Tag: Support

I am about to start my summer vacation, which means that there will be not much (if any) work done and that I will only check e-mails sporadically, so don’t expect any snappy responses. If you have a really really important issue to bring up, that cannot wait until I am back in mid-August, please state so in the e-mail subject line and indicate why the cannot wait. (Or simply call me if you have my number…) Have a great summer!

From today, I will shut down my activities on the website and over mail to spend the Christmas holidays with my family. I will likely not read e-mails until the first week of January, and as I might then have a large pile of mail to go through, please re-send any messages to me after January 3.

I apologise to everyone who might have outstanding support issues for Metaxa2 or ITSx. If you feel that I have neglected your e-mail, please re-send it after January 3 as well, to make sure that I have not missed it.

I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy new year!

I just wanted to share an experience with the FARAO software we recently published a paper about, and its compatibility with the GD and libpng libraries (used for creating PNG files). I have got questions from users about how to get this to work, and to test it out I decided to try to install it on my Mac. It turned out that it is nearly impossible to get this to work. These two packages are extremely picky with versions and dependencies. After trying for about on hour, I gave up and turned to my Linux machine. Surprisingly, I could not get it to work from scratch there either, despite that I have had it running (with some previous version combination) when we programmed and tested FARAO.

I find this extremely annoying myself, and I will try to look into other solutions for PNG or JPEG output from FARAO. In the mean time, I can only recommend to instead use the EPS output option, which produces more nice-looking figures and is considerably easier to set up. I am sorry about this and hope to be able to provide a better solution soon.

This week is the first of my long summer break, and I will be on vacation until mid-August. This means that I will only read mail sporadically, if at all. For very urgent issues, please give me a call or send me an sms, and I will attend to your message as soon as possible (this of course only applies to those of you who have my number in the first place).

For support questions, there are a few options:

• For questions regarding Metaxa or Metaxa2, please add “METAXA” to the beginning of the subject line of the e-mail.
• For questions regarding ITSx, please add “ITSX” to the beginning of the subject line.
• For other support questions, please add “SUPPORT” to the beginning of the subject line.

This way I can easily assess which mails that are urgent to reply to. Don’t add “IMPORANT” or “URGENT” since that will just invoke the spam filter.

I wish you all a very very great summer!

We’re approaching Christmas, and this year I will try to spend lots of time with my family and less time at the computer. We’ll see how that goes, but all in all it means that I will most likely not respond promptly to e-mails until after New Year’s, maybe not until January 8 or 9. If, for example, you have asked a support question and have not received a response before January 12 2015, then please feel free to re-send your e-mail as I should then at least have replied that I cannot solve your issue quickly.

A further note for the future is that I will be on parental leave with my lovely nine-month-old during the entire spring, so answering e-mails will not be my highest priority, and might be neglected entirely in periods. I apologize for all kinds of inconveniences that this might cause, especially for Metaxa, ITSx and Megraft users.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I would like to sincerely apologize for that I have been terrible at responding to support issues pertaining to ITSx, Metaxa, Atosh etc. lately. I am currently on 50% parental leave and at the same time I am wrapping up three first-author papers, organizing a workshop and preparing a talk. Thus, support issues has been lagging a bit behind the last weeks to be able to cope with everything else. I have been ticking off most (all?) of my support questions the last couple of days, but if I have any remaining issues that I have missed to reply to, please re-send them to me!

I will try to improve response times, but it is hard when I am working less than usual (also, note that I (strangely) don’t get paid for supporting software, so I have to do this on my “sparetime”). My aim is to respond within a few days, so if I have not done so, please resend your e-mail with a friendly reminder that you are waiting for my response. Reminding me will very likely put your question up the priority pile.

So, my advice to becoming dads is: Do take paternal leave. Do take a lot of it. Share responsibilities with your partner. Because what you get back is awesome. (And also you get a good reason not to answer support questions in time.) But finally, don’t plan to wrap up the last couple of year’s worth of work and arrange a conference at the same time as you take out paternal leave. That will only make you feel insufficient at all fronts.

Keep the spirit high!