[4429] in SIPB bug reports
Re: Resizing xstapler
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (yandros@MIT.EDU)
Wed Mar 2 16:56:42 1994
From: yandros@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 2 Mar 94 21:56:16 GMT
To: nocturne@MIT.EDU
Cc: svalente@MIT.EDU, bug-sipb@MIT.EDU, nocturne@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <9403021954.AA04548@m4-167-1.MIT.EDU> (nocturne@MIT.EDU)
> Letting `Walkin' and `Phone' work with an empty field was an policy
> decision Matthew and I made, because it made it less likely that
> people would punt altogther if they're busy, and it was easier to
> code. Convince us otherwise (probably won't be hard)
Typing a word or two in summary ("EZ", "emacs", etc.) isn't hard; I should
think that people waste more brain-cycles clicking away zephyrs, much
less replying to them, than doing this. Plus, making this so would
reduce the number of accidental entries made by people who don't yet
know how to use xstapler (or accidentally click on it)....
No, it's not much effort, but we're losing questions *now*, and making
it be more work isn't going to help; the people who are busy will
click on `Walkin' and not notice that nothing got entered. This is,
to me, a clear case of `who cares'. The program should be small,
fast, and simple. If someone wants to make it more complicated, then
convince me or Matthew that it should be installed.
> We thought about it and couldn't come up with any good reason to log
> usernames or hostnames. Convince us otherwise if you like.
I think that logging hostname might be useful for us to see what the
*actual* stats on the numbers of questions answered by people logged in
on a particular machine. I mean, we have a "hotseat", but the person
sitting there doesn't always handle things. Other than this, I think the
hostname would be useless.
Logging the username could be much more useful; it would help us to figure
out who we should ask to stop adding entries like "My mom called to see
how I was doing" and "Phil stopped by to say hi", and it would allow folks
to make polite recommendations to people who make entries like
"Mr. Peterson walked in and I gave him a bowl of milk and Root Oops. He
purred at me, and then left."
Loggin usernames is a privacy violation (a small one), and isn't
really that useful; if we tell people ``don't do this'' and they do
anyway, then we give it up as a loss. Logging hostnames and times is
equivalent to logging usernames. Neither one of these, IMHO, is a big
win. If people care, then someone could add in a client mod to put
those two things (and maybe even the date) in the comment field. (the
current logfile format would work reasonably well with this)
> I remain unconvinced that the `date' is worthwhile, since it has to
> run /bin/date. If we turned over the logfiles periodically (nightly?)
> we'd have most of what we wanted (but not all, I admit). Comments?
It might be useful to profile the logs based on the times at which we
get the most qustions of type (foo). It would let us make Another Pretty
Chart or three. You can't have too many charts. :-)
Yeah, it might, someday, but, honestly, I don't think so. Such a
graph wouldn't really be useful to us, and most likely it'd show that
we're understaffed in the early part of the business day. :-)
Seriously I don't really think it's worth the trouble right now. Just
my opinion, not at all certain about it. If I don't like it, I'll
remove the timestamp code from my copy. :-)
