[mythtv-users] manual scheduling -> "no upcoming recordings"

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

    Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2005 22:43:55 -0500
    From: Isaac Richards <ijr at case.edu>

    On Friday 04 November 2005 10:21 pm, f-myth-users at media.mit.edu wrote:
    >     Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2005 22:06:32 -0500
    >     From: Isaac Richards <ijr at case.edu>
    >
    >     You got 'burned' because you didn't even _look_ at the capture card
    > list after setting up any of your cards.  All the device paths that have
    > been setup are on that list.  They're also in the input connections list. 
    > You didn't notice, is all.
    >
    > I -did- look.  I failed to notice what was going on, especially since
    > there are lots of 0's that are correct---just not those /dev/video0's.

    There's nothing on that page besides the pathnames + device types.  Slightly 
    difficult to miss.

Yet apparently I did.  People miss things sometimes, especially when
they're new to a task, or when they're tired, or when they've had to
do the same damned thing over and over again and might not be paying
100% attention, or when there are confounding influences (such as
other things that were -supposed- to all have 0 on the end).  All of
these were certainly true of me.  Having that cause a giant waterfall
of peculiar bugs and a reinstall or two seems a rather extreme payback.

    > As I've said before, you're too close to realize that there's a whole
    > lot of information whizzing by in this interface, and that -you-, as an
    > expert, know exactly where to direct your attention to avoid problems.
    > On the other hand, I, as nonexpert, did not.

    Then why are you still arguing, if you think my opinion's not valid?

Because I'm trying to convince you!  Isn't that what an argument is
-for-?  [Okay, I admit, sometimes it's because you decided that
getting-hit-on-the-head lessons were a stupid concept.]

If I thought your opinion on WHAT A NEW USER EXPERIENCES -was- valid,
I'd have shut up long ago.  But not only are you a long way from that,
you're the exact opposite---you -wrote- the very thing we're arguing
about!  How much farther away from (a) new user and (b) objectivity
could you possibly -get-?

(You know, there's a reason why they typically make the usability
people and the programmers be -different people-.  It's the same
reason you don't let the bankers audit themselves.  Plus, of course,
there are different skillsets there, and mountains of research have
shown that the typical coder is awful at figuring out what confuses
users.)

    >     Ok, I'll dare.  In some cases (if you wanted to setup the analog + hd
    > parts of a hdX000, which doesn't quite work right yet), duplicate paths
    > could be right.  I see no reason to disallow this.
    >
    > Okay, then do you see no reason to have it put up a big fat warning
    > saying, "You're probably doing the wrong thing!  Are you sure?"  That
    > was my original suggestion, if you'll recall.  That -one- check would
    > have saved me a week of work, and (as it turns out) the list several
    > 10's of K of messages talking about the whole thing.

    I don't recall your original suggestion.  It was buried in a 10kb email that 
    could have been stated in 2 sentences.  I stopped reading after the first 
    couple pages.

Well, that's part of the problem, then.

There is a -giant- list of problems in the interface just below
paragraph 5.  They're extremely specific.  There are 10 of them.
Each of them could be translated to a handful of lines of code.
I guess you just didn't see any of them, and have been arguing
in total ignorance of my point ever since the first post.  Charming.

[Then there's a list of 6 problems with the way forms work in general
in this interface, right below that.  I guess you didn't read those,
either.]

    > So far, though, you say that (in some future situation which doesn't
    > even work yet) this should be allowed.  Meanwhile, people right now
    > have been screwed by the current situation.  Seems to me that you
    > should make the common mistake difficult, at the risk of making the
    > unlikely future action require one additional keystroke.

    This is the very first time I've ever heard of someone assigning multiple 
    capture cards in the setup program to the same physical device.

newbury at mandamus.org sent mail to the list just this evening saying
that he had the identical problem of recordings not taking place,
and that he suspected it was because he, too, had screwed up the
/dev/videoN assignments and was probably going to have to reinstall
to recover.  So that's two just today.

Maybe we should have a show of hands?

I'm sure part of this is because multiple-tuner setups are less common
than single tuners, of course.  It could also be because people just
assumed, "Oh, I guess I was dumb" and reinstalled (or maybe just fixed
it in setup, if it didn't cause other problems later like what Newbury
and I have been seeing), but didn't send mail saying, "I was dumb in a
way the computer could have prevented"---which was the point of my mail.

    The "common" error at that stage of setup is assigning the wrong type of card.  
    Lots of people say their ivtv card is using the bttv drivers.

Huh?  Are we even talking about the same screen?  The screen I'm
talking about has a choice labelled "Card type" with a bunch of
different hardware cards.  It doesn't mention "bttv" anywhere.
[Perhaps one of the card types---maybe the default "Standard V4L
capture card" (whatever -that- is) uses bttv?  I'm not sure.]

But regardless:  Is there any way the interface can make -that- error
harder, too?  Since I don't understand the error, I can't suggest any
alternatives.  Presumably, if ivtv is already installed, it's already
scanned the cards; maybe the interface can ask it somehow?

    I believe you started off this thread by this:

    "How could this happen?  Because mythtv-setup is the absolute -mother-
    of all usability screwups."  and you continued in that vein.

    Considering that I *wrote* much of mythtv-setup, do you think that that's any 
    way to make me think you're _not_ just your standard slashdot troll?

-Now- it all becomes abundantly clear.

Let's notice how these interactions have been going, in every single
message up to about an hour ago:
o  I critiqued the -code-.
o  You critiqued -me-.

See the difference?

When I made that comment, and indeed until about halfway through
today, I didn't have any particular reason to think you were a
developer.  I didn't know you had any hand in mythtv-setup until this
very message.  I don't spend my time looking up who wrote what---the
important thing is whether code -works-, not who wrote it.

But apparently you view any critique of your -code- as a critique of
-you-.  If someone says, "This piece of code is buggy and needlessly
cost me a lot of time," you apparently don't say, "Oh no!  How can I
make it better?"  Instead, you attack the messenger, calling them
stupid for even bringing up the subject.

With an attitude like that, is it any -wonder- that people are afraid
to criticize the code in public?

For example, one person wrote to me just this evening saying (and I'm
paraphrasing  here, because this person did NOT want the subject
brought up yet again), "I had this other usability problem involving
[CENSORED] and there was discussion about a simple way to fix it, but
the impression I was left with was that those who could change it
wouldn't 'cause they knew what it meant, and it was my job as a user
to put up with it."  That's not a happy thing to hear.

Okay, so here in this message, I am not critiquing the code, by the
way:  I am critiquing -you-.  And I'm saying that your defensive and
overly-personal responses to people complaining about usability issues
is unwarranted and directly hurting MythTV itself.  Your inability to
separate a critique of your work from a critique of you personally
would get you ejected from any writers' workshop I've ever been
associated with in about half an hour---the other members would
realize that feedback on your work was not helping you, and would
decide that their time was better spent elsewhere.

    > 								  Learn how to
    >     reply to emails properly - your quoting is horrendous.
    >
    > Please explain.

    That's funny.  Look at your emails in the pipermail archives.  Can you tell 
    who wrote what?  It's rather difficult.  Hell, just look at the completely 
    random amount of indentation you've put in this reply.

My quoting is standard Emacs RMAIL quoting style.  But wait!
That's right!  You hate Emacs!

As for the random indentation, I presume you're talking about, e.g.,
the line of yours immediately below?  That's because I'm breaking
lines at sentence boundaries (C-M-O in Emacs-speak) when I'm replying
to subpoints in a paragraph.  Since I'm not reading the mail out of
the archive, but instead out of a text buffer, it wasn't obvious to me
that this was causing any difficulty at all.  It's just standard
practice on the majority of mailing lists I'm on, and has been since,
let's see...  about 1978.  Sure, Usenet popularized the ">" style of
message quoting, but I guess I'm a stick in the mud.  Sorry.  I tend
to emphasize readability of the message as a message more than its
readability in an archive whose behavior I can't control and which
tends to differ from archive to archive.  But I didn't do it to cause
you grief.

So I guess to make the archives pretty, I need to insert >'s in front
of the two lines below?  That's my guess, anyway:

    >                                                         You reset the subject 
    > line every email, too.

I haven't touched it.  Unless you're talking about my MTA's automatic
suppression of "Re:", which was typically required because too many
dumb Unix-based mailers would tack on "Re: Re: Re:" forever.  But
since the messages should be threaded my Message-ID:, not by Subject;,
this shouldn't matter---unless the pipermail archives don't use
Message-ID:.  (I haven't checked.)

    > 							    Learn how to state a
    >     problem _succinctly_.  Do that, and everybody'll get along just fine.
    >
    > The succint statements got flamey responses.

    The 'flamey' statements got 'flamey' responses.  The long ones didn't get any, 
    because I, at least, didn't bother to read them.

That's a pity.  The long ones had all the technical content.