Once, when I was staying in San Francisco (trip report with pictures on my personal site), I misdialed and got the message “the number you dialed is inappropriate”. It always struck me as an odd way to say “you dialed the wrong number.” But at least my feelings were spared.
I saw an error message on a website, scriptlance.com, which reminded me of this. I had typed the description of a project I wanted doing and I inlcuded a semi colon. The error message flashed up: ”The ‘;’ character is not allowed.” Why? (I’m moving my site ModernPilot.com from Joomla to WordPress, if you’re interested.)
Then it made me think of the stupid validation process that happens on so many webforms and programs. Like the accounts package that has a fit, with beeps and lights, if you enter a date in anything other than dd/mm/yy. Or American sites that can’t cope with the concept of a date where the month is in the middle. Or my online bank that won’t let me use a comma or a pound sign when I want to do a payment.
I used to be a programmer. I know it is not difficult to write a piece of software that checks this stuff and filters it or at least asks ‘Did you mean March 12th or December 3rd?’ As usual we seem to be working for the machine and not the other way round.
On this subject, has anyone read “How to Survive a Robot Uprising?” Any good?
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I must admit, I’ve always considered overly-limited data entry for dates to be a sign of poor programming. In the Perl programming language, there’s a library called Date::Manip which can cope with dates entered in such exotic forms as “the day after tomorrow” and “the second sunday of next month”.
Sure, it’s more computationally expensive that straight-up numerical calculations — but I thought the whole point was that computers were meant to do the work for us!
I’m sure it’d be easy to plug that module into other programming languages.
I’ll be typing away and all of a sudden, this message appears:
“This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down.”
I have never tried to perform any type of surgery while using a computer, nor have I ever done anything illegal while sitting at a keyboard.
I’ve done things that are ill-advised, and ill-mannered, but never illegal. So, I am ill-prepared to deal with this mysterious, accusatory message.
Despite my innocence, I can’t help feeling a little guilty and looking for a way to atone for this illegality. Perhaps I can do community service to pay my debt to society.
Moving from joomla to wordpress. I completely understand that. I recently moved one of my blogs from joomla to movable type. Joomla is all very well for a website, but when you have a blog that you want to update frequently, all sorts of problems can arise. There are all sorts of hacks that one can use in joomla, but wordpress is far superior in almost every way.
All the best.
I am in Ireland. Two things about Ireland are:
1. There are a lot of people with surnames starting with ” O’ “;
2. We don’t have postcodes (yet).
The former is, I would have thought, very well-known, and not exclusive to Ireland. The latter not so well-known, but not exclusive to Ireland, either (I imagine).
So, why are so many e-vendors incapable of dealing with people with apostrophes in their names and no post codes in their addresses ? Why are so many *Irish* vendors included in their number ?
Finally, I am looking for a phrase to put in the obligatory post-code box as I am not entirely happy with “xxxNONE !xxx” or “therearenoneinireland” which amuse my postman so much.
Any suggestions ?
I usually think “lazy programmers” too, but it is often “cheap corporations.” I find formatting phone numbers a particular way annoying, and requiring/not-requiring a space in Canadian Postal Codes dumb.
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