Month: July 2013

Knee-jerk Scripting

On By Brian OlsonIn UncategorizedLeave a comment
Some people become programmers because they like math, some because they like video games, but most because they are lazy. That’s right, lazy. Picture this scenario (the names have been changed to protect the guilty).

Lizzie comes by my desk to discuss a project. They’re trying to migrate off one cms to another and want me to nam manage the worth for my team (hundreds, perhaps thousands of pages). My first question: “Have you guys scripted this already?”
Her response, “No. It would take to much time to figure out how to script this. We don’t have time.”
In my head, But you have the time to copy then all one at a time?
I asked around a little among some of the engineers and found out that Lizzie hadn’t researched the scripting option at all. The ability to automatically copy pages was built into the api of both systems.
Scripting isn’t always the answer to repeat tasks, but it usually is. To end this post, I’ll reference xkcd.
Xkcd.com/1205

Hold on….why did they let it do that?

On By Brian OlsonIn UncategorizedLeave a comment
When we work with computer systems, we rarely imagine the people who designed them. If we do, we only think of them in their work context, abstract entities that give us their product and answer our questions about it. We don’t like to think about them being dumb, or having a sense of humor. I’m not sure which of those two to chalk this
little “feature” up to.

I was working with a wiki product recently, made a few changes, and saved the document. A nice little save window popped up like you’d expect.

I moved my mouse back to the task bar when I noticed that my mouse changed when I moved it over the blue bar at the top of the window. A split second later, the page finished saving and the save box was gone. I opened the doc back up, made another change and saved it just to take a look. Sure enough, when I moved my mouse of the blue bar, I got a movement option.

Here it is delightfully displayed over the other toolbars. Why on earth does it do that? There is nothing else on that page to work with during the save. Nothing at all. There is nothing I’d be interested in looking at, nothing useful to me. There are only two possible answers to why I can move the save box:
The developers got it for free with some framework for creating pop up boxes on web pages, didn’t think about the feature set available and what should be turned off. If this is the case, picture your vendor’s developers like this:

Or, the developers were playing around, figured out how to do something cool and left it in there as an easter egg, in which case, your vendor’s developers are more like this.

It’s a subtle, but significant difference.

I was told there would be support?

On By Brian OlsonIn UncategorizedLeave a comment
If you work in a technical position and use any sort of vendor product you have likely had to call them for help with their technology.
Here we run into a question: do you have engineers answer the questions more slowly or hire non technical people to answer more quickly.
It’s can’t decide which I prefer. Each option has it’s pros and con’s. Right now, in more bitter about having non technical people answer more quickly.
I called IBM recently to get help with one of their version control tools. I was deep, deep inside the configuration (so deep I could barely feel the keyboard) but I ran into a problem. My password to the licensing center wasn’t working.
My phone was handy, so I called support and explained the situation  and that I needed my password reset. Their first question: what browser version are you running?
It may not sound that bad, but it jerked me out of my zone pretty good. Every sharepoint engineer has experienced the same thing. You call Microsoft and ask a question, but instead of help they respond: Why aren’t you using IE?
These situations make all of us feel like this poor guy:

No Progress Bars in Hacking

On By Brian OlsonIn UncategorizedLeave a comment
I have played through the following scenario at least three times now.

Me: Hello Information Security, I need admin access to for to complete . Would you be able to give it to me?

Info Sec: Thanks for the request. We’ll get back to you.

Info Sec: We don’t feel you need access for . In our experience should only take a tenth of . How about we give you admin access for half of ?

Me: *Grumble grumble* That’s really not what I need. I won’t be able to do my job if I don’t have admin access for for trouble shooting.

Info Sec: Fine, you can have admin access for half of plus one day. Thanks!

I think info sec gets the idea from watching movies like Skyfall where the computer guys watches a colorful map that shows what’s been “hacked” with a count down for how long the hacking will take.

They assume if I have a dastardly plan, and I requested two months of access, giving me access for five days less than that means my evil plot will get cut off just in the nick of time and everyone will be saved. Yay!

Any real computer person knows that if you wanted to damage a server or steal data any amount of time over 15 seconds is probably plenty.

I know we all have to deal with security theatre, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating.