[Ldsoss] Wireless Networks in Church Buildings

[Paul Penrod]

Ben Galbraith wrote:
> Hi Joe,
>
> On 11/22/06, Idaho Joe <idahojoe at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Right, MLS packages up its data and uses Afaria to transmit/receive
>> it, no?
>
> That's right.
>
>> By the way, it's been one of my pet peeves since I started using MLS,
>> but I
>> was wondering if I was the only one that thought that locking MLS and
>> preventing any further action during transmission was a poor design
>> idea on
>> their part?
>
> Good feedback. In general, making user interfaces concurrent result in
> significant additional complexity, which in turn requires a good deal
> of effort to engineer properly. I'll pass your feedback along. How
> much of your time does this behavior wind up wasting?
>
Ben,

Forking a process for communication does not require significant
additional complexity
if it's done right. Even DOS was capable of background transmission,
which I did way
back in the 80's. Windows XP is the baseline for all the machines here
in our stake and
it is far more capable of background transmission - especially over modem.

As someone who spent years in communications - it's not that hard to
engineer properly
the first time. These days however, there is a serious lack of talent
that understands serial
communications at a low level. They would rather throw it over the fence
to an API and
whine about how hard it is, when things don't work.

As a stake financial clerk, I would regularly see 15-30+ minute work
stoppage due to
transmission times, cryptic status messages, retransmissions, and
complete transmission
restarts, as the modem would lose the connection.

MLS fixing their communications layer (or lack of it) would go a long
way to make things
work much better. Also, since it appears you have someone's ear, placing
useful status
and/or progress messages in the status window would go a long way in
help clerks understand
where they were in the process and in the problem resolution phase where
they would be on the
phone with SLC and could articulate where the process died and the
message that last appeared.

Basic QA...

...Paul
>> Also, as finance clerk, I'm pretty good at making sure I transmit my
>> changes
>> to SLC.  However, it often annoys me that instead of taking just a short
>> time to transmit my finances, I get a lot of membership updates, and
>> have to
>> print out all those reports.  Sometimes I really wish that if a
>> finance guy
>> transmits, only the finances are dealt with.  Likewise for membership
>> I'm
>> sure.  (Although I doubt he ever gets finance reports)
>
> Good feedback; I'll pass that along.
>
>>  My apologies for the tirade.  It's just something that has always
>> bothered
>> me, and I can't explain why.
>
> It's a separate thread to explore this topic, but of course we're all
> very bothered by software that forces us to go through extra work to
> accomplish repetitive tasks -- especially those of us who by our
> natures try and be as efficient as possible.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ben
>
>>
>> -- 
>> -- Joe
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ldsoss mailing list
>> Ldsoss at lists.ldsoss.org
>> http://lists.ldsoss.org/mailman/listinfo/ldsoss
>>
>>
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Ldsoss mailing list
> Ldsoss at lists.ldsoss.org
> http://lists.ldsoss.org/mailman/listinfo/ldsoss
>
>