Typical. Museum of London Docklands display would be ready to set sail were it not for no-show cast member Today's submission to the pantheon of bork comes from reader Alastair Craft (who spotted a rolling BSOD earlier this year) via the rather splendid Museum of London Docklands. By our reckoning, this is a twofer in terms of obsolete software; Macromedia (or Adobe) Director running atop Windows 7. The former has its roots well …
...for museums to be running out of date software.
Typically they got a grant at some time in the past for "innovative interactive displays" but no money for maintenance or support.
Usually, in my experience, those displays (even when they work) replaced existing good signage to the detriment of actually providing information. It's not always the case, Stow Maries Aerodrome in Essex got it right.
Director and Windows XP where I work. When it opened 15 years ago the technology was very futuristic. It is currently in danger of turning into a museum of museum interactives as there was never any budget for refresh, despite initial promises.
All the interactives were designed off site and delivered as (effectively) black boxes, no source code supplied. Since many of the companies involved have "moved on" since, some bugs in the software which have been there since day one cannot now be fixed.
One interactive for example, at least once a day one of the two videos it plays stutters. The video lasts six minutes or so (about 10 when it's stuttering) and after that it's fine. The other video never (as far as I'm aware) does the same thing. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the stuttering, it just happens randomly.
Another interactive under certain very specific "high load" conditions (i.e. there's a school party mashing the thing about) pops up a filer box asking where to find one specific asset. There must be one code path where the name of the asset is mis-spelled or something because the same asset is used quite a lot, but without the source code we can't investigate.
I have found the sysinternals utilities very useful for occasions such as this. You might be able to get the tail to wag the dog. Obv take a backup before acting on hunches though. Typical scenario might be a missing file, or trying to copy a file into a folder that has that file name as a directory name, for example.
N.B. Many IP owners will take the stance that this is reverse engineering, but if that is the case are they offering support?
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