CBS MarketWatch - Changes I can live without

Yet another web site lambasted today. CBS MarketWatch decided to change their charting software over the past week. This site formerly had a decent site that showed some interesting things that Google and Yahoo didn't support. It had a lot more detail and insight - oh - and their news feed actually worked better than Google's which I spoke about a few weeks ago. At least they had a way to contact them and provide feedback. Here's the note I sent the - let's see what happens.

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A few weeks ago I set up my charts to show 50,100,200 day moving averages. Today I came back to view charts and the charts had changed a lot. I understand change, however now I can no longer get 50,100,200 day MA, my choices are: 9,50 the click boxes look like they want to offer me the choice of 100,200 alas these do not work. Yet another fine piece of software engineering released upon the the world before it was ready. Which would be fine if you claimed it was Beta - but you didn't you just foisted it onto the world as a brand new feature. Care to discuss - send me an email. You won't.

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The trend continues - Get it mostly there, call it a day.

Copying and Pasting Should Work - Shouldn't It?

So today I was instantly frustrated when copying a piece of a powerpoint document and sending it to a colleague for review. When I pasted it into outlook, it changed colors from a shade of green to a shade of red. Now I ask you - what could possibly be a valid explanation for this. I don't want to hear about palettes, templates, color cubes, and the like. If I select something in one window, and click copy, it should paste cleanly and properly into another window. This is OLE gone mad. When moving pieces of text from one document to another - it seems like it never gets the formatting right. In the never-ending attempt to get better and cooler, seems many have forgotten that "working simply" is an important thing. Per my quote at the top of the page:

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler. - Albert Einstein

Wiki Sorting Problems

Today I was looking up something about HBO. I noticed that there were a few tables on the site. I wanted to see what was the first show that they had produced. I tried to sort by broadcast date. Much to my dismay the sort was skewed. This seems to be yet another example of "get it close" "call it a day". I remember studying the various types of sorts and the efficiency thereof in my very first computer science class. It is truly unfortunate the state that things have become. I can't describe precisely how to fix this because the Wiki stuff is "needlessly complex". Here's the site

Quick Screen shot - last time I checked 2009 was after 1973 - then again perhaps it was because I clicked some of those links (see how they are red) - then again that shouldn't matter should it!?!?!

I am done with QuickenOnline!

I have now deleted all of my quicken online accounts

Let me explain the straw that broke it for me. I just downloaded and synchronized my Mac quicken. Even though I hadn't use it in a few weeks it went mostly smooth and I was able to reconcile all of the outstanding items. It matched very well and the payee information downloaded from my bank looked like reasonable transactions:

Sample Sam's Club. Showed up in Mac as Sam's Club, in QuickenOnline it showed up as: Check Card Purchase XXXXX7509 as did all of my purchases.

My bank provides additional information about the transaction that the Mac version of Quicken pulls in but the online version does not.

It seems dreadfully wrong that as you advance into the online world products would become LESS USEFUL. I CANNOT ADEQUATELY EXPRESS MY LEVEL OF DISAPPOINTMENT.

I AM TRULY AMAZED AT THE LACK OF QUALITY OF THIS OFFERING.

The statement below is clearly created by someone under the age of 25, and is why I will be looking for some other way and perhaps even going so far as to break all ties to Quicken.

Reconciling - Reconciling is useful for matching up your paper checkbook register with the transactions on your bank statement. But who keeps a paper checkbook register these days? With Quicken Online, you're seeing your bank's transactions right on the screen. To match up your receipts with your bank's list of transactions, you can make an entry in the Note field for each transaction as you check it off as valid.

My Coke Rewards Site is Horrific

As anyone who knows me knows, I am an avid drinker of Diet Coke. I collect caps and enter my codes, and get my coupons. This site is loaded with every sort of web control and snazzy, jazzy do-dad you can think of, all rolled into one incredibly slow, hard to use, and difficult to access site. Today I received an "Error during the invocation of the business service". I am confident this is due to the "SOA" craze - Service Oriented Architecture. Unfortunately the business service seems unable to be invoked, and here I thought an invocation was for church. I wasn't sure if this should be a curmudgeon post or a regular post, so I put it here.
Here's the note I just sent them. We'll see if they call.

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I am writing to express my EXTREME displeasure at the use of the mycokerewards.com web site. I have been a loyal diet coke drinker for about 15 years. I have entered many many codes, received coupons and free coke. Today I received a "Error during the invocation of the business service" each time I tried to enter my email and password. This is at least the 10th time I have tried to enter or redeem codes, only to have the site frustrate me. I have been a software developer for 25+ years and I can say that while the mycokerewards.com site may not necessarily be the worst site from a "time to load" "overall design" and "user experience" perspective, it is undoubtedly in the top 3 I have encountered. I cannot think of a worse site - although I suppose it is possible one exists. Thankfully your core business is coke and the product continues to be delicious. Should you like to discuss this with me - I would welcome the opportunity for a live discussion with the developers or development management team regarding human interface design and overuse of technology. It certainly seems like every possible thing that can be on a web site is on this web site. Too bad most of them don't work.

Another Google Rant

Once again I must jump onto my high horse about lack of caring in programming and follow through. Google - aka big brother of information collection and dissemination has created a wealth of things from their 'labs' to try out. BTW - almost everything @ Google is in perpetual beta - a great excuse to the question - "why doesn't this.....". Today's object of my disdain - Google finance -- which of course is Beta.

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I'm confident after HAL learns of my speakings my account will be disabled or something.

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Within this front screen which provides a goodly amount of information, then allows clicks to additional information. In true beta fashion - it also has a way to be displayed in their igoogle interface. This happens to be the method I use. With the market being mostly crazy the past 6 months I click through and read stuff with some level of frequency throughout the day. When clicking "Dow" you come to a screen that shows a 3-month or some other cool looking graph that is scrollable and in general has nice information. On the right is some news feeds - now for the past 6 days the news feeds on the right have been hit or miss at best with miss being far more operative. I haven't seen a real news update in over 6 days, and item "B" is still telling me about Chilean stocks from March 19. Something is clearly amiss in their reporting enginge.

Again - get it mostly there, call it a day - go check Google stock options, play some ping-pong, eat some donuts - or whatever it is developers do now.

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BTW - also no way to send them a note and tell them it is broken. At least not that I can find.

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Zune Date Problems

So today the Urban word of the day was: Y2K9 - The simultaneous worldwide crash of every 30GB Zune worldwide during the early hours of the morning on Dec 31, 2008. Seems it is related to the following stub of C-code.

year = ORIGINYEAR; /* = 1980 */

while (days > 365)
{
    if (IsLeapYear(year))
    {
        if (days > 366)
        {
            days -= 366;
            year += 1;
        }
    }
    else
    {
        days -= 365;
        year += 1;
    }
}

This site has some good discussion of the problem. When in a leap-year and it reaches the last day of the year and can't break out of the outer loop. Hmmm, perhaps a little bit of TESTING! Trying this function with perhaps just a few samples would have revealed this. First off - this is a precise case where this code is needlessy complex, and quite honestly for no reason whatever. There are probably somewhere in the neighborhood of a few thousand routines for dates. Why did they need to invent something new. By the way - the fix is simply to change the days>366 to days>=366.

I am a DEC guy

What does that mean? Well Digital Equipment Corporation (aka DEC) was the first computers that I worked on when I was at the University of Pittsburgh. I started on punch cards - working in FORTRAN using the SITGO - The Steven's Institute of Technology - Load and Go FORTRAN compiler. This was my introduction to formal computing and that which changed me from a chemistry major into a computer science major. From there I learned about Pascal, LISP, ALGOL, Simula and MACRO all on the DEC PDP-10 machines. They were 36-bit machines - 12 Octal digits. For this reason, to this day I still am not very good at Hex, but can do Octal math very well, and know a good chunk of the ASCII chart in Octal but not decimal. I struggled to work with Intel machines due to their handling of words, and the order they looked at bytes to create long-words. When at the software translation companies - we created various mechanisms to deal with the "endianness" of words and long-words. It also means that I never learned a solid appreciation for the big-iron machines of IBM. When starting work I worked on a VAX-11/785 - another DEC machine. I worked in LISP - but learned a lot about BLISS and C. It was there that I was introduced to Unix and the world of the Internet - my company had accounts @ Carnegie Mellon that we could dial-in to to read email. I still have yet to learn much about "The Mainframe" even though I did a brief stint at a subsidiary of IBM - Transarc. My big leap into Unix was on Sun Microsystems that were Motorola 68k based so the "endianness" was preserved and I did a lot of cool and interesting things with databases, networks, file systems and the like. The Sun-3 that I worked on had a spectacular keyboard that you could type extra-fast on and could take a pounding. I spent 5 years @ Westinghouse working on Suns, connecting the corporate network to the Internet, re-addressing the internal network from a C-Class to a sub-netted B-Class and in general learning a lot about networking and systems management.

Crypto Advances

Seems I have been out of touch a little bit with the world of cryptography. Looks like there is a contest to devise a new hash algorithm which will become SHA-3. The good news is I think that the algorithms will be held up to some intense scrutiny and therefore we may actually get some decent code out of it. Code that runs fast, might have decent data structures associated with it, does what it is supposed to do, and hopefully nothing more than that. I think that's really the problem I have - creaping featurism, just keep piling on features to keep the "new version" revenue stream going, meanwhile never bother fixing the old stuff that didn't work. Much like a colleague of mine Bruce Leverett once wrote in a book he published: But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses. Yes - albeit not quite to the extent of Dr. Leverett - I was a compiler jock of sorts back when I worked with Bruce at the software translation company. One interesting tidbit was we worked in LISP - a language that had a lot of interesting variable names. One of the more interesting was Bliss32$Bruce - named after one Bruce Leverett - this variable contained various portions, up to and including the entire Bliss source file that was being processed and transformed into GIF (not the picture GIF - Generic Internal Form) for later processing. BTW - While creating this post - I realized that blogspot no longer provides an easy method for having your post title have a link associated with it. Yes indeed - that's what I'd call an advance. Why would you do away with functionality that existed in the past. Now overall I like blogger and blogspot - especially the new publish feature, that doesn't require needless generation time, but some things were better before.

Lack of caring in coding procedures

Today it seems that everyone simply wants to slam out some code, get it to the 90% mark then call it a day and grab a sandwich. If you are reading this blog, take a look at the pictures of the folks following this blog to see the evidence of this. Both pictures are poorly cropped images of the full size image you will see if you simply click the picture. I know for a fact that software to shrink an image is fairly straight forward, and I fully understand that the image presented may become illegible, however right now Scott is just a nose and eyes, and Tim is basically just the middle of his black and red jacket. If only people could care just a little bit about the code that they are creating and take some pride in what they are doing, perhaps things would not be so poor. More evidence of this is evident for those out there using google reader. Try subscribing to this blog Then go look in your feeds. You should see: "Secretary Mike Leavitt's Blog" There is however a good chance you will see: "Secretary Mike Leavitt 's Blog" WHY - BECAUSE NOBODY CARED THAT QUOTED CHARACTERS MIGHT CAUSE A PROBLEM AND JUST EITHER ENCODED EVERYTHING OR DIDN'T ENCODE ANYTHING!!! My motto - when you claim that something is "done" you should consider whether or not you would want to present it to your mother as evidence of the kind of work that you do.