Category: Uncategorized

Don’t you hate it when something that used to work, just stops working?

I’ve been draggin-n-droppin images into WordPerfect for quite sometime. Yesterday, drag-n-drop stopped working. Instead of the image being placed in the doc, I would get a generic placeholder with the name of the file.

This reminded me of the old WP10 issue covered in this forum post on WordPerfect Universe:

WP9,10: Cannot insert graphics files on Win2k, WinXP systems

But I wasn’t getting the “Detected file format not supported” error message. I tried the old indexing hack, but it didn’t seem to work.

So, I investigated further. Turns out that the same problem occurred when I tried to drag-n-drop into Word!

Then I came across this post:

Copy and Paste from Explorer yields an Icon Thumbnail vs picture

This seemed closer to my problem and I found that if I RIGHT-clicked and then dragged I could get a pop-up window that gave me the choice of inserting. Picking that worked. But LEFT-clicking and dragging still does not work.

So perhaps Windows OLE (object linking and embedding) is out of whack. But what could throw it out of whack and what could whack it back in?

This whole process took up hours of my day yesterday and today–all to get back to where I was originally. And I still don’t have a full answer.

Of course, WordPerfect’s tech support was useless. The only semi-answers I found were on a third-party bulletin board. WP doesn’t even have true forums. They only supply a Usenet-style feed and it’s not searchable!

Man!

I remember the days when WP was the gold standard for tech support. Anyone — even someone with an unregistered copy — could phone their toll-free line and get excellent, knowledgeable support.

Man!

Those were the days!

Then Novell bought WP and busted it up a little. Then Corel bought it and busted it up some more. Now I remain loyal to it in order to retain a few features that M$ Word doesn’t have, but issues like this drag-n-drop thing are severely testing me.

Let’s imagine a gateway program through which you will access everything on a university campus from sensitive class grades to the final exam schedule. One of the services is your university e-mail account.

Now imagine that gateway runs on Java and requires pop-ups in order to get to anything. How useful is that internet mail interface going to be when you find yourself in some cyber-cafe that has done their durndest to stop all pop-ups. Perhaps you are on your 80 year old parents pentium one with dial up. How likely/easy is it going to be to deal with getting Java d/led and running on their machine.

But suppose that you’d be willing to overlook these problems. What if the gateway went down on the first day of class. No access to e-mail, class lists, ability to add classes. All gone.

If you can’t imagine try myBama at The University of Alabama. We have completed the first day of classes at the University without computer services.

This would be surprising except the university has a history of buying crappy software.

Why create a blog devoted to cranky rants about crappy software?

• Because there is so much of it out there.
• Because software companies don’t seem to give a damn anymore.
• Because software support has become untenable.
• Because the more reviews that are not written by magazines whose bills are paid by software company’s advertising the more likely we are to have unbiased information.

Okay, okay . . . so occasionally I might relent and post a positive review about software I really like, but essentially this blog is for venting.

I know you feel my pain.