people go berserk? Over ten years ago I wrote some web callback software for a small but customer friendly 'phone company (with a fabulous domain name). I asked them what they wanted to do about number validation, and they just said "Throw anything away that isn't a digit". Is it really that hard for large companies like United to understand?

The ironic thing is, United are trying to sell me access to their lounges. I am sitting in Atlanta airport, waiting to fly United, and I am in the Delta lounge, because Delta take the Priority Pass that I buy annually for around $300. On the way down from DC I upgraded to first class, one of the reasons being I had plenty of time at the airport and thought it would be nice to use the lounge. Foiled again: only United international first class passengers get to use the lounge. So all I get for my $79 is a little extra legroom on a 2-hour flight. On only one occasion in the last five years did a friendly United staffer grant me access to the lounge because I was traveling with them even though I didn't have the right card with me. I will love her for ever - she treated me like a human being.

I am left wondering why on earth I bother to be a United frequent flyer. It's not that I fly that often any more, and I know all airlines suck, but I can't help feeling that United have this inbuilt self-destructive ability to suck harder than anybody else while they think they are succeeding. No wonder Untied.com is going from strength to strength. I am convinced the United management never fly incognito as economy passengers. If they did, they would realize what a crappy airline they are running.

For the Want of a Nail

We've all done it. One step forward, two steps back. I just thought I'd try to relieve my current frustrations by writing this particular sequence up. It's amazing the diversions and byroads you can end up taking to achieve an apparently simple goal (as I learned yet again last week in trying to accommodate Outlook on my SMTP server). This one started at PyCon, now four weeks in the past. So, bear in mind the goal: submit a Django documentation change.

At the Django sprint (of which, due to a family illness, I was only able to attend a truncated first day) I was struggling with an unstable laptop, so I managed to assign myself a documentation ticket, and that turned out to be pretty much it what with PSF responsibilities and needing to go home early. I have been working on the ticket since: it isn't a difficult issue, but I needed to learn a little more about how the Django database layers worked.

Having finally decided on the required change, during entry in the Django tracker I decided it would be much more developer-friendly if I were to provide the change in the form of a patch. This isn't really necessary but I figured it couldn't hurt, and that I should really be able to rebuild the documentation locally to be sure that any future changes were stylistically correct and didn't mangle what is, after all, quite good documentation.

This is where things started to get a little rough. Descending into the documentation directory I discover that it's driven by a Makefile. "No problem", I think, "I have Cygwin, I can build under that". So I type "make html" and discover I don't have make installed. This is quite normal, I like to keep Cygwin fairly lean, and I haven't previously done any Cygwin building on the new laptop.

So, I run the usually very cooperative Cygwin installation utility, and discover that my usual mirror site is providing very slow response. So slow, in fact [minor pause here to repair cable retraction mechanism on traveling mouse: this really is not my day] that several attempts to update my installation have to be abandoned, though it notes that several of my other installed applications should also be upgraded and has even managed to pull down some of the installers.

Eventually the fifth or sixth attempt gives me the dread message from Vista (how I hate this operating system, yet despite my best efforts there are tasks I currently still need it for) that the Cygwin installer "is not working correctly".

After a reboot and several further repeats, I eventually track this down to a corrupted /etc/setup/openshh.lst.gz file, and delete it. I establish contact with a different mirror and lo! The Cygwin installer now runs to completion, and I can run make. So I confidently re-enter "make html" and see the message

make: sphinx-build: Command not found

Fair enough, it shouldn't (I foolishly think, despite all the evidence that should by now have convinced me to set the computer aside for the day) take me long to get that up. As a first stab, before doing anything else, I type "easy_install sphinx-build". Hello, another even more interesting error message:

bash: /c/Python25/Scripts/easy_install: Permission denied

What? ls -l gives me the following rather unsavory news:

----------+ 1 sholden None 6656 Apr 2 10:33 /c/Python25/Scripts/easy_install

Damn, that can't be right? How did that happen? Well by this time I am past caring how it happened. I own the file, so I'll just reassert the correct permission, right? Wrong:

$ chmod 755 /c/Python25/Scripts/easy_install chmod: changing permissions of `/c/Python25/Scripts/easy_install': Permission denied

Now this is getting really annoying. Note how my problem has subtly changed from "how do I submit a Django documentation change" to "how do I get Cygwin to allow me to change the permissions on this file", and that I am now several steps further away from my original goal than I appeared to be at that happy moment when I set out to submit the change. Note also the assumption that running easy_install is actually necessary to solve my problem. If this had turned out to be wrong I would probably have shot myself, thereby relieving you of the task of reading this post.

Fortunately I quickly realize that this is the easy_setup from my Windows Python that I am trying to run, and that the solution is to run ez_setup.py with my Cygwin Python. [There are some who doubt the wisdom of doing this to a Python installation, but I am blasé beyond belief about such things]. So I run ez_setup.py, which installs setuptools. There is the minor annoyance that Cygwin refuses to recognize the correct version of easy_install and continues to run the Windows copy, but I solve that by opening a new Cygwin terminal window. Another final false start: the package required isn't called sphinx-build, so easy_setup can't load it. So I take another reasonable guess.

Now, finally, I run easy_install sphinx followed by make html, and in less time than it take to write a blog entry I have a local copy of the documentation that I can patch to my heart's content. Wonderful things, computers. When they do what you want.