Month: January 2007

Why is it that a tech support problem doesn’t become an emergency until it’s most inconvenient?

I was quite literally standing up and collecting my wallet to go to lunch when I got approached by one of our support people and a fellow developer with a problem at a partner site. They described the problem and asked if I can log on to see if I can figure out the answer. I asked if it could wait until after lunch, and they said no because the system is going to be packed up and shipped to the evaluation center and it has to be working by then, and so we’ve got a 1 hour window to get it working.

So I go over and get Bob to log me on, and at first I’m lost. The subsystem that sends back the heart beat from one system to the other was the responsibility of a programmer who doesn’t work here any more. The log files don’t help much. But one thing I notice is that according to the logs, they’ve had this problem as far back as the logs go, about 14 days. Ok, it’s been a problem for 14 days, but evidently you can’t be bothered to fix it until there is 1 hour to go before an irrevokable deadline. Why is this my problem again?

I do some poking around a config file that I’ve had very little to do with in the past and I notice something glaring – the system is configured as [system] “2”, but it has another similar parameter set to an id of “1”. Ok, leaving aside the little question of why there are two parameters that control the same thing when one could probably be derived from the other, is this it? I change the second parameter to a 2 and restart it. And almost immediately start seeing heartbeats coming.

I’m out of there before they can find something else for me to work on, and the cafeteria doesn’t close for another 45 minutes. Yeah, me.

User interface design for programmers with no sense of style

Years ago I was working on Kodak’s Cineon system, an innovative system for digital post-production of movies. It was a great gig, but unfortunately Kodak pulled the plug because there were too few post-production houses doing digital work to support a competitive marketplace, and because some really questionable business decisions were increasing the development costs. I still think they should have held on a bit longer until the market caught up to us, but that’s life.

One of the projects I worked on was a “clip editor”, where the users got a view of multiple film clips (ie. different shots from the same scene) and they could cut them, shrink or expand them, slide them up and down relative to each other, and then define the transitions between them. Our competitors called theirs a “virtual light table” or something like that. Ed Hanway was doing the guts of the program, and I was doing the user interface. I liked working with Ed – he’s one of a handful of people I’ve worked with over the years I’d consider as good if not better than me, and easy going and easy to get on with in spite of it.

I had the basic outline for what I wanted the clip editor to look and work like, but I felt that my own aesthetic sense was lacking (which you’d agree with if you’ve seen the way I dress), so I wanted some feedback on the aesthetic aspects of the design. Kodak didn’t have a Corporate Design and Usability department like they do now, or if they did nobody was telling me about it, but since the Cineon tech support department was staffed by people who edited movies, I figured they’d have some artistic instincts.

Oh quick aside here – our tech support people often pitched in at customer sites when they were using our software on big projects, which meant that you could always tell the Cineon people at a Rochester movie theatre, because we’d always wait for the very last credit and cheer when it had one of our people’s names.

But I couldn’t get anybody to answer any of my questions. So I figured I’d force the issue by choosing two of the most hideous colours I could find. I think I chose two that had pre-defined colour names in OpenGL, but I toned them down a bit because the people using our software always seemed to do it in dark rooms and the rest of our interface was in shades of grey because of that. I think I ended up with a sort of mauvey-pink and a light limey-green. I knew *somebody* would have to complain about these colours, and then I could ask them what colours they thought it should be.

Oh, another aside – the program had been started at Kodak’s Australian office, and then moved to Rochester, and then we had some code contributed by the office in London England, and then half the development moved to San Francisco for no good reason. One of the things that led to was continual problems with the spelling of the words “colour” and “grey”. You’d find both Commonwealth and US spellings of both those words in method names, and sometimes both variations in the same method. The method name confusion was the worst – you’d write your code to call “adjustColourSpace3D” only to have the compiler bitch because you meant to call “adjustColorSpace3D”.

But I never got any complaints about the colours, so that’s how they went out in the release. And a year or two later, somebody brought some literature back from our big trade show, ShowWest, and lo and behold one of our competitors had copied my hideous colour scheme in their virtual light table.

A few weeks ago I was telling this story at lunch, and one of the other former Cineoners who got to go to customer sites mentioned that the customers had loved my hideous colour scheme because of how well it stood out. Huh. Who knew?

I guess the secret to good user interface design is to purposely make something that offends my senses, and I’ll come up with something that normal people like.

No fucking thank you, Quicken tech support

Update: Almost as soon as I finished writing the rant below, I got an email from Quicken tech support explaining what I should have done – used “Activities->Prior Statement” (which would have shown that list of prior statements that I semi-accidentally discovered on my own) and then used splat-D to delete them. Delete doesn’t appear on the Prior Statement window anywhere (nor anywhere on the help that comes up if you press the ? button that I could see), but evidently it’s there on the main menu under Edit, so I should have just known to look.

I got a paper bank statement the other day, covering up to the 5th of January. I went into Quicken as I had so many times before, only to find that all the stuff I’ve downloaded from the bank recently was marked with an “R” (meaning “Reconciled”) instead of a “C” (meaning “Cleared”) like it’s supposed to be. Attempting to click on any of these “R”s just takes you to the Reconcile page, which won’t show you any of these transactions that have supposedly been Reconciled. And it also complains about the fact that the date range you are attempting to reconcile comes before the last “statement” that it evidently processed.

I couldn’t find anything on the local help, or the on-line help, so I clicked the “tech support chat” button, which had me enter some information on what version of Quicken I’m using and a brief description of the problem, then connected me to somebody with an Indian sounding name (which isn’t too surprising at 9pm on a Sunday). I briefly described the problem again, and he/she said they could email me some steps that would solve my problem. I said that would be fine, and clicked off. The mail came some minutes later, but by that time I’d had enough of bill paying and put it off to today to deal with.

Today I read the instructions. The very first step says “First reconcile your transactions, where you see R click on it make it C .” Since the very problem I was complaining about was that once these things were “R”, I couldn’t make them “C”, that was less than helpful. The rest of the instructions about saving a copy of the file to my desktop were a little vague, but when I followed them as best as I could, I ended up with exactly the same results as before. So I threw away the copy of the file, and wrote a reply to the email telling them that their steps didn’t work, and could they please actually try reading the problem statement before sending me boiler plate responses to a similar but different problem?

And just as I sent it off, I got an email asking me to take a customer satisfaction survey. I was pleased to report that they didn’t solve my problem, I was very dissatisfied with the quality of their tech support, and in the “suggestions for improvement” I suggested they actually try reading what the customer is saying.

Then I got to playing with Quicken again. I tried clicking those pesky “R”s with various modifier keys, and found one (I think it was Control) that allowed me to uncheck it. Which brought up a warning about how I was going to mess up the reconcilliation, and then another dialog about how I had to save the transaction, and another dialog about something else I was going to mess up. If I was going to have to go through this with every “R” transaction that I wanted to un-reconcile, it was going to be a long night.

Some more messing around brought up a list of previous reconcilliations, which showed a succession of monthly manual reconcilliations, and then two this month which must have happened at Quicken’s whim when I downloaded bank transactions. I clicked on each of the two bogus reconcilliations, and clicked the “Re-reconcile”, which brought up the same dialog I normally use to reconcile. I clicked “uncheck all” and then “save”. It warned me that the reconcilliation didn’t balance, and it was going to put in a new transaction to fix them. After it was finished with that, I found and deleted the two “reconcillation adjustment” transactions. And then I tried the paper reconcilliation. And you know what? It worked. Everything looks fine now, but I don’t doubt I’ll have some problems with the next paper statement as well. But now I think I know how to fix them.

And just in case, I turned off the “auto reconcile” option entirely. I’ve had that on since I started using Quicken in 2002, with the submenu “reconcile when I recieve a paper statement on the 22nd of the month”, and it’s never caused problems before, but I suspect it was that causing the problem. The option probably didn’t mean what I thought it meant, but I guess I’ll see when the next paper statement comes.

Getting there, still some collateral damage

I spent much of the weekend working on my waypoint generator – more specifically on the code that loads new data into the waypoint generator database. As anybody who reads this blog probably heard (and forgot), the main source of data for outside the United States, the NGA ‘s DAFIF is no longer available, and so I’ve been working on ways that people can contribute data that fills in the gaps and updates the DAFIF data as it gets old.

The problem is how to integrate all these different sources of data of various levels of quality and completeness, and somehow pick out the “best” parts of them all. And that’s tricky, because points can move and their IDs can change. Worse still, the various data sources aren’t very consistent about a point’s “type” . Points can move because they’re re-surveyed, or because the navaids that define then have been re-aligned with magnetic north. IDs can change because an airport needed to get a ICAO compatible ID so that they could participate in weather reporting or international flights, or because of political expediency (there is an intersection near here named “PTAKI” – you can bet it wasn’t called that before George Pataki was governor of New York, and it probably won’t be called that after he’s gone). And types are the biggest problem – one source will have a “NDB/DME”, but another will have separate NDB and DME of the same ID at the same location, there is some mixing for “VOR/DME” and “VOR” for the same naaid, and one source uses the type “DVOR/DME” for what DAFIF would call a “VOR/DME”. The worst are the airborne points – the FAA and DAFIF could never agree on whether a point was a REP-PT or a CNF or a AWY-INTXN or a RNAV-WP.

And to make matters worse, one of the data that I used years ago was “waypoint.nl”, a site that catered to GPS users and Geocachers – it seemed likely to me that many of the airport locations were probably taken at the airport fence, but it had a bunch of airports that nobody else had, so I took them. Well, now that I’m getting better data, one of the things I’m finding is that their airport ids are frequently wrong. I’d like to just get rid of them entirely, but they cover countries that nobody else does.

So what all that leads to is if I’m loading somebody’s data, I can’t just delete all the existing points with the same id (or even the same id in the same general area) and insert what I’ve gotten. So I have to come up with a way to find the same point, even if it moved or changed ids, and use the old, existing data to fill in anything missing in the new data (like if the new data source doesn’t fill in runway or navigation frequency data). And hopefully, not lose any existing waypoints that might be “close”.

Because of the inconsistency of airborne waypoint points naming, I separate waypoint types into three types – “airport” and airport like, ground based navaids, and airborne waypoints. You’ll probably see why I mention that later.

The algorithm I settled on to find the existing point was to call an existing point the progenitor of the new point if the existing point was within 0.1 degrees of latitude and 0.1 degrees of longitude of the new point, it was in the same country (and in the case of the US and Canada, it was in the same state/province), and the same type (unless it was in the airborne waypoint category, where the same category was sufficient). In my first tests with some data I have for Ireland (after converting DVOR/DME to VOR/DME), that worked pretty well – it removed some garbage data from waypoints.nl, and updated some DAFIF data. But there was some collateral damage – a CNF named BAL86 was removed, because it was too close to a REP-PT called MARNO, a similar thing happened to GURGA near KEKUL, the SLG NDB/DME at Sligo was replaced by separate SLG NDB and DME, and who would ever have believe that they’d put waypoints named “TIMAR” and “TIMRA” within 0.17 nm of each other? Doesn’t that last one sound like a cockpit resource management nightmare?

I think I need to make a few small changes to the algorithm, but it’s mostly there. I hope. I need to make some bigger tests as well.