The importance of clarity

-
I wrote and now maintain a Pocket PC app for Imperial Tobacco (yes, despite supporting the ban on smoking in public places). It is important that the date/time on the PPC is accurate so part of the business flow is to get the user to check the date/time immediately after they log in.

Despite this step we were getting invalid dates back from their collected data, in all cases it was always one day ahead of the correct time. We have recently introduced various additional common sense checks such as "You have missed a working day, are you sure?" etc, but the change that will have the biggest affect is the one that was the smallest to change.

When the user enters the current date/time if it is less than the last known date/time on the server (sent in their database of work to do) I showed a message saying it was incorrect. The message read

"The date you have entered is invalid"

At this point the user looks at the date they have entered, thinks "but the date is right!", they click it forward a day and the PPC accepts it, so they continue with their work. Because I used the word "date" the user was blinkered to the value in the date, and didn't even bother looking at the time they had entered. The message now reads

"The date/time you have entered is invalid"

Hopefully this will be a bigger clue :-)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Connascence

-
I’ve just finished reading What every programmer should know about object oriented design . The first couple of sections are a bit useless really, but the 3rd section is very good. I particularly liked the section on the difference types of connascence in software. There’s some basic information about it here if you fancy a brief overview of what it is about. It’s a really good book, I recommend you read it! Should only take a day if you only read the 3rd section.
Read more

Convert absolute path to relative path

-
Today I needed to convert an absolute path to a relative path based on a specified base path. E.g. c:\a\b\c -> c:\a\b\c\d\file.txt = d\file.txt c:\a\b\c -> c:\a\file.txt = ..\..\file.txt c:\a\b\c -> c:\a\x\file.txt = ..\..\x\file.txt I am surprised there is nothing in the .NET framework so I had a hunt around and converted the code from the following URL ( http://www.vergentsoftware.com/blogs/ckinsman/default.aspx?date=2006-08-07 ) into C#.... private string RelativePath(string absolutePath, string relativeTo) { string[] absoluteDirectories = absolutePath.Split('\\'); string[] relativeDirectories = relativeTo.Split('\\'); //Get the shortest of the two paths int length = absoluteDirectories.Length < relativeDirectories.Length ? absoluteDirectories.Length : relativeDirectories.Length; //Use to determine where in the loop we exited int lastCommonRoot = -1; int i
Read more

Printing bitmaps using CPCL

-
I've had no end of grief trying to print a PCX to a Zebra Printer using the CPCL printer language. Silly me, didn't notice the EG command (expanded graphics) so there was no need to convert my BMP to a PCX and then struggle with binary data. I still had a bit of grief working out how to print using the EG command because the documentation is quite frankly crap. The expected command format is EG {WidthInBytes} {HeightInPixels} {XPos} {YPos} {Data}\r\n The printer expects a 1 bit pixel matrix. So if pixel(0, 0) is set you will set "80" in the data. If pixel(0, 0) is set and pixel (7, 0) is also set you would sent "81". Basically what you need to do is to read each set of 8 horizontal pixels and then use bit operations to create a byte value 0..255, and then output this as hex 00..FF. Here's the routine :-) public void DrawBitmap(Bitmap bmp, int xPosition, int yPosition) { if (bmp == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("bmp");
Read more