The fear that they’ll figure out I’m quitting. Or that I don’t care. And I can’t let them know that because that would spoil the revenge!

On Friday, I decided to take a 10-minute break and thought, since it was early afternoon, but definitely after lunch, that I had enough time to walk to the bank, deposit my check, and get back to work.

Wrong!

It took 21 minutes, and the rest of the afternoon, I kept thinking, “Oh god, someone’s going to say something about how I was gone and it wasn’t my lunch.”

Then I actually took my lunch, a few hours later, and while I was eating, M skyped me, “Come see me when you’re free.”

Crap!

But then when I came back from lunch, he was bumbling around his office on his Bluetooth (he paces around it constantly, and it looks like he’s talking to himself really).

I thought, well, maybe he’ll just forget all about it, and we can go on our merry ways… Besides that, if anyone gave me shit, I know all I’d need to point out is the smokers (including Scott and Manny) take so many goddamn smoke breaks daily that they probably end up with an hour on the clock outside shooting the shit.

Anita, who works in the evenings with me, kept commenting on how this was the longest shift ever. And for some reason it was. The clock kept ticking so slowly, and I just wanted to get the hell out of there.

Then at 8:15 (I get out at 8:30), M skypes me, “Come see me.”

Well motherf–.

I sigh. I walk over towards the door dreading the fake face I’ll have to put on of how happy I am to do work and how much I care.

And it’s worse than I thought.

Because I had been complaining about M’s poor programming and problems we were having with one variable in orders, M wanted to show me he “fixed it.”

So I sit there, nodding, uh-huhing, and feigning interest.

“Let me show you,” he says, and he pulls up an order I’d noticed before.

He tells me that from now on we’ll have a new procedure, and employees need to do X, Y, Z to this type of order for it to process correctly in the system.

“When does this new procedure take effect?”

“Tomorrow,” he says.

“Soooo how are people supposed to know?”

“They’ll know.”

Right.

So he punches in his digits, uploads his excel spreadsheet or whatever the fuck he’s trying to show me about getting this order to process correctly. He clicks “Process” and says, “See? Now it works.”

Only, it doesn’t. And I’m not sure I actually managed to suppress my smirk because I wanted to laugh so hard. M looks annoyed.

“Well, usually it’ll give an error at the top that you’ll see. This kind of silent error is rare.”

I nod as if I actually believe him. He monkeys around with his programming for a bit until he’s certain it now works.

So we waste 15 minutes with him telling me all this new information about procedure, and I guess he assumes I’m going to relay the information (ha!) since he asked for my help in training the CS reps.

Then he says, “Well I’ll skype you this order number, and then you can fix it before you leave.”

Only I can’t. I go back to my seat and stare at the order. I can’t fix it because it’s an issue we’ll need to call the customer about (they ordered fewer shirts than they actually needed) unless M has decided to send them some free shirts.

M waits for me to finish.

“Sooo how do you want me to fix this? Because we’ll need to call the customer if you want them to pay for the shirts.”

M looks annoyed.

“I can send it to the call queue so the CS reps call the customer on Monday.”

“No, the call queue isn’t meant for that. Just write the number down and check on it later.”

So I shut down my computer and hurry out of there.

I’m not sure why M assumes I’m going to train customer service reps just because I’ve been promoted. Sure, I could. And I’d do a great job too, but I have no incentive to do so. Let the Titanic sink.

And if even he realizes Manny is a terrible manager and can’t communicate, then Manny shouldn’t be fucking manager. Besides the poor communication issue, I’m supposed to have a key to lock up at night, and Manny (and M) have both failed to make me a copy–as if it would kill them to take 20 minutes to walk to the nearest hardware store and get a key made.

Lord, I need to get out of this fucking hell hole.

“Imagine a millionaire kid running around with great ideas but not actually knowing what he’s doing.”

And that leads to much internal frustration among the senior folk who actually keep this place running while the boss is off in Candyland, tucked away in his office.

One of the biggest internal complaint is our website. It is so buggy and half-baked. It works well enough for us to be a successful company that is still growing, and we do get customers that tell us they love our us and our website, but the bad programming creates a lot of problems that we could avoid if we had a good, dedicated programmer, and if things were well-thought out and planned. But the boss wants to cut corners everywhere, and I wouldn’t doubt if some dude in India who has no clue what we’re doing designed our website.

But the big boss sits in his office and ignores the million of things the manager has told him need to be fixed.

When things slowed down around the holidays, some of my coworkers started watching YouTube and Hulu because there were no customers who were contacting us for help, but I started digging through every link I could click on our website. I found some atrociously written, clichéd articles that I doubt (and hope!) our customers never read about T-shirt design. I found links that don’t work, links to blank pages, and grammar errors.

I started a file to keep track of it all. Some of it is stuff that has great potential–but it’s not complete. For example, I counted no less than a dozen pages that were supposed to be themed design ideas for customers (like sports ideas including a high school football team shirt or a 5k marathon shirt), and the ideas didn’t exist. The pages did, but there wasn’t a single design.

Then earlier this week, a customer called for help placing her order. I took the call, and was trying to guide her through the checkout process. I even managed to get her to download and install Firefox because she’d been using Explorer, and I told her we recommended Firefox and Chrome for our site.

So I pull up her design on my end–both in Chrome and Firefox (I mean, they’re our recommended browsers. Things should work, right?!) And as she clicked along with me, I found the site failing each step of the way. I could pull up her design, but every step beyond that to place an order, was filled with one fail or another. The pages didn’t load properly (or at all!), the design wouldn’t show, the checkout page was all wrong… it was a ton of fail.

The poor woman said she’d try again tomorrow, and I told her I’d contact the appropriate person about this issue (as my coworkers all burst out laughing around me because they know what THAT means). After the call, Sheila told me, “Oh, add it to the browser issue file.”

“The what?”

“There’s a file to log browser issues you run into with customers.”

“Wait, what?” asked my coworker next to me, and others turned around.

“Didn’t anyone tell you guys about this?”

“Uh no,” I said. “Nobody ever said anything about it in training!”

Then Sheila responded, “I was wondering why nobody ever wrote anything in it except for me.”

So I recorded my novel of the browser issue I had with the customer. Then I went home and attempted to use the website myself to order some shirts I wanted printed.

It took no less than five tries for the order to go through–pages wouldn’t load, the information was all cleared out (shirt style was blank, color undefined, no total cost), and I even got an error that said to call if I needed help to checkout–ha!

Designing a Fail Whale shirt shall be on my list of things to do next time it’s slow at work.

There are several color systems that are used in graphics design. The most common ones are RGB (red, green, blue), used to create video images such as for Websites; CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black), used to create four-color process images for printing; and spot colors.

Spot color is a method of specifying and printing colors in which each color is printed with its own ink. In contrast, process color printing uses four inks (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) to produce all other colors. Spot color printing is effective when the printed matter contains only one, two, or three different colors, but it becomes prohibitively expensive for more colors.

Spot colors are the problem. The authority on spot color inks is Pantone, Inc. It has a system (PMS) in which color is designated by a three or four digit number. To help users of the system select colors, the company prints a book of color samples. Unlike paint, that has the texture built into the liquid (gloss, semi-gloss, flat, etc.) all ink is the same. The appearance of the ink, however, depends on the type of paper stock (coated, uncoated, etc.) to which it is applied.

In its swatch book, Pantone distinguishes the differences in appearance of a color by means of a suffix (C for coated, U for uncoated). Let me say that again: The suffixes only represent the apparent color; the ink is exactly the same; the sole purpose of the suffix is to identify the swatch in the sample book.

For example, PMS 185C and PMS 185U are the same color red. In fact, if you use PMS 185U and print it from your computer on glossy photo paper, it will look exactly like PMS 185C. PMS colors also will look the same on the computer screen regardless of suffix.

So where is the problem? Apparently, when programmers examined the printed book of ink samples, they did not understand that the suffixes were merely an added feature for the sample book only. The sole purpose of these suffixes was to make it easy for the reader to distinguish between those swatches that were printed on coated paper and those that were printed on plain paper, even though the distinctions were patently obvious.

As a result of this misunderstanding, graphic designers have problems with color images and colored text that were created by different artists when they are combined into the same computer file. Images created by the same designer can also be a problem if they were created with different color palettes or were created using different software.

Sadly, all graphic design software will treat two colors with the same number but different suffixes as two different colors when generating color separations. This means that when working with spot colors, graphic designers have the tedious task of eliminating duplication of colors within the same file.

Accordingly, software creators need to eliminate the distinction between one suffix and another, but this is not likely to happen.

And then, there is accounting software. Accounting software while being the lifeblood of the financial department, suffers from having software that utterly stinks from an IT point of view.

Case in point: Simply Accounting. To put it mildly, it’s a horribly designed program. Oh don’t get me wrong, if your company’s financial department consists of one person who uses it, then it’s no trouble at all. It will work, and it will work nicely.

But the minute you have to network that puppy, it will bring about grief, frustrations and bewilderment. In other words THERE IS NOTHING SIMPLE ABOUT SIMPLY ACCOUNTING!!

Here are my three biggest gripes with Simply Accounting;

1) The connection manager. Let’s start with simply accounting’s most irritating feature; the connection manager. This program has to be installed if you want SA to function on a server. It installs itself as a service (in windows) and like any good service on a windows server, you have to tweak it so it doesn’t misbehave.

At least in theory.

Of course, that is fine and dandy if you are using windows, but what if your server is *nix based? Tough luck buddy. They “have” a version of the Linux connection manager. But it suffers from a major problem. SA’s priorities are as such that it doesn’t particularly care if your servers are Linux as it’s connection manager isn’t all that well supported, and it seems to be for Red Hat systems and that’s about it (and development is somewhat dismal).

That’s too bad, since Ubuntu, a Debian based distribution of linux ranks slightly above Red Hat as far as the Linux server edition in use.

How to remedy to this: Just build up a window server dedicated to that task. It will work with Win 2003, which can reduce costs. Not much of a solution, granted, but in the light of this poor support, one can’t do much with it than grin and bear it.

2) There is a lack of backwards compatibility. Simply Accounting forces you to upgrade, and when it does, rather than run the file you were using, it forces you to upgrade it to the latest version of the format. Why is this even necessary? In an office suite, you have less problems opening files from the former version of the software and it’s a key point in business software: Compatibility. It’s what it makes it so that you can recover old files and enable you to work with them and update them.

No such luck with Simply accounting. It will force you to upgrade the format, and if you didn’t make a backup copy and it corrupts, you will be stuck calling customer support.

How to remedy to this: Make several backups. Backup regularly, and when it’s time to upgrade, you won’t have to worry about the potential loss of data.

3) Total disrespect of the customer. You want to see a clear example of a company that practically mocks it’s consumer-base, look no further than the support forums, where you will see a festival of customer frustration!!

How to remedy to this: Other than not buying that product? If you absolutely have to deal with that software, document everything, Have the client numbers and serials in your technician’s handbook and a hidden bottle of Scotch. For every functional solution you find on that forum, print it to PDF and then a hardcopy to your IT Handbook. They will save your neck!

String str = "" + 10;

Sometimes I really don’t know what’s in people head. Isn’t it a lot more simpler/clearer/better/faster to do it as:

String str = "10";

If it is up to me, we should banish people writing code like this to write single line of code again.

Point in case: Microsoft Outlook Web Access.

In order to get the really nice version, you have to use Internet Explorer. This means that I have to stop using Chrome, and fire up another browser just to check my email if I want to send an HTML formatted mail message.

So today after sending an email through IE, I decided to see if the only thing blocking Chrome was the browser sniffing done by Microsoft.

And the verdict is: ……………… Nope, the browser sniffing isn’t the only thing stopping Chrome from replacing Internet Explorer.

The Outlook interface is completely, I mean completely, unusable in Chrome. Messages can’t be read, folders can’t be switched. The full, unsliced CSS sprites are displayed everywhere.

If you’re curious to test this out, all you have to do is run Chrome with the –user-agent command line argument like so:

chrome.exe --user-agent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729)"

Guess I’m stuck with either using the “Web Access Light” on Chrome or the full-feature switch to IE.

*I will continue to hope that Microsoft will start to care more about end-user experience*

It’s rather ridiculous if you ask me on how they portray these women, it’s entertainment only to them. It portrays these women in a not so nice light. Using them for ratings and exploiting them for profit. Was anyone surprised? Not really surprised here personally – apparently money makes for pretty good inspiration for networks like this.

I haven’t really watched TLC in a very long time because of my pure disgust with the way the programming has gone downhill. It’s like they are grasping at the last straws, trying everything and anything without regard in how it hurts other people or takes advantage of those people.

I’ve recently seen reactions to the Obese & Pregnant program. It’s quite disturbing, reactions of “Fat people don’t have a right to be concerned for their health” or “Fat people shouldn’t get pregnant, they have no right”. It rather critical and I don’t think TLC really cares either what the reactions of their viewers are because the majority of those viewers are watching it to wrinkle their noses in disgusting curiosity – it’s like the neck swivel at a car wreck scene. You try to look away in disgust but you just can’t bear not rubber necking it as you pass by.

I think it’s very sad that media has taken something that is a sensitive topic and made it into an entertainment circus ring. It’s horrible how people are being treated and used in this manner. Those in glass houses should never be the first ones to throw stones.

I present here some very simple things to do to find flaws or problems with your website, and some ways to fix them. This list is ordered by ease of attack.

1. Broken links and resources

Many websites have broken links hidden deep inside of pages or within CSS files. If your website is not publicly available, you can download a tool like Web Link Validator. If it is publicly available, then the W3C Link Checker will allow a quick and download-free way to test all your links. This tool can check all the links on your site in a few seconds and let you know of any broken resources.

This is probably the easiest and quickest thing that can be done.

2. No limit on form field length

Almost all interactive websites have some form of user input. The text fields found on these forms may not have a client-side limit of the amount of text that is allowed to be entered. Sometimes these form fields, when filled with a vast amount of information, can make forms break and websites crash if too much text is entered. To test this, go over to Project Gutenberg, grab a free book in a text format, copy its contents, and paste in to the forms fields. Submit the form and watch the website crumble.

To fix this, your website should block requests over a given size and should truncate strings that are unreasonably large.

3. Unicode strings in form fields

There are some really strange Unicode characters (such as this airplane: ✈). Some sites just can’t handle Unicode characters. Enter a bunch in to text fields and see if there are any issues. Also, try a BiDi language as another use of Unicode strings.

Some ways that these problems can enter a system is if you are not using Unicode strings in the backend or are assuming each character is only one byte in size.

4. Broken email address validation

It is near impossible to validate an email address the proper way, and a lot of websites use poor regular expressions to validate an email address. Here are a just a sample of valid email addresses that are often refused (quoted from RFC 3696: Application Techniques for Checking and Transformation of Names):

“Abc\@def”@example.com

“Fred Bloggs”@example.com

“Joe\\Blow”@example.com

“Abc@def”@example.com

There is a really good post by Phil Haack about how he thought he knew how to validate an email address until he read the RFC.

I recommend checking for an @ sign and a period following the @ sign. After that, you can require users to verify their email address. It’s about all we can do.

5. Cross-site Scripting

If anything that is user-submitted will end up being written back out to a webpage, there is potential that it is open to cross-site scripting (XSS). Cross-site scripting has been responsible for taking down MySpace, Twitter, and other major websites. Try pasting some of the examples from ha.ckers.org to see if your site is susceptible.

If it has vulnerabilities, there will have to be server-side scrubbing of these fields. It is best practice to scrub data when it is coming in to the system and when it is going out of the system (in case there is some unknown way that it can enter the system, you will be protected).

6. SQL Injection

Just like XSS, this can cause major issues. Worst of all could be giving out credit card information from customers or an entire loss of your database. Try the examples given at mavituna.com to see if your website will break or go down. You might want to make a backup of your database before trying this .

To fix this, there will have to be server-side scrubbing of the fields (see a trend here?).

7. Client-side modification of form variables

Ever set a maxlength attribute on one of your form fields. I hope this isn’t the only place that the data size is being restricted, but it might be. Client-side tools like this are really helpful for usability but that is about as far as they can go. Use a browser like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox (with Firebug), right click on an element, choose “Inspect Element”, and remove that maxlength attribute on the input element. Another thing you can try is to change the values of an option element. For example, if there is a field that asks for an integer quantity and the maxlength is set to three, remove the attribute, and enter in 15 digits. This may cause an integer overflow error (probably not something you wanted to happen ).

To fix the integer overflow problem, the string should be truncated or rejected if it is too long before it is converted to an integer.

I hope this list will help someone test their website. Remember, it’s always better for you to find your errors before someone else does. Any problems you find can be a lesson to not make the same mistake in the future.

1. Never leave a blank catch statement or use catch(Exception)

In C#, if you write catch(Exception) or a blank catch, the exception will be casted to a System.Object. This will also catch non-CLS compliant exceptions. If you can’t do anything to remedy the exceptional situation, you shouldn’t be catching the exception. Usually when you see a code construct like this, the exception is rethrown. Not only is this unnecessary and bad programming, it ruins the stack trace and any other important information that Windows Error Reporting can provide for you.

If you are unsure what type of exception can be thrown, you should check the documentation. If you are catching the exception so that you can perform some cleanup before exiting, then you should move that cleanup code to a finally block. If the latter is the case, then you probably don’t need the catch block there in the first place.

If you run Code Analysis on your code, you will receive a CatchNonClsCompliantExceptionsInGeneralHandlers warning.

More information can be found about why not to have empty catches in your code at the CLR Team Blog.

I was teaching a leadership workshop several years ago, and I showed a video about two women working through a conflict scenario in an office setting. It was a normal (even boring) training video produced for the class I was teaching. I had seen the video many times and showed it to many groups of managers. There was nothing remotely sexual about it. So, I was at a loss for words when during my debrief on this particular occasion, one of the men in the workshop joked that the two women looked like lesbian lovers.

My co-facilitator and I talked about the comment after the class and we tried to figure out from where the participant had gotten that impression. In the end, we agreed it had nothing to do with the video and everything to do with the person. With that one comment, he revealed to a group of twenty or so peers something very telling about his private life. For him to have seen a lesbian relationship in an ordinary working relationship, he must have been programming his brain with sexual stimuli.

What we take in through our ear and eye gates colors the way we see the world. If we allow large amounts of sexual stimuli in, we start to see sex in everything. Innocent remarks take us places they were not intended to take us. Normal situations begin to seem sexually charged. Typical behaviors from the women around us seem to be sexually motivated.

You’ve heard the principle “what goes up must come down.” How about “what goes in must come out.” The more sexual stimuli you pack into your brain, the more likely your mouth will betray your confidence through inappropriate comments, sexual jokes and innuendos. And if your mouth doesn’t do it, your eyes will. When you see a man who can’t resist the urge to stare at an attractive woman as she passes by or who can’t seem to make eye contact with the woman he’s talking to because he is focused on her neckline, you can bet that he has been programming his brain when no one was looking.

Jesus was communicating this principle when he said:

“But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these make a man ‘unclean.’ For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what make a man ‘unclean’…”

(Matthew 15:18-20)

If you allow garbage into your temple, it’s going to find it’s way to your mouth gate. Garbage In – Garbage Out.

*****

In the next chapter, we’ll look at strategies for strengthening your walls.

]]> http://timthefoolman.com/2008/05/09/not-so-great-moments-in-social-networking/ Fri, 09 May 2008 17:46:39 +0000 TimTheFoolMan http://timthefoolman.com/2008/05/09/not-so-great-moments-in-social-networking/ So today, I get an update from Classmates.com, telling me about new profile pictures that various people from my high school have posted. However, when I log on, I’m greeted with this:

Just to clear things up, I am not presently a Mom, nor do I plan on ever becoming one. It does make me wonder… how difficult is it to use the gender variable in a social networking site. For some time, I’ve wondered how a site like Classmates.com can continue to exist, and the answer seems to be, “until the people who use it figure out that you can do everything that you can do there, and more, on Facebook.”

At least Facebook seems to have figured out that I’m not a potential Mom.

The very fact that they post their spam is a negation of the apology they offer.

What possesses someone to think that if they apologize in advance their action is somehow OK?

I have never understood the idea of apologizing prior to committing an offense – it smacks of insincerity if it’s real human, and bad programming if it’s a bot – or perhaps it’s the other way around?