Building Safety Into Our Work

[Brena Boba]

As far as the warning messages go, I think that message like the Firefox
"i'll be careful I plomise" would be sufficient. Remember that power or any
user for that matter first has to go googling around, find the "Sink"
application, probably this group and is already hellbent on destroying his
system. All we can do is try to implement help and rollback features in a
way to make this destruction as benign as possible. Lot of nagging messages
will just result in lot of angry "Ok, now piss off" clicks.

Few years back I used a Linux system whose programmer had some sense of
humor and in stream of messages which where "Ok" or "Cancel" he would insert
some that were like "Ok. I now nobody reads these messages and you just
click OK, so now you must do this math 24x2/5-1 and input the result to
continue." :)

Firefox example is also good if we want to think with the approach to make
the more gconf/dconf tweak configs easier. Just a button click and "Default
value" rollback button. But for any more sophisticated tweak that has a
greater chance to do the destruction, maybe make a more
"complicated" front-end that simply forces the tweaker to be more careful.Go
firefox, about:conifg to see what I mean. In my experience in doing payed
user support, even people that feel comfortable with their systems tend to
stop and think before engaging with more complicated-looking setting
managers.

iv
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