Every so often one has to take the plunge and get a new computer. The old one quits, or else becomes sufficiently outdated as to be troublesome. Over the summer, my Lenovo X61, while generally functional, experienced 1) ever-full hard drive; 2) pen permanently stuck in the pen garage; 3) non-revivable battery. None of these things individually was a reason to buy a new laptop, but I had to ask myself how much longer a three-year-old laptop would work and thus whether it made sense to buy new things for it. At first I hesitated, as it seemed there were no tablet-convertibles on the market that offered the combination of features I wanted (large screen, large hard drive, swappable bay for second hard drive), but then I noticed that Fujitsu (maker of my first two or three laptops) had all of that. So I decided that I might as well get the whole project over with and have the new machine ready to go before school started.
While a large screen was one of my major desires--the small screen on the Lenovo has been the bane of my working life as Photoshop (among other things) is hard to use on it--I discovered that Fujitsu's TH700 had everything else I wanted at such an affordable price that I could get a big separate flat-screen monitor to use for Photoshop and watching movies. That seemed reasonable enough. I may use Photoshop a fair amount, but I don't have to do that kind of thing everywhere I take my laptop. It will be rather exciting to have a 27" screen (I bought a highly regarded model from Dell and it has arrived but I have not had time to do more than unpack it).
A friend with a Mac tells me it's a no-brainer to get everything from one Mac to another, and if so that's one of the few reasons I'd consider switching to Macintosh, because it always takes me days or weeks to get things properly set up on a new computer (mine, that is--I can do this for my parents in a day or two since they use few programs and have few files). I'm not sure how much of the time-sink is the searching out all those files and copying them, and how much is making decisions about reorganizing the material. Merely installing the programs I use takes hours and hours each time.
This installation process is exacerbated by changes in operating system. Once the new laptop arrived, I had to deal with Windows 7 and a 64-bit environment. This is taking some getting used to. At least two of my programs, neither of which I plan to abandon, don't yet work in 64-bit as they are complex and made by small companies that don't have huge squads of programmers. I had to upgrade Windows 7 Home Premium to a fancier flavor so that I could install XP Mode and thus install the said programs. I am still rather inclined to use these programs on the old laptop until the 64-bit compatible versions come out, which I gather should be relatively soon. There's also the matter of how many more times I can "activate" various programs that I've had for awhile, and suchlike.
For now, however, as I have most of what I need set up on the new machine, I may as well compare the two a bit.
Screens: Both have a 12" screen. The Lenovo has a 1024 x 768 resolution, however, while the Fujitsu has 1280 x 800. In other words, the shape is different, with the Fujitsu going more in the wide-screen direction. I don't know how I'll react to that, as wide-screen isn't desirable for most of what I do. The screen quality on the Fujitsu seems better, but I may need to see if I can calibrate the color, as photos that looked good on the Lenovo sometimes look gray-blue on the Fujitsu. This is not something I really want to deal with. Overall, I haven't spent enough time working on the Fujitsu to know how the screen interacts with my programs and tasks.
Keyboards: The Lenovo is the only laptop I ever felt had an uncomfortably small keyboard. I don't expect to have that complaint with the Fujitsu, which is an inch wider. I also detested the fact that the Lenovo keyboard placed special keys, intended to move you through web pages, RIGHT NEXT TO the arrow keys. I don't want to think how many times I hit those damned web keys instead of an arrow key and lost whatever I was typing on a web page. I wasn't opposed to the concept of the web keys (although I never used them), but the placement was terrible. Fortunately I won't have that problem with the Fujitsu. On the other hand, I regret to say that the Fujitsu keyboard also has some odd choices. It has the PageUp and PageDown keys in those locations, which I'm not sure I like as well as the Lenovo's location of these. I may not have any problem getting used to the switch, but more problematic is the fact that these two keys are also the Home and End keys, if you use them with the Function key. I use Home and End constantly when selecting text (or so it seems), and
I really dislike the cumbersomeness of depressing Shift, Function, and Home or End. And speaking of the Function key, the Fujitsu places it where I expect (from the Lenovo, but perhaps also from other computers) to find Ctrl. I keep hitting Function when I want Ctrl, which occasionally has bizarre results. (I will say I like how Lenovo puts everything requiring the Function key in blue.) However, if we speak of Function Keys in the plural (those F1-12 keys that were once so easy to touch-type back in the days when keyboards had them to the left!), I'm relieved to find that the Fujitsu, like most computers, aligns them pretty closely to the corresponding numeric keys. This means I'll be able to almost touch-type them. The Lenovo has F2 starting to the left of 1, so that F8 and F9 are above 7. This meant it was really hellish trying to use these keys, and believe me, I do use them. In some programs I use them A LOT. It causes me pain to watch students and conference presenters laboriously mousing through loads of menus to do things that can be accomplished by pressing (for example) F5.
Touchpads etc: The Lenovo has one of those pencil-eraser-shaped things for cursor movement. While better than a mouse, I didn't like it, as constant use was tiring. The clicker buttons were satisfactory. Thus, I was pleased to get a touchpad with the Fujitsu, although I still regret that Fujitsu phased out its earlier disk-shaped input devices, which were a very comfortable way of moving the cursor. But alas, I'm not sure I'm crazy about this touchpad. In combination with Windows 7, all kinds of weird things happen when it thinks I've gotten too close to it. I've already disabled some special function or other on the left side of the touchpad because my left hand was eternally setting it off. I may need to shut off a lot more things in order to make the touchpad truly usable rather than a weapon of unpredictable disaster. I'm also not crazy about the clicker buttons, which are too hard to find by touch for some reason. I'm always clicking on the edge of the laptop instead, I suppose because it is actually higher than the buttons and I expect the buttons to be what sticks up.
Operating System: I was really entirely content with XP. It was very stable and easy to use; I don't even remember there being much of a learning curve after Windows 98. So, especially after finding Vista a pain when working with my parents' computer, I was not eager to switch to Windows 7 despite hearing that it is considered quite satisfactory. Still, I was curious to see what it could do that I might like. At this point I'm not sure, because on the one hand I was dealing with its quirks most when installing new software, and on the other hand there are a lot of things that may be Windows 7 but on the other hand may be the Fujitsu's touch screen or touchpad instead. I get A LOT of unpredictable weird stuff happening, particularly in terms of things resizing in unwanted ways. Things would gigantify for no apparent reason, so that everything in the browser window with Gmail would be blown up too large to read--even if I closed and reopened the browser, or the desktop icons would bloat so that only about four would fit on the screen, or windows would leap to take over the screen when I wanted them to fill about a quarter of the screen. I was finally able to shut off the Windows 7 feature responsible for some of this mayhem, but it wasn't easy, and as I say that only shut off SOME of it. Also, the Windows Explorer windows are tricky to use. I was used to opening a folder and not having to see the whole directory structure over to the left--well, it's not a big deal to see it, but it takes up space. More to the point, when I'm moving files or folders, I have to be much more careful than ever before. Things really seem to want to go into the wrong place, or something I didn't intend to open suddenly becomes the open folder instead of the one I had very intentionally opened. I don't know if this is the fault of Windows 7 or of the Fujitsu.
Overall shape and contours: Much prefer the Fujitsu. The Lenovo has square corners, which I wouldn't mind except that they invariably caught in my sleeve. One of the first things I ever did after getting the Lenovo was to flip it onto the floor because I hadn't yet learned to move my arms very sedately around it to avoid catching the corners in my sleeves. I found that a very bizarre problem to have. It was partly because the Lenovo is very thin without its base. Let's just say it speaks well to the Lenovo's durability that it survived multiple tosses to the floor. Since the Fujitsu has round corners and a thicker bottom (to accommodate the swappable bay), chances of it catching in my sleeve and going flying are pretty small. Yes, it weighs more, and that's not a plus for portability, but it doesn't weigh all that much more, and I really like swappable bays. So much better than the separate base that I stupidly bought for the Lenovo instead of a plug-in DVD drive. The swappable bay means I can have a second hard drive in most of the time and swap in the DVD drive only as needed, which is rarely.
But enough of all this, classes begin in a week and my syllabi are not yet finished.
Showing posts with label computing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computing. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Online Catalogs and their Peculiarities
A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at problems in online library catalog databases and some efforts to fix them.
This is a topic of ongoing interest to me, but I can't say I think the article addresses the problem with sufficient depth, and the comments on the article suggest that I am not alone in thinking so.
We're presented with a specific case: a grad student gets poor and frustrating results when using University of Virginia's Virgo catalog. We aren't told what the Virgo search options are or where in the interface the student typed "Thomas Jefferson." We are told, however, that new and better software is taking over.
I haven't used Virgo, so I don't know how it's set up. But I've used Melvyl, Gladis, PittCat, PittCat+, Library of Congress, WorldCat (and is this or is this not the same as OCLC?), and various other library databases in the US, the Czech Republic, and Great Britain. I'm not a librarian and I don't consider myself an expert on library software, but we could say I have some experience in using and getting used to different catalogs.
In most catalog software I've used, the user chooses whether to put "Thomas Jefferson" into search fields such as author, title, or keyword. This is usually but not always pretty effective. Things aren't always properly catalogued. For instance, when I returned from the Czech Republic, I spent a lot of time looking for materials at UC Berkeley--generally books for which I had full bibliographic data. I was surprised to discover that often the library didn't appear to have a book when I searched by title, but that an author search would bring the book right up. I think the reverse was also true, and that sometimes it was more productive to locate Berkeley books using Melvyl, even though I'd normally Melvyl to see if any library in the UC system (within easy driving distance) had a book.
Some of the new catalog software, however, has you just type in "Thomas Jefferson" without specifying whether you want books by him, about him, with his name mentioned in the keywords, or with his name in some other random location. University of Pittsburgh's new PittCat+ does this, forcing the searcher to spend absurd amounts of time winnowing down the categories to find him as a subject. When I first saw PittCat+, I thought I would like it because it does allow you to narrow the search in ways that I had seen on OCLC, but I rapidly concluded that since you can't start with a focused search as in PittCat "Classic", PittCat+ simply wastes the user's time. This was a complaint I heard repeatedly from librarians and faculty. We learned rapidly that PittCat "Classic," with all its faults, was way quicker and easier to use than its replacement.
I've heard people argue that Google-style searching is the new direction for library catalogs, and I've heard people decry it. Well, surely it should be possible to have both Google-style searching (useful for fairly obscure things) and more focused initial searches. After all, if you want books about Thomas Jefferson, the problem is more likely to be how to narrow down the search, since there must be a plethora of books dealing with various aspects of Jefferson--biographies, histories, political studies, works on plantations and slavery, etc.
One of the people to comment on the Chronicle article argued that what we really need is a return to Library of Congress headings. He or she apparently taught these headings for years and imagines that they are easily learned. I beg to differ. I wouldn't say Library of Congress headings are useless, but back in the early days of online catalogs, I tried searching with them, since in those days UC Berkeley's online catalog used them (maybe it still does, in some hidden place). I'd dig around in the big red books, trying to figure out where in the hierarchy my topic might be. I understood the concept of hierarchy, but--not having taken the commenter's class--I found it impossible to guess which aspect of a topic might be higher on the hierarchy. If I had wanted to look for Czech art, for example, I would have been uncertain whether Czech, Czechoslovakia (this was before the Czech Republic existed), or art would start the string. Fortunately Boolean searches pretty much wiped out that problem. Not that Boolean searches are always simple, but the basics of Boolean searching are easy. Czech and art, or Czechoslovakia and art.
I haven't yet familiarized myself with the catalog here, but I've already had one disturbing experience with it. I wanted to put a volume of the commonly used anthology Art in Theory on reserve for one of my classes. I searched for the title Art in Theory and was shocked to find that apparently the library didn't own any of the three volumes. I therefore (after scanning the pages needed and posting them online) requested that the library order the series. To my great surprise, yesterday I got an email saying that we do actually own the volume in question (apparently not the other two) and that it has been put on reserve for my class. Well, I'd like to know where this book was hiding in the catalog.
This is a topic of ongoing interest to me, but I can't say I think the article addresses the problem with sufficient depth, and the comments on the article suggest that I am not alone in thinking so.
We're presented with a specific case: a grad student gets poor and frustrating results when using University of Virginia's Virgo catalog. We aren't told what the Virgo search options are or where in the interface the student typed "Thomas Jefferson." We are told, however, that new and better software is taking over.
I haven't used Virgo, so I don't know how it's set up. But I've used Melvyl, Gladis, PittCat, PittCat+, Library of Congress, WorldCat (and is this or is this not the same as OCLC?), and various other library databases in the US, the Czech Republic, and Great Britain. I'm not a librarian and I don't consider myself an expert on library software, but we could say I have some experience in using and getting used to different catalogs.
In most catalog software I've used, the user chooses whether to put "Thomas Jefferson" into search fields such as author, title, or keyword. This is usually but not always pretty effective. Things aren't always properly catalogued. For instance, when I returned from the Czech Republic, I spent a lot of time looking for materials at UC Berkeley--generally books for which I had full bibliographic data. I was surprised to discover that often the library didn't appear to have a book when I searched by title, but that an author search would bring the book right up. I think the reverse was also true, and that sometimes it was more productive to locate Berkeley books using Melvyl, even though I'd normally Melvyl to see if any library in the UC system (within easy driving distance) had a book.
Some of the new catalog software, however, has you just type in "Thomas Jefferson" without specifying whether you want books by him, about him, with his name mentioned in the keywords, or with his name in some other random location. University of Pittsburgh's new PittCat+ does this, forcing the searcher to spend absurd amounts of time winnowing down the categories to find him as a subject. When I first saw PittCat+, I thought I would like it because it does allow you to narrow the search in ways that I had seen on OCLC, but I rapidly concluded that since you can't start with a focused search as in PittCat "Classic", PittCat+ simply wastes the user's time. This was a complaint I heard repeatedly from librarians and faculty. We learned rapidly that PittCat "Classic," with all its faults, was way quicker and easier to use than its replacement.
I've heard people argue that Google-style searching is the new direction for library catalogs, and I've heard people decry it. Well, surely it should be possible to have both Google-style searching (useful for fairly obscure things) and more focused initial searches. After all, if you want books about Thomas Jefferson, the problem is more likely to be how to narrow down the search, since there must be a plethora of books dealing with various aspects of Jefferson--biographies, histories, political studies, works on plantations and slavery, etc.
One of the people to comment on the Chronicle article argued that what we really need is a return to Library of Congress headings. He or she apparently taught these headings for years and imagines that they are easily learned. I beg to differ. I wouldn't say Library of Congress headings are useless, but back in the early days of online catalogs, I tried searching with them, since in those days UC Berkeley's online catalog used them (maybe it still does, in some hidden place). I'd dig around in the big red books, trying to figure out where in the hierarchy my topic might be. I understood the concept of hierarchy, but--not having taken the commenter's class--I found it impossible to guess which aspect of a topic might be higher on the hierarchy. If I had wanted to look for Czech art, for example, I would have been uncertain whether Czech, Czechoslovakia (this was before the Czech Republic existed), or art would start the string. Fortunately Boolean searches pretty much wiped out that problem. Not that Boolean searches are always simple, but the basics of Boolean searching are easy. Czech and art, or Czechoslovakia and art.
I haven't yet familiarized myself with the catalog here, but I've already had one disturbing experience with it. I wanted to put a volume of the commonly used anthology Art in Theory on reserve for one of my classes. I searched for the title Art in Theory and was shocked to find that apparently the library didn't own any of the three volumes. I therefore (after scanning the pages needed and posting them online) requested that the library order the series. To my great surprise, yesterday I got an email saying that we do actually own the volume in question (apparently not the other two) and that it has been put on reserve for my class. Well, I'd like to know where this book was hiding in the catalog.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
I Hate Things Not Working Properly
Since I won't have usable internet at home for awhile, there won't be much appearing here for at least a few more days, or so I imagine. Technically there is internet... DSL flows through the phone line... but for some reason the modem I had gotten from Verizon refuses to let AT&T's bandwidth get through to the browser. Why this should be is a great mystery to me. I consider myself fairly competent with computers--after all, I use lots of different programs, I install new parts from time to time, and I can troubleshoot a fair number of things. But this doesn't make me an expert on anything in particular. How the Verizon modem can tell that the bandwidth flowing through it isn't Verizon's, I really don't know. The computer recognizes that it's getting a signal, but it's unable to make any use whatsoever of it.
So I await a new modem. I hope it won't only work with AT&T, since there's no guarantee I'll stay in AT&T territory for long.
For variety, I offer a photo of my front porch. Or is that my side porch? Let's just call it the veranda I share with the front tenant.
So I await a new modem. I hope it won't only work with AT&T, since there's no guarantee I'll stay in AT&T territory for long.
For variety, I offer a photo of my front porch. Or is that my side porch? Let's just call it the veranda I share with the front tenant.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Academic Discussions
An article in today's online Chronicle of Higher Education asks whether academic e-mail lists, notably those hosted by H-Net, are moribund. Some scholars claim that blogs, Facebook, and Twitter are taking their place.
As a scholar who's used all of these except Twitter (and I'm not a stranger to Twitter, I just don't use it), my reaction was that this was ridiculous. Why?
Blogs, due to the flexibility of the form, have an important place (or should) in the scholarly world. Individuals and groups blog on a wide variety of topics. On the other hand, I think few people really want to keep track of more than about ten active blogs. Sure, you can read your blogs via a feed, but the more blogs you track, the less likely you are to notice that any individual blog has a new post. The feed doesn't show the discussion that a post has prompted, either.
Facebook is good for keeping track of friends, and some academic exchange does take place, but the scholarly is easily lost amid the more social material. More significantly, to post something of any length on Facebook, you have to put it in a Note, and comments of any significant length have to go in other Notes because the comment field only allows a certain number of characters (I'm not sure how many, but it's not a lot). Besides, while you can group your contacts within Facebook, there isn't really any good way of separating academe from everything else. I know there are some ways around this--one person I know has a Facebook identity for use with friends and a separate one for use with students, but since many of his friends are also colleagues, I think many of the links get posted in both places.
Twitter seems particularly unsuited to take over. With a 140-character limit to each Twitter message, that's a medium with severe limitations. You can broadcast your headline news with it, but how much humanities discussion is something you want to read in capsule form?
Thus, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter all have their uses, but their uses are rather different from the uses of listservs. I think I subscribe to about six academic lists, plus a shifting number of lists relating to software and other topics, which can get me up to something like twenty simultaneous lists at times. Obviously I don't read all of these messages, and I certainly don't read them all right when they arrive. But there they are, I've got them, and the ones I don't delete are categorizable and searchable. In one of those moments of semi-brain-deadness, I can go through a batch of art history or Slavic emails and see what's happening.
This, however, gets to one of the other points made in the Chronicle piece. While listservs are great for disseminating conference announcements, job postings, and book reviews, their use as a means of actual discussion has dwindled.
The amount of discussion depends on the list, though, and this has a lot to do with the number of subscribers. Too few subscribers, and the list has nothing to say; too many, and it gets noisy until people either unsubscribe or turn it into an announcement-only list. H-ArtHist has no discussion that I can see, just announcements, most of which are of no particular interest to me. This is not surprising, considering the list tries to cover the entire field, internationally. The likelihood of my hopping on a plane at the last minute to attend tomorrow's German symposium on (I'm making this up) dog iconography in 15th century Japan is pretty small. But other lists do have discussion, particularly about books people have read or want to read. H-HistSex has pretty good discussion (as it ought to!) and often H-Women does as well. Not endless discussion, but readable.
I'm not sure how the question of scholarly discussion should be resolved. The historians have the benefit of all the littler special-interest lists, which can sustain some specific discussions, but as far as I can tell, the art historians are pretty much stuck with one non-discussion list. HGCEA sends out email to its members, but I wouldn't call that a discussion list. Likewise AAH. But perhaps I'm missing something.
Where are all those art-history discussions, anyway?
As a scholar who's used all of these except Twitter (and I'm not a stranger to Twitter, I just don't use it), my reaction was that this was ridiculous. Why?
Blogs, due to the flexibility of the form, have an important place (or should) in the scholarly world. Individuals and groups blog on a wide variety of topics. On the other hand, I think few people really want to keep track of more than about ten active blogs. Sure, you can read your blogs via a feed, but the more blogs you track, the less likely you are to notice that any individual blog has a new post. The feed doesn't show the discussion that a post has prompted, either.
Facebook is good for keeping track of friends, and some academic exchange does take place, but the scholarly is easily lost amid the more social material. More significantly, to post something of any length on Facebook, you have to put it in a Note, and comments of any significant length have to go in other Notes because the comment field only allows a certain number of characters (I'm not sure how many, but it's not a lot). Besides, while you can group your contacts within Facebook, there isn't really any good way of separating academe from everything else. I know there are some ways around this--one person I know has a Facebook identity for use with friends and a separate one for use with students, but since many of his friends are also colleagues, I think many of the links get posted in both places.
Twitter seems particularly unsuited to take over. With a 140-character limit to each Twitter message, that's a medium with severe limitations. You can broadcast your headline news with it, but how much humanities discussion is something you want to read in capsule form?
Thus, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter all have their uses, but their uses are rather different from the uses of listservs. I think I subscribe to about six academic lists, plus a shifting number of lists relating to software and other topics, which can get me up to something like twenty simultaneous lists at times. Obviously I don't read all of these messages, and I certainly don't read them all right when they arrive. But there they are, I've got them, and the ones I don't delete are categorizable and searchable. In one of those moments of semi-brain-deadness, I can go through a batch of art history or Slavic emails and see what's happening.
This, however, gets to one of the other points made in the Chronicle piece. While listservs are great for disseminating conference announcements, job postings, and book reviews, their use as a means of actual discussion has dwindled.
The amount of discussion depends on the list, though, and this has a lot to do with the number of subscribers. Too few subscribers, and the list has nothing to say; too many, and it gets noisy until people either unsubscribe or turn it into an announcement-only list. H-ArtHist has no discussion that I can see, just announcements, most of which are of no particular interest to me. This is not surprising, considering the list tries to cover the entire field, internationally. The likelihood of my hopping on a plane at the last minute to attend tomorrow's German symposium on (I'm making this up) dog iconography in 15th century Japan is pretty small. But other lists do have discussion, particularly about books people have read or want to read. H-HistSex has pretty good discussion (as it ought to!) and often H-Women does as well. Not endless discussion, but readable.
I'm not sure how the question of scholarly discussion should be resolved. The historians have the benefit of all the littler special-interest lists, which can sustain some specific discussions, but as far as I can tell, the art historians are pretty much stuck with one non-discussion list. HGCEA sends out email to its members, but I wouldn't call that a discussion list. Likewise AAH. But perhaps I'm missing something.
Where are all those art-history discussions, anyway?
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