DerekTP’s blog

Times are hard, cashflow’s difficult… all the more reason, surely, to protect and nurture the resources that allow your business to function effectively?  Apparently not, for at least one high street retailer.

This is a company that we’ve been supplying software services to for almost 12 years. We wrote one of their key business critical applications, that ten years on, is in daily use by their buying department. It’s not changed much in the past few years, but occasionally problems arise - usually due to data fed from other systems, from infrastructure changes, or related to user training issues. We’ve had a support contract with the company the past year, guaranteeing that we will provide prompt support on issues as they arise. In return, the retailer agrees to pay us a monthly retainer, with an additional sum if our support hours exceed a certain threshold (which they never have). So effectively they just need to setup a standing order payment for the same amount each month.

We have never ONCE been paid on time. EVERY month we have had to chase, chase, chase to get payment. In all that time, when we’ve sent 29 emails TO their accounts department, we’ve only ever had 2 emails FROM their accounts department. One was a survey asking for information about outstanding balances (!!) and the other was another request to file an up-to-date statement that had been sent to EVERY SINGLE SUPPLIER; not by BCC, but by including their email addresses in the TO field. Now, this gave me a very useful list of several hundred businesses for me to send unsolicited marketing to, should I wish to; it also brought a flurry of responses from equally incompetent users who hit “reply to all”.

Over the past months I’ve threatened to withdraw services on several occasions; each time IT have stepped in and eventually payment has been received. But over the year, I calculate I’ve spent roughly three times as much time chasing payment as I have providing support. That’s madness and it’s not continuing. I’m not renewing my contract with them and as of November their key production planning application will be unsupported, with no-one in-house (even after running the software for 10 years) knowing enough to support it. (Yes, it’s all documented, but no-one in support reads the documentation before referring support queries to me; plus most of it was written in languages that are no longer supported and they don’t have the in-house skills or tools).

The moral: If you are receiving a valuable service from someone - something worth paying for - treat that supplier with respect and courtesy. Treat them like dirt and they will walk away - even in the current economy.

The hint: If you have shares in the number one retailer for mums-to-be and parents alike, who are based in Watford, sell them now.  

OK, so this is my first blog post here. Just intalled Wordpress, and getting to know it.

Wordpress, eh? Yes, it’s free, it’s supported by my hosting provider (Fast2Host, bless ‘em) and everyone knows how to navigate a Wordpress blog. After all, it’s used by millions of bloggers the world over, right?  So it must be pretty bug-free and easy to use, right?And so it is, basically. Five minutes after clicking “install”, here I am, blogging away.

But you see that apostrophe up there in the blog title (and also in this posting title?).  Funny thing, apostrophes (and double-quotes too, for that matter). You see, because they’re almost universally used by database systems to mark a piece of literal text (and distinguish it from a database command) , apostrophes themselves can be tricky to get into databases. They’re used in HTML, too, and various other places. And so to enter an apostrophe into a database, or show it in HTML, there are various work-arounds; special character sequences that tell the software “what comes next is an apostrophe, but don’t treat it like that, just handle it as plain text”.  And most of the time, that works. Except that when setting up the blog, I entered a quote, and it came back displayed as \’. I edited it, thinking I’d mis-typed it. Still showing as \’  - and a second instance, I’d not seen first time around, was now \\’.  Each time I edited, it added a backslash.  As a developer, I quickly twigged that I needed to enter the “encoded” version, ' - now it displayed fine. I went back to admin to make one more little tweak, hit save, and voila! I was back to \’ again.  When Wordpress displays ‘ on the public pages, it correctly displays it as a quote, or apostrophe. But it does the same thing when you edit, so that when you save, and then display again, the quote is “corrupted”.

Now this isn’t such a big deal. No planes have crashed, no power stations exploded, no pacemakers failed.But it’s an indication of just how fickle software can be. Sometimes my clients alert me to “issues” in software that, on the surface, appear really trivial, but also really obvious - how on earth could I have delivered software with such an obvious problem?  But software testing is not a “do it once and forget” process; no doubt the developers of Wordpress tested that admin screen many many times, and never spotted what, to me, was a glaringly obvious issue.  So this is no way a gripe with Wordpress. But it does make you wonder, if a piece of software as much used as Wordpress has glitches and gotchas of this type, is it any wonder that so many computer systems sometimes behave oddly, or that, now and again, even the most accomplished software developer slaps his forehead in a “doh!” moment when a client points out an “obvious” mistake?