Category: Rant

This time I think it was the cache…

As I wrote about in 2007 in articles and , back in 2004 I wrote a cache for part of the product I was working on at Kodak. In the first release to QA, I made sure that area of the code got tested thoroughly, and they found a bug, and fortunately I got it fixed before it went out to the customers. But to my chagrin, my boss and other people on the project got it in their heads that somehow any problem anywhere near that part of the product must be the fault of my cache, even though time and time again it was proven that there were no further bugs in that code for the following 3+ years.

Now flash forward to the product I’m working on now. We have a “go live to the very important customer” happening in just a few days, and we’re supposed to be in code semi-freeze. But the “Performance Project” just put their performance cache into the product, evidently without giving the local QA much chance to test it before it went to the customer’s QA. That seems just a little bit dangerous to me. But no matter, they assure me they’ve written tons of unit tests. So what could possibly go wrong?

Today the customer called up saying that they’re setting up a new client on the admin site, but every time they go to the “branding setup” for that new client, they see some other client’s branding setup. This branding consists of things like the client logo and some “terms and conditions” text and the like. Since they’ve got literally hundreds of QA people hitting this site, I naturally wondered if they weren’t seeing some interaction between multiple people messing with the setup. But after hours of poking around on their site, one of my peers and I (neither of us members of the “Performance Product”, I might add) are convinced it’s the performance cache. Evidently if you use one browser to look at one client’s branding, and then use a different browser to look at the branding of the client who hasn’t been setup yet, you see the branding from the client that you’d looked at in the first browser. Somehow the cache is reacting to the absence of information in the database for a client by pulling up information from some other client out of the cache. That’s not good.

Hopefully that will get fixed, and hopefully somebody will set up a test plan that actually tests what the cache does not just on a cache miss, but also on a database miss as well. And hopefully the important customer won’t think we’re all a bunch of idiots for not testing this properly.

What goes up must come down

A few weeks ago I was feeling great. I was erging longer and longer distances every night, feeling good and not feeling any pain. I was up to doing 3 sets of 2000 metres, at pretty good speed and not much pause between then, and I had every expectation that I was going to increase the number of sets and distances continually. But then I started doing some extra stuff with Dan, trying to build up my core and other muscles and other things I’d need for the up coming season. But instead, I ended up overdoing it (due to the strange slowness of the way my body responds to pain, I never feel it when I’m overdoing it, only afterwards).

The next day, my shoulder was a little bit sore when I woke up, but I attempted to go paddling with the guys, but ended up falling in at the dock (due to using a different boat) and not going, but by evening my shoulder was killing me. And it kept feeling bad. I tried icing it, I tried stretching, and I tried taking more Aleve than usual. Nothing has really helped.

Yesterday I had a massage from my favourite massage therapist, and then a few hours later I tried a tiny bit of erging. By tiny bit, I mean less than a minute. I felt a tiny twinge, so I stopped. And a few hours later, it was back to feeling really bad.

My enthusiasm and optimism for next season has pretty much evaporated now.

Notice anything missing?

Last night somebody stole my roof rack. The Yakima rack was nearly 12 years old (except the new q-towers, which are only a few months old) but it might be worth something to somebody. The really annoying thing is the v-rack. The only people who use v-racks are kayak racers, and it’s unlikely anybody will use this – more likely they’ll sell it scrap for less than what it cost me for the ropes to tie it down.

I’ve phoned a few aluminium recyclers, but nobody has seen it yet.

Don’t worry, it won’t affect anything

Before upgrading to Lion, I checked the compatibility of the apps I use, and discovered that Quicken doesn’t work on Lion. Intuit hasn’t actually updated the Mac version or Quicken for nearly 5 years, instead bringing out something called “Quicken Essentials For Mac” which didn’t have the one thing I used most in Quicken, which was bill paying. So I decided to bite the bullet and start using my bank’s ancient and creaky web interface to pay my bills. In a wonderful bit of synchronicity, my bank started offering a web product called “FinanceWorks” which did the other thing I used Quicken for, which was showing me what expenses were coming up, which helps me decide how much money I have to transfer into savings or back out of savings and the like. It even allowed me to combine information on my bank accounts, my credit card, my retirement accounts and my mortgage all in one place. Very nice. It’s an Intuit product, looking very similar to their mint.com web site, but it’s integrated into the bank’s web site so once I log into the bank’s web site I can bring it up without any further logging in.

Flash forward to 7 days ago. My bank phoned me up and said they had to change my account from “Foo checking” to “Bar checking”, but the account number would stay the same and all my web payments would be unaffected. I said ok, and within minutes, the bank’s web interface showed the change.

But it turns out they lied. There was one thing that changed – FinanceWorks can’t update any of my bank accounts. It’s still updating my third party accounts, it just won’t update my primary accounts.

And that has lead me into the hell that is Intuit technical support. The way you start a support request in this case is you just click a button and it shows you some details (like your customer id, financial institution, account that’s not refreshing, error code, etc) and sends it to Intuit. That information should be more than sufficient for Intuit to see that the accounts that aren’t refreshing are the ones on my primary bank, ie. the one that I didn’t (and couldn’t) enter login details into FinanceWorks, they’re included automatically. And yet the first couple of responses from Intuit are along the lines of “make sure you can log into the bank’s web site?” and “did you enter your details correctly?”. I kept responding and telling them that it was my primary institution. So those responses started tapering off (but not ending) and I started getting a different response, saying to use this particular option to reset my account. Except I couldn’t find this option anywhere on their site. And so I’d respond saying that I can’t find this option, and they’d respond with another demand that I use this option. (I should mention at this point that the “Help” in FinanceWorks is just a simple FAQ, not searchable and not very detailed or complete – also, there is no search to find options on the site, so it is possible that there are menu items I can’t find).

It’s been 7 days now, and I still can’t get FinanceWorks to update after this supposedly innocuous change. And as of 5 minutes ago they just sent me another “Go to the account details screen and change your login information”.

Jealous, much?

So less than a week after I start using my new upgraded Linux box for lots of stuff, my laptop suddenly decides not to wake up out of sleep, and when you reboot it the light comes on and you can hear some minor activity inside, but you never get the start up chime and the usual special keys to boot in diagnostics mode or single user mode didn’t work. I think it’s jealous because I haven’t been using it as much. Or maybe it’s just under more stress because I’m opening and closing the lid and moving it around instead of leaving it tethered on my desk all the time.

Vicki has been talking for a while about getting a new laptop because her old MacBookPro with only 3Gb of RAM keeps freezing up, especially when she’s doing Second Life, and especially since she “upgraded” to Lion. So we went off to the Apple store, her to get a new MacBookPro, and me to get some help from the Genius Bar.

The Genius poked around, tried a few things I’d already tried and a few things I hadn’t, all to no avail. It wouldn’t stir. So he said “well, it looks like it needs a new logic board. We had a few problems with nVidia chipsets back around that time, so I’m going to write it up as one of those even though I can’t boot it far enough to run the graphics system diagnostic.” The upshot is that I’m going to be without my laptop for a week or more, and I’m going to get a new $500 logic board for free. Not too bad, I guess. Although if they’d tried to charge me for it, I probably would have just bought a Macbook Air instead. So maybe that’s a mixed blessing.