Weather Measurement Bug

1- You go to www.weather.com
2- You get the weather for your area.
3- You click on the 'Metric' link to convert all measurements to metric ( assuming the page isn't localized and you haven't done so already ).
4 -Having done this, look at the picture below. See any problems?

Fleeing Felon

Economic times are tough. Now, imagine you recently became part of your state's nearly 8 percent unemployment rate. You hope what is left of your meager savings (which is now worth less than you've invested) and the small severance pay out will last until you find a new job.

However, finding new employment proves more difficult than you anticipated. You eventually decide that you must swallow your pride and request government assistance during your personal economic downturn. You do the calculations and submit the required forms to receive food stamps to help feed your family.

You anxiously await the arrival of the first month's benefits. You find an envelope from the state in your mailbox. You excitedly open it, expecting to find your food stamp card. Your excitement wanes as you read the header on the letter: "Notice of Decision". The letter explains that you are ineligible for food stamps because you are a "fleeing felon".

What!? A fleeing felon? Not only are you down on your luck, but now the government has labeled you a criminal -- or at least their computer has.

You are not a felon, and you are definitely not fleeing. You've given your name and location to more government agencies, bill collectors, and prospective employers in the past few months than in the preceding decade.

You spend the day worrying, fuming, and making phone calls with no consolation. Then your phone rings. It is the state calling. It turns out that a computer coding error led to over 200 food stamp recipients being incorrectly informed they are fleeing felons. The state doesn't think you are a felon, and you will be getting your food stamp benefits.

Now, you wonder if the state will pay for the treatment of your anxiety.

Seem absurd? Well, this happened in Maine earlier this month. Check out Computer Glitch Lists Food Stamp Recipients As Felons.

Sometimes small technical problems can have a huge impact on the emotions of people.

I wish it were connecting

Nothing is happening ... oh, except that most IO with the computer seems to be frozen while ActiveSync is endlessly failing to connect.

Actually, I'm not logged in

Authentication successful? You are now logged in?

In fact, I am not logged in.

The technical call stack info likely makes sense to the developers that coded this. However, is it helpful to scare users with the words "Fatal error" and a call stack dump?

MadLibs helped me here

"How many Microsoft Certifications do you hold?"
I have no Microsoft Certifications.

OR

"How many Microsoft Certifications do you hold?"
No.

And if I call support?

Hello. Support?

Yes, your server encountered an unexpected condition and could not fulfill my request. Can you fix it?

Are you asking me to forget the password?

A dialog box is open

A modal dialog box appears to tell me a dialog box is open? Really? Of course, this dialog box is open. Oh, is there another open dialog?

Has it failed or what?

Submitted by James Bach

James Bach reports that he sees this message every time he tries to explicitly log out WordPress.



Is this an error message? Or maybe an error hint?

Toolkit API Key

Submitted by Danny Faught

Danny Faught reports that he trying to book a hotel room on Travelocity. He was viewing hotel search results on a map and used a mouse gesture to go back to the previous page.

The toolkit API key? Using a deprecated API? Make sure your key matches the Technical Support Site My Accounts page? Is this a useful user-facing message?

Thankfully, this error cleared up for Danny after he moved forward and then back again in the browser history.

Completely remove what?

After upgrading Skype and launching the new version, the dialog below appears on my screen.

I didn't select an application to be removed. What is the 'selected application'? Is this even related to the Skype upgrade? What happens if I select No?

Are we there yet?

Tweeted by @technosexual

"Keep this up and I don't think we'll be able to stay friends."

Conflicting messages

I tell my computer to print a PDF file. After a short time, Windows displays a bubble telling me the document was sent to the printer.


Than Acrobat displays a dialog stating the document could not be printed.



So which message should I believe? Was my document printed? Looks like I need to take a walk down the hall to the printer.

Context free spelling correction

When sending a meeting invitation, Outlook checks my spelling. It prompts me to correct a possible spelling error. However, I can't see, or switch to, the context in which the text is found. Without seeing, I can't tell if the spelling needs correcting. How about displaying the text in question in context?

All ur base 8 are belong to Flash app

Last night, I saw a commercial for an online life insurance tool from a large insurance company. It seemed to me that if an insurance company sinks dismal-economy dollars into television advertising for a web-app, they place some significant value on it.

And where there is value, there are bugs.

So during the course of exploring, I decided to try some input validation tests. Here are the fruits of my labors for your consideration.

Anticipated Retirement Age Validation
This is the known good example. Apparently, I cannot retire this year. Good advice.


And here is how I broke it.

Your Annual Income Validation
Here is the known good example.

What happens if I simply put a zero in front of the value? Well for starters, I need a lot less insurance.

After navigating away and coming back, I observed that my Annual Income had undergone a transformation.


Looks like my "0200000" entry

... was interpreted in base eight.


Bringing it all together
Knowing what I now know about the input validation ( or lack thereof ) I submit the following question: Is there a problem with a 100 year old person, who wishes they had retired when they were 65, being told that they may need $40,141 of life insurance based off their $200,000 annual income interpreted in base 8?

WARNING: Others might see what you publish on the Internet

I just clicked the PUBLISH POST button. I expect others to be able to see the information.

Blue Screen of the Day

Tweeted by bowlerjim

Kodak photo kiosk at CVS

Wait...

"Dear Microsoft: A 'Wait' button? Seriously? A BUTTON? Seriously???" - @solomania



Does it go faster if the user doesn't click the Wait... button?

Cancellation not allowed

Switching to another program doesn't make the dialog go away or unfreeze the program hampered by whatever is busy. And when Retry does not work, there is no way to cancel.

Someone updated their "gender"?

I think Orkut is more famous than Facebook in India and Brazil. They started providing updates of what our friends are updating in their profile.

A friend of mine had not added his gender to his profile when he registered long ago. Recently he probably thought it is good idea to add it. When he did that, I got to see the following:



OMG! What am I supposed to think?

I think the code might have been written something like:

name_value & " updated " & label_value

The test of does it display the update to friends might have passed but what about tests to see if this can hurt any user? Is it likely to be misunderstood? My friend did not change his gender. He set a value in a profile form.

What other updates may not be understood as intended?

Blue Screen of the Day

Tweeted by SAGExSDX

US Airways

Send? I don't believe you!

( With apologies to 'Evil Tester' )
What follows is a bug. Or not. See which side of me you agree with.

[Scene]
Creating an email for a blog I read a lot. After clicking send, the page refreshes. This is what I observe:



Evil Zach:
Look at that red text!!!! It looks an awful lot like an error indicator in an ASP page. Are you sure it was sent successfully?

Good Zach:
I don't perceive the content to be an error message, so I'll assume that some kind of non-errant process just occurred in web-land. Besides, I'm not convinced that we've seen an error occur on this page before. How would we know if one did? Can we assume that the UI metaphor employed would map to something we've experienced before?

Evil Zach:
You think too much. Devs don't like re-inventing the wheel. If the choice is between an error widget they can drop on the page, or rolling their own error indicator - which do YOU think they would use?

Good Zach:
Good point. But we've sent messages from this page before.

Evil Zach:
Did they ever respond?

Good Zach:
Um...No, but they are exceptionally busy folk. It would be naive to expect replies all the time.

Evil Zach:
Maybe they hate your FACE! Look, the contents of our message are still there - Name, Email, Subject, Message. Did you notice that the SEND button is still there, too? Why? Our previous experience with e-mail clients is that when a message is sent, we are taken to a page ( or area ) that alerts us to the result of the attempt and AWAY from content. The page reflects the state of the system. This says to me, "Not much has changed, Bucko".

Good Zach:
Well, it may be that the developers chose this work flow in case an error DID occur. That way, the user would not lose their carefully crafted email.

Evil Zach:
Now we're back to the, "How do you know there's a problem here?" Trust your feelings, Luke. By the way, you are making a lot of concessions for the developers.

Good Zach:
True, but I'm unsure if this really is an issue and what severity it may be. My feelings are conflicted. I'll ask the testing community if they would raise this up as an issue if they were...um...us.

Evil Zach:
More Xanax, please.

Florian's Bug: The hour the iPhone forgot

Tweeted by @florianseroussi. Confirmed by @karlerikson and @maxbeatty.

It is March 8th, 2009. This is the 2nd Sunday in March, the day that Daylight Savings Time starts in the United States and Canada. This evening, Florian Seroussi (@florianseroussi) reported trouble setting his iPhone alarm to 2:30 AM for a conference call. Karl Erikson (@karlerikson) and Max Beatty (@maxbeatty) quickly confirmed they found the same problem on their iPhones.

So what happens when you try to set an alarm for 2:30 the next morning when it is the second Sunday in March? Let's see... (Screen shots courtesy of Karl Erikson.)

Add an alarm for 2:30 AM.



And get an alarm for 1:30 AM.



It appears that the iPhone alarm is coded to adjust times in the 2 o'clock hour back to the 1 o'clock hour on the second Sunday of March. This is correct for actions that apply to the second Sunday of March. However it looks like the fine folks at Apple neglected to consider the case of users needing to set alarms on the day the time changes for the 2 o'clock hour of the next morning.

Max Beatty tested other times and provided the following video. Take a look.

Thank you to Florian Seroussi for finding what Apple missed. Maybe he is the only one that wants to be awakened at 2:30 in the morning after the shortest day of the year. :) In his honor, I dub this bug Florian's Bug.

And, I hope Florian makes it to his meeting on time.

Blue Screen of the Day

Tweeted by RohanLikhite

Express Park

The object is not responding

Tweeted by @bp

Yeap, it's still possible to bust Word and Excel with, basically, Copy and Paste. The clincher is this error message (Where's the "Cancel"?!)

Where is the cancel? And click OK to wait?

Close the installer to install

Tweeted by wbinford and Meboz

Limit plus 69

If the limit is 500, why was I permitted to waste time and effort entering more data?

Bilingual

"This is probably not a good sign" - @Alcedine

Empty Monologue

If you say so.

This doesn't look like MS-DOS

Tweeted by @gustavd

Blue Screen of the Day

Tweeted by @Burkazoid

"Super bikes are no match for the BSOD!"

Even parking spaces aren't safe from software failure

Tweeted by @rocknlikedockin 

 "HAHAHA! Parking Meter Fail!"

This thing has to be run by software.

So there's no parking when the meter fails?

Hilfe und Support kann nicht geöffnet werden

Tweeted by @Rewur

Windows Search, auf Deutsche.

Says "Follow the instructions on the left side, to start the search." at the top of the window.

"Help and Support can not be opened because a system service is not executed.

Run 'help and support' to resolve this issue."

If it knows what is wrong, why doesn't Windows start the service on its own; or at least give the user a dialog response option to start the service? Why isn't the service running? Are Windows users expected to know where and how to start and stop services?

The day the lights went out @Twitpic

Well, maybe not a software problem...

Twitpic is a service used by tens of thousands (maybe more) to share photographs on Twitter.  They went down sometime this morning. The approximately 50 tweets per minute I'm currently seeing complaining about the outage leads me to believe people value this service.

@TwitPic says there's a power outage at their data center. Maybe someone kicked the switch on the power strip under the desk. :)

Timeout: Contact your administrator

Should every user really contact their administrator every time their session times out due to inactivity?

Here's a feature administrators are going to love: You timed out. Now, go pester your Quality Center administrator for no good reason.

What is an administrator to do other than get frustrated as they repeat "Log in again" to each timed out user that contacts them?

Google Reader Corpus Callostomy part 2

The right pane and the left pane are now on speaking terms. But the body won't respond.

The Countdown

Tweeted by @spanishmanners

the countdown clock is lovely but your developer forgot to account for timezones

Yeah, something doesn't seem right about this countdown clock. So I had to try it out myself. I tried to view the page at http://moma.org with my computer clock set to a variety of time zones. The countdown appears to only work properly with timezones west of GMT. Did developers and testers for this New York based museum not think to support users in other parts of the world?

I still haven't figured out what happens when the countdown gets to 0:00:00:00.

Broken Blogger

Blogger went belly-up this afternoon.  Attempts to access Blogger-hosted blogs resulted in the above error message being displayed.  I'm glad it wasn't a permanent error. :) If you are reading this, it is working again.