A big thank you to the crew of HMAS Arunta
At about 10am GMT today the crew of the Australian Naval frigate HMAS ARUNTA rescued Yann Eliès who had suffered a broken leg during the Vendée Globe – the single-handed non-stop round the world yacht race.
Yann’s yacht Generali was approximately 200 miles south of Australia when the accident happened. He managed to crawl back to his bunk from the foredeck where he had been working, and spent two days unable to leave the bunk to get food, water, or medical supplies, being tossed around by the waves in the Southern Ocean.
Two other competitors, Marc Guillemot and Sam Davies diverted in extremely difficult sailing conditions to proved any support they could, although Sam Davies was advised to continue on in the race before she could get to him. Marc Guillemot kept his boat at times within throwing distance of Generali for two days, talking to Yann continuously on the radio and trying to keep his spirits up. He also tried unsuccessfully to throw him water and painkillers. His job was made more difficult by the fact that Generali’s sails were still up so the boat was continuing to sail.
This is far from the first time that the Australian Navy hasn’t hesitated to provide assistance to sailors who get into trouble in the Southern Ocean, and a huge debt of gratitude is owed to them by any sailor who has passed through Australian territorial waters, and indeed the Southern Ocean.
There is a short video of Yann being transferred onto the Navy RIB here, and a longer one by Marc Guillemot here. Other videos – Marc arriving on station at Generali, and attempting to throw supplies to Yann.
So…Windows Live Writer
After getting over my hulk rage during the download process when Microsoft forced me to update Messenger at the same time, and having used it a few times, I’ve finally had the chance to think about Live Writer objectively in comparison to in-browser editing.
Interface
Microsoft have kept things pretty simple – the user interface is uncluttered, and controls are mostly where you’d expect them in terms of formatting…its a bit like a dumbed-down version of Word.
The Tasks and post Properties panels are toggled with function keys, although screen real estate probably won’t be as important due to the limited dimensions of many blogs.
Editing can be done in Edit (Presentation/WYSIWYG) or Source format, so fine control over html elements is possible, and drafts can be saved locally or online.
Functionality
The Tasks panel is really the only place that Live Writer seems to me to have a big advantage over the web editor provided by mature blogging environments such as WordPress.
Inserting Images/Hyperlinks/Video takes one click to pull up the appropriate dialog…and having done so you get quite a deep level of control over the properties of that object (copy & paste doesn’t provide the same control over the object). Resizing an image is as easy as stretching the border or specifying an exact size in its properties.
If you frequently post non-text objects in your blogs then the speed advantages in performing all this work locally is quite significant, as well as being simpler in my opinion. When finished, Live Writer can be left to publish to the web in the background.
Categorisation/Tagging is all performed at the bottom of the screen, with intelligent lookup of previously used tags/categories, and even automatic creation of new ones if a searched-for term isn’t found:
There is a growing selection of plugins available here.
Benefits compared to in-browser editing
- Speed – doing all the formatting work locally gives considerable savings over online editing, especially for those of us with occasionally spotty internet connections
- Ease of non-text object editing – as mentioned above, this functionality is well advanced on WordPress’ in-browser editor
- Reliability – Ever press Publish in your browser and had a timeout/connection failure? Rarely an issue for those of us lucky enough to have broadband, but for people working off weak wireless/narrow pipes it’s still (very) occasionally an issue. Doing all your work locally means there’s nothing to lose.
Weak points compared to in-browser editing
All I can come up with is:
- Limited Preview – while the layout is perfect in Preview, Live Writer doesn’t reflect my custom theme in Preview and shows it in the default theme…maybe this will update automatically in time? Edit: As per Brandon’s comment below, View -> Refresh theme does indeed update the theme, and after refreshing the Preview view actually shows the current front page of the blog, including all posts, and inserts the blog-in-progress at the top. Very impressive!
- No support for audio objects – WordPress allows the insertion of audio objects (songs), which I’ve never done, but Live Writer doesn’t have this yet.
- You can’t install Windows Live Writer on Linux – Need to fire up VMWare or one of its ilk…
Annoyances
- Can’t customise the toolbar – granted, there’s not a lot to customise, but not being able to extract the font size control and save myself having to dig to it through the Font dialog is a mildly irritating – 1 whole click potentially saved
– and there’s a bunch of unused space on the toolbar. - Non-unified toggle between Edit (presentation) and Source views – F11 to get to Edit (which is the default) view, Shift+F11 to get to Source. Eh? There shouldn’t be a Shift required, it should be straightforward toggle. Likewise F12 should toggle in and out of Preview.
- Can’t customise panel layout – The tasks panel is on the right, which is probably natural in terms of mimicking real-world action placement for the majority of users, but what if I was left-handed? My control hand would be on the left, and I’d be used to reaching left.
- Occasional lag – Oddly, I get a bit of lag from time to time when editing. Generally it seems to be when I select a few words of text, but I haven’t definitively nailed it down. Live Writer is still in Beta, so hopefully this will be exterminated by the time it comes out of Beta. Edit: This is using build 14.0.8050.1202 – the lag is rare but persistent.
Conclusion
This is an excellent piece of (free) software. I don’t like the forced upgrade in its distribution channel, but I can’t see myself using anything else to write my blogs any time soon.
Edit: Having just Published this post from Live Writer, two of my images lost their centered format. This didn’t happen previously in my previous post.
Robocopy – bad GUI, brilliant functionality
Further to my post yesterday talking about the absence of any regard for user-friendliness in the design of the User Interface for Robocopy, I want to expand on and emphasise the brilliance of function in the utility itself.
As a simple backup (mirroring) solution I don’t think that Robocopy could be beaten for minimal use of resources and speed.
Run it to copy a directory with the switches /S and /XO and you’ve got incremental copying of a directory and all its (populated) subdirectories.
I use it as a home (where some web programming work is done) solution in case of disk failure.
One simple script to copy the appropriate directory, scheduled to run every evening, and I’m backed up. No errors or asking me whether I really want to copy a particular file, just simple, no fuss execution.
Why bother? Robocopy’s “GUI”
Having gone through the pain of trying to use Windows’ built-in file/folder copy utility to copy a large amount of data, I played with a few different tools.
Of all these, Robocopy seemed to be among the most robust and configurable. Unsurprisingly, as its distributed as part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools package, it is targeted at command-line use, but an MS engineer called Derk Benisch kindly wrote a GUI for it for those of us to whom pointing and clicking comes more naturally.
Unfortunately, this is the result:
While the GUI does provide a big advantage over the command line, namely that it supports and facilitates multithreading and it also allows you to save your scripts, I might as well have a printout of the help section beside me and use the command line.
By the time I actually remember what even the most commonly used (by me) switches do, I’ll be faster running it from the command line, and I’ll have learned the actual syntax properly.
Sure, there’s no extraneous information at all in this UI, but that doesn’t fecking help if I have to spend time firing up the Help file every time I want to vary my script!
Jakob Nielsen would have nightmares.
Don’t force me to upgrade!
Why, oh why do developers – I’m looking at YOU Microsoft – decide that its ok to force you to upgrade software?
I wanted to try out Windows Live Writer. So I head over to the download site, remove the items from the Live package that I don’t want, and then I see that I’ll be given a forced update to Messenger also. There is no way to remove this option.
I don’t bloody want to upgrade Messenger! I can’t remember my reasons for not wanting to upgrade, but when I collected installers for my recent new build, I made a conscious decision that there was something in the newest version of Messenger that I didn’t want, so I grabbed a slightly older version. There were no cricical security holes and no incompatibilities in the older version, but these arrogant plonkers have decided that if I want to try out one more of their free software offerings I HAVE to upgrade another, entirely unrelated program.
It may well be that the newer version runs faster, tells my friends what I ate for breakfast and places advertisements more effectively in the program window (hooray for HOSTS files) – I don’t care. I was perfectly happy with the version that I had, and Live Writer is going to have to be astonishingly good to make up for the arrogance of the decision to force upgrades to different programs.
