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What's happening over on CT?


JohnD

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1 hour ago, JohnD said:

Really? My Kindle Fire, and my Android phone have 'qwerty' keyboards.

 

Exactly they are both graphical keyboards, so the layout is entirely arbitrary, however convention alone dictated that software developers (who almost certainly were using a qwerty keyboard) went for for what they were used to.

 I have never looked but I'd be surprised if on the App Stores there aren't little apps that will allow you to configure your own keyboard layout. Even in the early days of Windows when Terminal Emulators were the main interface to proper computers, they had keyboard layout configurations so that they could be mapped to different physical language and regional keyboards (even US and UK keyboards are different) A good trick on April 1st used to be to get on someones PC, go to the keyboard configuration and jumble up the keys (or a few common ones next to each other) when the developer started typing he would find that random keys started producing the wrong result, and especially if you swap'd things like full stop and comma (next to each other) or flip the case on a key so they got a cap instead of lower, the better their typing skills (i.e. the less they had to look at the keyboard) the more frustrating they would find it, as it appeared that they were being clumsy, rather than there actually being anything wrong!  

Hey Ho good old days! went along with biggest keyboard malfunction being that they were full of fag ash and needed a good vacuum to get some of the keys working again! most of the software developers I worked with chain smoked!  I suspect its the lack of this that has made modern software so flaky and bug ridden, just lack of concentration from developers :biggrin:  

Alan

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At college, ALL the keyboards transpose the @ and " keys (Shift-apostrophe ansd Shift-2)

This I believe is the US standard, but keyboards are delivered with UK standard keys, and the IT department hasn't been arsed to change it.    When the @ is so ubiquitous in email addresses and I'm using " so often in quotes, it's a real b"gg@r.

 

Allegedly, the "qwerty" board was invented to allow slow mechanical keys on earlier typewriters to return from the paper, and not jam together., by ensuring that the commonly used letters in English were as widely separated as possible,     Those are "e t a o i n s r h l d c"  but as i and o, and a and s, are right next to each other ona qwerty, I don't belive a word of the legend, especially as for exactly the same reason, the left hand coloumn of the keyboard of a linotype tyepsetting machine reads “etaoin".

The second column reads "shrdlu" and some say that the frequent appearance of the mystical phrase "etaoin shrdlu" in newsprint has biased letter counts the world over.   Whatever, when you're a two fingered typist like me, it really doesn't matter.

John

Edited by JohnD
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Thats just a windows setting in the control panel that is wrong John, they just need to set the keyboard language to uk, by default microsoft sets everything to american and the timezone to baltimore, catches me out every time building PCs for clients, forget to change it.

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No doubt, mattius, and it shall undoubtedly be my new campaign objective to reset them all, but in the Library one is allocated at random to a PC every time you go there.     With over 50 such PCs in the Library and another several hundred around the campus that I might use from time to time, so I shall be Professor Emeritus before I get them all!  (I'm a student now!)

John

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So keyboards are here to stay? Wasn't voice-to-text promised a couple of decades ago. 

@Alan, yes  I do have a mobile thingy. Not sure it needs any Gs at all, and it speaks german when it comes on 'Wie geht es ihnen?'.

I haven't charged it for weeks, and it doesn't tell me when its empty. A quiet reminder 'Ich bin MT' would be useful.

So its not really much use, even in emergencies. It doesn't even work as a torch...now one that did that would be really useful.

Peter

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We used it in the past but voice to text is still not there, its not intuitive when you want to for instance correct text or goto a new line.

Problem is people are so used to keyboards, i can type faster than i can write these days  and bemusing to some people without even looking at the screen so i can multitask reading one document, writing another.

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22 hours ago, JohnD said:

At college, ALL the keyboards transpose the @ and " keys (Shift-apostrophe ansd Shift-2)

This I believe is the US standard, but keyboards are delivered with UK standard keys, and the IT department hasn't been arsed to change it.    When the @ is so ubiquitous in email addresses and I'm using " so often in quotes, it's a real b"gg@r.

 

Allegedly, the "qwerty" board was invented to allow slow mechanical keys on earlier typewriters to return from the paper, and not jam together., by ensuring that the commonly used letters in English were as widely separated as possible,     Those are "e t a o i n s r h l d c"  but as i and o, and a and s, are right next to each other ona qwerty, I don't belive a word of the legend, especially as for exactly the same reason, the left hand coloumn of the keyboard of a linotype tyepsetting machine reads “etaoin".

The second column reads "shrdlu" and some say that the frequent appearance of the mystical phrase "etaoin shrdlu" in newsprint has biased letter counts the world over.   Whatever, when you're a two fingered typist like me, it really doesn't matter.

John

Your old mate Emile Mercier liked "shrudlu" omn the linotype machine, often used it in his cartoons:

 

shrudlu.jpg

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Thought I'd give the old CT one more try, and found a reply to a popst that I thought hadn't arrived!     

I am told, and it's true, you get onto the post-a-message box by clicking on "File" then "New Documemt"!     So simple that no one on the that board thought to tell anyone.

It's still not easy to scan the board, see what's been happening.

John

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John, you just have to do "something" to get a cursor to appear. Clicking on the "p" bottom left of the box will do it, and saves a click or 2.

I have no idea why a cursor just doesn't appear. 

And I know what you mean about scanning the board About 50 subsections.....

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It varies...... sometimes just clicking in the box brings up the cursor.  Sometimes I have to click P.  Sometimes neither does anything. 

Reading the comments of others it's also clear that different people see different things and get different responses to their actions.

I have managed to post pics.  I haven't managed to copy any text to it.

Earlier, I found that if you end up in a position where you are only in the cars section (can't remember how I got there now, it was by mistake!) It is even more subdivided......  I left at that point.....

 

Nick

 

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I'm not a CT member, so I don't have any skin in the game.  I'd join, but they insist that I have to pay double the UK membership rate, so they can slow boat a paper based magazine  around the world to me throughout the year.  

I've always liked and appreciated the forum, it's been a huge help, if a little twee and mumsy.  As a free user, I appreciated what they had.

My guess is that someone (or ones) in power decided that the forum wasn't a "proper website that reflects the club", just a mere forum, and that "we need to update it so it has more information about the club, and we have more control".  I've seen that exact circumstance play out before, and like now, a hugely useful and informative entity goes into the weeds so that a bright shiny "Website that does everything" goes up.  Traffic goes down, the user interface in unworkable, navigation is impossible, and the constraints of the backend slowly strangle the site.

Eventually the "forum"part of the new website dies.  Those in power notice the drop off of traffic, and point out that the forum section is a drag on the website, anyway "Everybody uses facepage for that sort of thing these days, don't you see", so they entirely drop the forum, and put up a pretty, bright and shiny new website that does nothing at all.

The work of thousands of people simply disappears.

As it stands, CT is just woeful.  I can't login, and attempts to recover my password don't work.  The layout is completely shithouse, it so unintuitive its not funny.  Every old link is dead, and there's zero re-direction in place.  Club Triumph may proudly not pay staff, but sometimes you have to get professionals to do tricky things.  I feel for the volunteers who've put this new site in place, they've obviously tried hard, but no matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, it's still going to smell like pigshit.

Vale club.triump.org.uk

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Gosh!   As Sir John Major said recently, and transparently untruthfully, that he took no pleasure in pointing out the short comings of the present Gov's Brexit antics, I take no pleasure in being in the same camp as the Honourable Member for IT, Craig.   Long may Sideways benefit from his expertise.

John

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Facebook is the future!

Uh, no, try and google something off Faceache.

So many clubs don't grasp the fundamental difference between vertical and horizontal sites..

 

As regards CT, almost everything on Google is 404'd.

if they don't quickly pull a rabbit out of the bag, they'll completely fall out of the search results.

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5 hours ago, GT6MK3 said:

The work of thousands of people simply disappears.

 

100%!

Its simply astonishing how many decades and peoples worth of Triumph knowledge and expertise has simply been deleted by short sighted club officials over the last handful of years.

We can't get it back, its gone, and they don't seem to care. :unsure:

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  • 8 months later...
On 3/1/2018 at 7:04 PM, GT6MK3 said:

I'm not a CT member, so I don't have any skin in the game.  I'd join, but they insist that I have to pay double the UK membership rate, so they can slow boat a paper based magazine  around the world to me throughout the year.  

I've always liked and appreciated the forum, it's been a huge help, if a little twee and mumsy.  As a free user, I appreciated what they had.

My guess is that someone (or ones) in power decided that the forum wasn't a "proper website that reflects the club", just a mere forum, and that "we need to update it so it has more information about the club, and we have more control".  I've seen that exact circumstance play out before, and like now, a hugely useful and informative entity goes into the weeds so that a bright shiny "Website that does everything" goes up.  Traffic goes down, the user interface in unworkable, navigation is impossible, and the constraints of the backend slowly strangle the site.

Eventually the "forum"part of the new website dies.  Those in power notice the drop off of traffic, and point out that the forum section is a drag on the website, anyway "Everybody uses facepage for that sort of thing these days, don't you see", so they entirely drop the forum, and put up a pretty, bright and shiny new website that does nothing at all.

The work of thousands of people simply disappears.

As it stands, CT is just woeful.  I can't login, and attempts to recover my password don't work.  The layout is completely shithouse, it so unintuitive its not funny.  Every old link is dead, and there's zero re-direction in place.  Club Triumph may proudly not pay staff, but sometimes you have to get professionals to do tricky things.  I feel for the volunteers who've put this new site in place, they've obviously tried hard, but no matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, it's still going to smell like pigshit.

Vale club.triump.org.uk

Club Triumph sent me a membership renewal note recently. I replied saying that as an overseas member the Club’s most important component was the forum and its accumulated knowledge and experience, and that in its current state it wasn’t useable, and that I wouldn’t be renewing my membership. Tony Pulis did reply! His answer, though, was pretty much what Craig said...

Dear Nick,

Thank you for your email.

The Committee are aware of the issues with the new Forum and are looking at various aspects of the website, however this is not going to change overnight. I have forwarded on your email to the guys who look after the site so they are aware of your comments... The world is forever evolving and we are trying to cater for old and new members. We stared a Club Triumph Facebook page a couple of years ago and it has taken off recently in a massive way and a lot of people now use it as a forum. We can't stop it but can only continue the run Forum along side it.

The Club is committed to running the Forum in one shape or another and we need to improve the new one. I will let you know the outcome of this subject after the meeting.

Regards, Tony Pulis”

So yeah, they’re trying, the forum is a part of the larger website and Facebook is elbowing its way onto centre stage. I haven’t heard anything since. 

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