CSCI 5828

Homework 1 Rant

Hi. I just thought I would take the time to explain why following directions is important. For Homework 1, I requested people to send me their homework as a plain e-mail message. Most of you did, fourteen of you did not!

Of those 14 people, 7 people sent me postscript, 3 sent me a PDF file, 2 sent me text files, 1 person sent me a Microsoft Word RTF file, and 1 person sent me a postscript file that disguised itself as a pdf file! (That last one was a lot of fun.) Also, one of the postscript files came embedded in the e-mail message. That required saving the message externally (my mail program stores e-mail messages in a database), editing it with a text editor to remove mail headers, JCL commands, and e-mail signatures, before it became a legal postscript file. Fun Fun Fun!

In order to successfully print these documents out, I made use of the following software, Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat Exchange, DropPS (a Mac-utility for uploading postscript files), a text editor (to view and print the text files), and a Mac resource editor to change the file type of the disguised postscript file to a type that would be recognized by DropPS.

Ignoring how much time this took me, I would like to ask you: If you had been in my place, would you have been able to successfully print out all of these diverse formats? (I'm sure the RTF file would throw a lot of Linux hackers for a loop!) Would you have been happy about it?

Please, please, please, follow the directions next time, it really saves me time!

Thanks, I feel better now.