Lazy Programmers, Installment 315

So, during a brief engagement with ING Direct's web site I receive the following error message:

 It was complaining because a) I had used a one-digit form for the month (i.e. 9/19/2010 rather than 09/19/2010), and b) because I had just entered the telephone numbers, as is my wont, as ten-digit strings.

What I want to know is, is there any user-centered QA in effect on this site? Who exactly decreed that dates had to be entered in that inflexible format? Who reviewed the stupid decision to require that specific format for telephone numbers, when it's actually much easier to simply throw away anything that isn't a digit, store that and then format numbers when they are printed? Finally, does anyone at ING care how much trouble they put their users to?

See, I've been in the business long enough to remember the days when computers were there to make things easier for user-type people, not for the programmers. This is clearly a lost approach, one sees so many ridiculous requirements such as the above.

Apple Going Over the Top?

Yet again I rejoice that I am not an iPhone user. Indeed, given this latest news I might well just chuck  my Mac mini away in protest (no, you probably don't want it - it's an aging obsolete PPC mini from about six years ago).

In news from the Electronic Frontier Foundation I learned today that Apple has applied for patents on method of spying intrusively on the users of their devices. Here's a partial list of possible applications:

• The system can take a picture of the user's face, "without a flash, any noise, or any indication that a picture is being taken to prevent the current user from knowing he is being photographed";
• The system can record the user's voice, whether or not a phone call is even being made;
• The system can determine the user's unique individual heartbeat "signature";
• To determine if the device has been hacked, the device can watch for "a sudden increase in memory usage of the electronic device";
• The user's "Internet activity can be monitored or any communication packets that are served to the electronic device can be recorded"; and
• The device can take a photograph of the surrounding location to determine where it is being used.

So enjoy your iPhones. I won;t be doing business with a company that thinks this way. Sigh. I suppose that means the new laptop will have to be PC based.

Bugzilla Bug?

Why, when you change the assignment of an issue in Bugzilla, doesn't the default status change to "Assigned"? I so often forget to make that change it's not funny.

Twitter is currently down for unscheduled maintenance

Talk about being a victim of your own success. Twitter has become my social networking tool of choice, but I wish the service were more reliable. It's just flaked for what seems like the tenth time in the last month, and now only displays the above message when you try and access it. You might regard that as the "this page intentionally left blank" of the web 2.0 world.

Of course the original design inevitably meant that the service is faced with scalability problems, but Twitter hasn't helped matters by providing tools for "weblebrities" like auto-follow (automatically following someone who follows you). Us regular no-hopers, of course, wonder exactly what the point is: if you have 10,000+ followers on Twitter it's self evident that you couldn't give a bugger what any of them are tweeting, which makes the whole thing a rather vacuous exercise to those of us who prefer two-way communications to broadcasts.

I've actually been a member of the open source identi.ca site since OSCON, and while I think it's great that there's an alternative I haven't yet found it compelling enough to be more than an occasional visitor.

Like email spam it's becoming obvious that whenever a new phenomenon arises in the technical world, once it becomes public knowledge the traditional spoilers (marketdroids, celebrities and the like) will climb aboard and screw it up for everyone else. They just haven't realised yet that the rest of the world is just one short step away from telling them to get the hell out. There are a lot of dinosaurs walking around right now, wondering why they are feeling so warm.