Monday, September 2, 2013

Incompetence in computer programming #1

This is 2013 but I still run into incompetent computer programming as if it were 1995 (the heyday of Microsoft and the sloppy coding practices that it both embraced and provided as a bad example to others). Here are four examples.

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Minnesota Public Radio: I wanted to make a nice comment about Corky Miller on this story published in 2005. On Aug. 10, I duly filled out the information and wrote a comment but when I clicked on "Post", I got this error: "Comments are not allowed on this entry."


MPR, if you're not going to allow comments on this story, then let me know on the article page, not as an error after I try to post!

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Apple: On Aug. 18, using Apple's own browser, Safari, on a Macintosh, this is what I saw at this page:


Yes, I have reported the error to Apple but no fix yet.

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Employee portal error: A certain Cincinnati employer (which I am not going to name) provides a portal for its employees to show their availability to work. Recently, I saw this error:


The error, in case you can't read it, is: "The following request error has occurred: String or binary data would be truncated. The statement has been terminated." The same error occurred in three different browsers, two on Macintosh and one on Windows so I'm concluding it happened on the server. I was told later what the error should have been: "Changes to availability must be submitted before the deadline. The deadline for start date 9/8/2013 is midnight Sunday 9/1/2013."

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Kenmore: This is a picture of the front of a 5,000 btu/hr. Kenmore air conditioner. The rightmost light is telling me that the filter needs to be cleaned. But the filter was cleaned several days ago and really doesn't need to be cleaned again. The incompetent computer programming: You can only reset the filter timer if the light is on. So when I pushed the button to reset the timer after cleaning the filter with the light out, nothing happened. Only now that the light is on can I reset the timer.


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That's all for now. I will add more posts as I run across ICP.

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