Sigh

[ellarien]

Yes, I've been quiet lately. Busy kind of quiet, mostly.

Today it seemed like a good idea to update the Cygwin installation on the laptop so I could run a Fortran code. That was fine -- except that I then spent all of a long evening chasing down a couple of crucial bits of functionality that went missing in the process. I used to get along all right with computers in the days when there were paper manuals aimed at the intelligent end-user. Now there are online instructions for unintelligent end-users, with animations to show you how/where to click on the menu, on the commercial side, and on the volunteer side it's all geeks talking to geeks in mazes of twisty little bulletin-board messages. Cygwin support is of the latter variety, and these are snooty geeks with no patience at all for mere users.

All's well that ends well; I suspect I've picked up a bunch of development tools I didn't actually want, in the process of pulling on the wrong end of a tangle of dependencies, but at least my beloved ImageMagick tools are working again.

Comments

[peoppenheimer]

What would life be without ImageMagick?

[ellarien]

A lot less convenient, in my case. Photoshop is all very well, but there are times when only the command line will do.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Sympathies on the Cygwin troubles. Not that I know anything about Cygwin, but I've had similar problems trying to install extra things on the Eee. In the process, I have also met those snooty geeks who assume you already know all the ins and outs of Linux and merrily use words and concepts without explaining them.

[ellarien]

It's much the same problem, and a similar mindset -- though the Eee boards used to have some fairly patient and helpful people, whereas the Cygwin mailing lists are much more rarified and more geared to developers than mere users.