Quarterflash Designs

Sometimes the wrong word in the right place can give a whole new meaning to what’s written.

In a recent email to a Linux mailing list about backups and backup strategies, we find the following:

> On Tue, 2007-11-06 at 08:36 -0700, XXXXX XXXXX wrote:
> > Fifth, restore capabilities are only a website away, and can easily be
> > performed by the end user (assuming they have enough rites to do so).
This is a case where the word “rites” obviously should have been “rights”. However, the wrong word really changes the meaning. My response to the author (which I made a private reply and not a reply back to the mailing list) was:

> Sorry, but I was very amused by your typo: “rites” should have been
> “rights”, but the mental image of users making the proper sacrifices and
> chanting to get their files restored made me laugh.

When you take into account the common view that users don’t know how all that networking stuff really works and it’s all magic, only understood by the Administrator and his minions, that’s what really makes this funny.

In a follow on email the author noted that spell checkers don’t help when you spell the wrong word correctly.

It just reinforces what I’ve known for a long time - spellchecking is not the same as proofreading.

This is part 3 of the Open Source Takeover series. I had to make a change to the user interface as I didn’t understand how a couple of the widgets were meant to be used. Here’s the new and, pending some input from actual users, final look of the application:

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I now have a working resizer/watermarker, but it only works if I manually edit the configuration file. This is because the original author had a separate config program and that was written with some sort of code generator. That’s not a bad thing, mind you, except for the fact that the code it generates is rife with absolute pixel positions and that makes it difficult to add on new elements.

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