[plug] David's ADSL Problem

[Daniel Foote]

> > Also, it was what Jonathan was looking for, and answers his question.
> > Wether or not anyone actually uses it to fix this problem is up for
> > discussion. I'm all for user-friendly ways of fixing it.
>
> Gah. Sorry Daniel. If my explanation can be interpreted as a slight on
> other peoples efforts it wasn't my intention. Everyone is dropping in to
> assist which is great. The response was more about explaining that we
> have made the connection method as simple as you've described.

And my comments were not meant as a slight to you or your orgainsation either.

I really do like machines that can be given to people, and have a "red
button" that they can push to make it all work.

For example, my parents are going on an extended holiday soon. They
both have a digital camera. In the past, I would manage copying the
photos onto my laptop, sorting them, viewing them, archiving them.

I'm not going with them on this trip, so I can't look after the photos
like I have in the past.

So I bought them a laptop. Put Debian Unstable on it. And then wrote a
collection of scripts to copy photos from multiple cameras,
chronologically sort these (by EXIF date) so that the photos from both
cameras can be shown in order, and then allow them to view photos. It
also allows backing up photos to an external hard disk. The front end
is a simple GTK+ Menu.

It has been designed so that all they do is click the button, and it
all happens automagically. They don't have to care about the details.
I've written the scripts to be as robust as possible, and to handle as
many cases of things as I can. I've been copying and sorting photos
that I have taken over the last two years on my own laptop, almost
completely from the command line. With that I have got a feel for the
things that go wrong. (Ie, what to do when photos only half-copy from
the camera, because you pulled out the USB cable).

I'm all for systems that work for this. Matching users with systems
that work for them. Rather than users working for the system.

(As a rant, I don't think there is much in the way of turnkey software
for Windows that would do this, and I might also have to pay for it if
it did (I'll admit, I didn't look). Using Debian, I can build the
entire system using free and open tools. The power of the tools
available is second to none. The ability to freely create solutions to
problems like this is what attracts me to open source tools and
operating systems.)

Now I'm getting offtopic, and I'll be quiet.

Daniel.