Bug Story - The Lost Cars of Branson
Published: 05/09/2013
I love to read other people's tales of finding and fixing weird bugs, so here is one of my own. I did one earlier that people found interesting: Fixing a Nasty Physically Modeled Engine Bug in an FPS Game.
I work for a travel company, and our iPad app includes many features including renting cars. The app was originally written by a third party company and developed under a previous group of executives who were "replaced". We got the code in a broken state and had only 10 days to complete it and put it in the App Store. It worked fairly well given the start.
During the first week a user sent in a bug report, and unlike most actually included useful details. Apparently he had opened the app the first time, went to Branson, Missouri and started to look at rental cars. After selecting a few he hit one that crashed the app. So he restarted the app, went back to Branson and repeated his search.
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WWDC Signup Was A Big Fail
Published: 04/25/2013
Today we tried to signup at work to send 3 folks to WWDC. At exactly the time the signup button appeared we madly tried to sign in and got nothing but a failure messages from Apple's authorization system.
Thirty seconds or so later someone said the sold out sign appeared, less than the two minutes being reported. None of use ever got past the login. In my case I have my login on both my personal account and the companies, so I have to first pick which personna I want to login as. No such choice appeared.
That is, except for the time when I got the screen and it asked me to login as some company I had never heard of. Yes, if I had not been disgusted I could have logged in as an unrelated third party. What kind of crap is this?
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The Programmer Skill People Rarely Ask About In Interviews
Published: 04/24/2013
When I started programming in the early 80's there was no Internet, no StackOverflow, no blogs, no easy way to get help on a programming problem. You either figured it out for yourself or went to a library or asked a coworker.
Today the entire programming world is at your fingertips.
A lot of it is crap, or inappropriate, or out of date, or downright dangerous. The skill today is not only in finding programming solutions, ideas, examples or even entire frameworks but being able to evaluate them in your context. So why is such an important skill rarely discussed in a job interview?
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Crazy Will Always Be With Us
Published: 04/20/2013
I need to step outside my usual persona of writing about programming to comment on the happenings of the past few days.
In Boston two brothers decided to blow up the Marathon, and an hour from my house half the city of West, Texas was blown to pieces in a massive explosion.
There have always been crazy people who for whatever reason decide to kill their family, their friends, their neighbors or even random strangers. They come from all walks of life, religion or not, every race or political viewpoint, people who seem ordinary for years but suddenly explode in violence. They do it because of hatred or fear or even for the thrill.
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I've Won A Free iPhone 6! Or Not
Published: 04/16/2013
Probably not. I got a text message sent to me phone today: "You were chosen to get the iPhone 6 and keep it before it is released. Enter your info at www.cellgiveaway.com to get it now."
Going to the site there was nothing but a simple form that asks you to enter your name. There is a picture of an iphone which is labeled "iphone5.png" but looks more like an iphone 3GS. It says only 3 left. Oddly enough the title in the banner calls it an "Iphone". I entered a name just to see where it went. It wound up at another form at "www.debitcardmatch.com" which offered some kind of prepaid debit card. Clearly there was no mention of an Iphone anywhere. How disappointing.
I really loved the "privacy policy" on the first site which was pretty pointless and made no mention of who the policy is from, which I imagine is a violation of Federal law or something. The unsubscribe just takes you back to the page. The second site had a bunch of legal looking stuff at the bottom including the classic "Card requests are subject to verification of the personal information provided. The Bank Secrecy Act, as amended by the US Patriot Act is a federal law that requires financial institutions to obtain, verify, and record information that identifies each person who opens a card account. What this means for you: we ask for your name. address. date of birth and other information that allows us to reasonably identify you. We may also ask to see your driver's license or other identifying documents at any time." Yeah, I'm sure you will.
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