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- CodeSOD: Your E-tailer Hates YouYesterday
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You'd think that buying things online eliminates the human element of shopping in a retail store. And you'd almost be right.
Nolan heard about one of his company's "problem customers" from a friend of his in the customer service department. This customer was satisfied exactly as often as he was not right – never. If there was a coupon code for $5 off five items, he'd be calling to ask why it didn't work for one item. If they caved and gave him the discount, it'd only result in more calls demanding more and more discounts. If his order arrived on the last day of the estimated shipping date, he'd bitch and moan until the shipping cost was refunded.
There wasn't much Nolan could do about their problem customer, but he did discover that one of his predecessors had added an undocumented feature, presumably in response to him:
'Get correct text based on error Select Case qsB Case "" If checkVirtualBundle = 0 Then strMsg = "<p>Please choose the correct amounts of the products below to " & _ "continue.</p>" Else strMsg = "<p>You have entered valid quantities. " & _ "<a href=""cart.asp?checkout=Y"">You may now proceed to " & _ "checkout</a>.</p>" End If Case "1" strMsg = "<div class=""linepull""><ul><li>The quantities selected are not " & _ "valid for the "" & strCpnId & "" promotional code.</li>" & _ "<li>Please choose the correct
- Error'd: Nothing To Smile AtJanuary 6
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"That's nothing to smile at, Brett," writes David Robinson, "EntityName parsing errors are serious business."
(currently live at NBC Sports)"That's okay," Zack notes, "I can wait."
"We're all familiar with the 'marketing' prices of $299.99 instead of $300," Alexandre Hetu writes, "but I'm not quite sure how the random question mark is supposed to work."
Translates to "Condos from""I would like to comply with their demands," writes Tim, "but I'm not really sure how. Maybe these guys need to rent a coder?"
"When setting up Windows on a new HP desktop," Andrew noted, "it seems they like to crush your high hopes with an offer you can't refuse."
Aaron writes, "I was playing word scramble with the AIM chatbot SmarterChild, and I got this:
- CodeSOD: Enterprise Level AccessJanuary 5
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Some time ago Martin F. was sent in by his IT consulting company to help fix some problems with the HR Database at a major European banking / insurance firm. He admits that the WTF worthy warning signs were there at the onset (among them being that he was the 4th in a series of consultants assigned to this project), but being relatively naive to such things, he accepted the position and spent a year shaking his head in bewilderment and, at the same time, his fists at Rob. He was an HR 'specialist' and a true IT genius who had a self-proclaimed hobby of programming in Visual Basic and was, of course, long gone from the corporation.
The HR Access-pool
The problem database held monthly snapshots of information about all the (over 50,000) employees of the bank, such as their names, DOBs, home address, function, fixed and variable salaries going back about 4 years. Over that period of time, it had expanded to an impressive 2 Million records in size which is not unheard of in any large corporation, but your typical "Select and Group By" query on 200 people took about eight minutes. However, as Martin came to discover, this was mostly due to the fact the corporate HR database was in reality an Access database sitting on some network fileshare.
Feeding-wise: every month, some 100 local providers from daughter companies would fill-in an Excel-based tool (created by the infamous Rob) that exported CSVs and send them by e-mail to the manager of the appl