Really let that sink in.

I am at a loss to come up with another language which shares that particular naming convention.

When I passed by it again today, the lights were out completely. I walked up to the car to look at the light switch stalk, and it was still set to on, which means no one had used it and the battery was completely drained. Trying to help out, I called 411, got the number for PCS, and gave them a call to let them know.

I was greeted by a series of menu options. The two that were relevant to me were as follows:

Or if you are a member experiencing an emergency, please press 1. [..]
To speak with an associate, please press 3.

Since I wasn’t a member and just wanted to speak to someone (and pressing 0 repeatedly didn’t jump dump me to an operator like on most systems), I hit 3. Shortly thereafter I was transferred to a rep who asked me for my membership ID. I told her that I wasn’t a member, but I saw a PCS car that was now surely dead, and I wanted to let them know.

Instead of thanking me or trying to get any information from me, the woman on the other end said, “Yeah, that’s an emergency, try pressing 1, then listen.” I was then promptly dumped back to the main menu.

Upon pressing 1, I heard another menu. After listening to that, I got to another rep who immediately demanded a membership ID number. I told I wasn’t a member, gave her the location of the car and that it had to be dead at this point. Instead of saying thank you, she asked for the license plate info. I said, “I don’t know, I didn’t write it down…do you want me to go back and get it?” She gave me an attitude, then told me not to bother, because it was the only car at that location. Then she hung up on me.

I’m not saying that I wanted a damned key to the city for calling in a dead car, but I potentially saved someone a lot of trouble by letting them know preemptively that the car was not in a usable state. A simple “thank you, sir” would have gone a long way. Instead, I was berated for apparently making the wrong choice on the decision tree.

Here are some ways that they could have made this experience better:

1. Change the tree options. I’m not a member and I’m not experiencing an emergency, so why would I go to that decision first? My goal is to speak to a rep first & foremost, who can either direct me to the proper department, or take the information from me.
2. If a general operator isn’t available, train your reps to transfer misdirected callers in a courteous, respectful manner. Most people would have hung up after the first rude rep dumped them.
3. Offer a hotline number solely for problems with the car. Put the number on the car itself, so strangers who see a vandalized/dead/damaged car can easily call without dialing 411 or needing to look up the number online.
4. Don’t berate non-members for not having all the data. I know, even as a non-member, that the cars are assigned to pods, and I know they can look up a car based on the location of the pod. Therefore, the location & the make and model of the car is all the needed data. Don’t insult the caller for not having a license plate number available if they gave you other datapoints that are necessary for identification. What if the vehicle was damaged, making the plate unreadable? What if the plate was stolen?

Following any number of these suggestions would have likely made for a better experience. But when you insult the Good Samaritans, you do yourself a world of trouble. Remember, it’s the people who experience bad customer service who are likely to talk about it. After all, I took the time to type this out, I surely wouldn’t have done a similar-lengthed article to talk about a normal transaction.

So to sum up, I’m not a member of their service, and you can rest assured that I won’t ever be now.

For the large majority of users, this is just fine, it forces the search results into a size that is proper for most monitors. However, I’m browsing on a 76 cm / 30 in monitor at home, and a 58 cm / 23 in monitor at the office. The pagination bar at the bottom and the results bar with the definition link in it used to appear right-aligned. I tend to browse full-screen, so if I needed to hit the definition link, it was a simple matter to just flick my mouse to the right of the screen. Then max-width was implemented, and now the link is hovering awkwardly in the middle of my screen.

Check out the before & after:

What I find particularly odd about this is that they didn’t implement a max-width for the Search Settings / Sign In section in the top right, that is still right-aligned regardless of browser width.

After a few days of using it, I found myself getting frustrated with the new change. So I fixed it.

It’s a simple, one-line change, available as a Greasemonkey Script or a Firefox Extension. Now results are a lot less annoying (for me at least).

Feel free to download either:

• Google Full Width Results, Greasemonkey
• Google Full Width Results, Firefox Extension

Enjoy!

I recently ran into an issue with a regex inside of a JSP file, with Tomcat in front of it. The JavaScript looked like this:
var regex = /^\\$|,/g;

The goal of it is to globally strip out all commas and dollar signs from a string, for display purposes only (no round-trip to the server here). It worked perfectly in all test & production environments.

Fast-forward several months since that code went live, and I’m splitting all the js out of the JSP. Suddenly that regex is broken; it strips out the commas, but not the dollar sign.

I went back over my steps, making sure I didn’t break anything along the way, but I didn’t. I inserted breakpoints, started logging everything in Firebug…yep, everything is fine beyond the call to the regex, but for some reason the regex isn’t working. I remove the extra slash, and everything is fine again.

But why?

I look at the code in QA & Production, and we have two slashes in the JSP. Then I view the source of the page in Firefox, and there’s only one slash in the source. Thinking my eyes are playing tricks on me, I hop over to Chrome, which does the same. Ditto IE, Safari, and Opera.

Turns out Tomcat is eating that extra slash in the JSP, resulting in the code we wanted to use all along, var regex = /^\$|,/g;, being sent to the browser. Once I split the code out of the JSP, Tomcat stopped chowing down and the extra slash was being interpreted by the browser, resulting in a non-functional regex. A quick tweak to the JavaScript, and all was right with the world.

This is highly annoying and seemingly undocumented behavior though. I shouldn’t need to worry that Tomcat is going to mangle my JavaScript before it hits the browser. Several months ago, I must have coded around the issue, not even realizing what was going on. If anyone finds an answer as to why Tomcat is doing this (besides it just being a bug), I’d love to hear it.

Before MySQL 5.0.60, the index_type option can be given only before the ON tbl_name clause. Use of the option in this position is deprecated as of 5.0.60; support for it is to be dropped in a future MySQL release. As of 5.0.60, the option should be given following the index column list. If an index_type option is given in both the earlier and later positions, the final option applies.

Translation: Did you download a version of MySQL >= 5.0.6? (i.e. have you downloaded MySQL at all in the past 9 months?) Yes? Then every create table statement with indexes in it will fail on an earlier version, even 5.0.x installations. Particularly annoying when the production servers are on 5.0.x versions, and your local dev kit is on 5.1.x.

Now, I of all people realize that Boxee is alpha-quality software, and as a result, I expect it to have some issues. I was not, however, prepared for the fact that using it would be a constant and unending struggle to get my media playing back properly from my SMB shares.

A little background on my setup. I have 1.5 TB of SMB-shared drives that contain all of my (legally ripped) music, movies, and TV shows. All data are in lossless formats, films are in a /Device/Film Title (File Year)/VIDEO_TS format. Permissions are properly set on the shares, and Boxee can see the shares. Most of the time. With that out of the way, here is my current movie-watching experience thus far.

1. Out of over eighty ripped films thus far, Boxee randomly picks up a whopping seven. Just seven. There is absolutely no rhyme or reason as to which seven Boxee will randomly pick up. Today it seems to like Batman, as it pulled up Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Gotham Knight.
2. Batman aside, Boxee incorrectly identified An Inconvenient Truth as An Inconvenient Tax. When I told Boxee that it had picked the wrong film and manually selected the proper one from a list of alternate options, the title changed to the proper title, the description of the film changed, but , but not the associated photo, which still shows up as An Inconvenient Tax.
3. The Incredibles is identified as simply “Movies”. The DVD photo is correct, but there is no description. The path is listed as, and I’m not joking here, “stack:/../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../VTS_02_01.VOB”. Yes, I counted to make sure I got that right.
4. I selected Batman Begins. It started playing great, nice and smooth, until it transitioned from the first VOB to the second, whereupon the audio decided it would randomly switch to French for no good reason.
5. Finally, it likes to randomly pretend the Movies share doesn’t exist, and every fourth or fifth time I access it, it tells me nothing is found. Then it goes back to the aforementioned random seven.

This is far from ideal. A six-year-old Daewoo DVD player works better than this. Heck, Apple’s DVD player on my Macbook will successfully play a ripped, uncompressed DVD by simply pointing it at the film title on my share. All I’m looking for is the same functionality without having to build a generic MCPC at each television in my house.

*No, I don’t care that they insist on spelling it in lower case, I’m giving it a capital letter like it deserves.

A calculation as simple as (289898-54545) / 54545 will throw a fun java.lang.ArithmeticException error.

It’s a good test calculation, because the resulting number, 4.314840957007975066458887157393[...], is a good precision test, and sure enough, it will cause an error every time. Get around it with a scale (in this case 10), and a BigDecimal.ROUND_HALF_UP RoundingMode.

You know, it’s really quite depressing when you see utter stupidity, know it’s utter stupidity, but can’t do anything to change it. Boxee did nothing except show Hulu in a nicer format. The ads were still there, so it’s not as though Hulu was losing their revenue stream. Instead, they were gaining over 100,000 active streams from Boxee users, and the ad impressions that go along with that.

Sadly, the old media in charge of the content that Hulu shows decided that watching their content on a nice TV with a remote control was simply wrong, and that it had to be stopped.

This isn’t the first time that the studios have looked at a good piece of tech and then turned around and shot themselves in the foot trying to ignore it, and it certainly won’t be the last. But as an ardent lover of boxee, I for one won’t be touching Hulu until the situation is resolved. And if it’s not resolved, then I won’t be using it ever again. This is less of a sacrifice than it sounds, because without boxee, I wouldn’t watch Hulu at all.

1234567890 seconds since epoch!

Epoch Win!  Time flies when you’re measuring it in seconds since 1970…