Posts

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Input fields of evil

Ok, ok I realize that this is more of a bloody rant than an actual programming thing, but what’s the problem with dealing with input fields properly? Take for example inputting credit card numbers. Type it into a text field, but the program complains that it’s wrong. What’s the problem? you used a space! An effing space! why the hell doesn’t it just strip the bloody space out of the input before processing it? but noooooooooo that would involve another one fucking line of code to fix such a complicated input condition as that.
Then let’s not talk about phone numbers! for fucking christ sake what is it with people and their insistence that you use the ‘proper’ format – XXX-XXXX noone in their right mind uses this format.
If the number is preceeded with a plus (+) it’s a fucking country code prefix … like every other goddamn country on the planet … but of course this does not work in the fucking U S of A, oh no, when I visit I have to fix all the numbers I call because some dumb fucking stupid motherfucking telephone engineer can’t deal with a proper mutherfucking phone number.
Other than that get rid of every other fucking non-numeric entity in the phone number. How hard is that? I mean really! Lazy fucking programmers! I’m a programmer myself and I hate it when I encounter UI disasters like that. It’s not difficult to write something that makes people more likely to use your system.

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Quote for the day

Imagine a school with children that can read or write, but with teachers who cannot, and you have a metaphor of the Information Age in which we live.

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commentry

QDB: Top 100 Quotes

I’m not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don’t we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?

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Pete’s tech support line

Ode to joy, I got to attempt to install windows 98 onto a PC that my next door neighbor salvaged from a dump (he works in the waste management industry – no he is not a trash man). Having spent about 40 minutes copying the content of the windows 98 cd onto the hard drive and starting the installation process – we wnet for some food, then came back to the installation process to find that some of the hard disk was corrupt. Either the drive had been damaged in the discard process or it was damaged in the first place. It’s been left scandisking with the surface scan for the remainder of the night. Another installation attempt tomorrow, I have an old hard drive which can be used for the installation if needs be. I mean it’s an ATA33 machine!
Scary old hardware you are evil!

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schnozz bleed

Why do I keep getting these ninja stealth nosebleeds? I was coming home on the train and my nose started leaking red liquid (that’s blood for you freaks). This seems to be an occasional thing for me. Maybe I should talk to a doctor about this?

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I can’t connect to the internet

A hint for all you windows users out there who can’t connect to the internet… don’t forget that the number they ask you to dial in the dialer box is not your own phone number of your house, but instead is the service providers telephone number. I just spent 20 minutes on the phone trying to tech-support my sister through the dialup effort. She was repeatedly getting number in use errors. It turns out that she put her own number in the dnumber to connect button. At least she wasn’t using call waiting, otherwise it would have kept disconnecting here every time she rang.
The fix is as always to use the real phone number of your ISP. I spent 10 minutes trying to get her to the eircom.net phone number, but accidentally gave her a pay-use number. The eircom number is 1892150150. It takes any username ans password, which makes it really easy to use.
Well she’s sorted and I’m off home now.