• Leap day scuttles Eftpos
  

  February’s extra day has been causing problems with computer systems here and in Australia.

  Foodstuffs said an eftpos outage at lower North Island New World, Pak n’ Save and Four Square stores this morning occurred after its systems were unable to cope with today’s leap day date.

  The outage, which has now been resolved, affected many stores across the lower North Island from early this morning.

  (Source: A tweet from someone on the other side of the Pacific Rim whom I follow.) 
   

• Windows Azure Leap-Year Glitch Takes Down G-Cloud:
  

  Microsoft has confirmed that a service outage that affected its cloud computing service Microsoft Azure, appears to be caused by a leap year bug.

  The Government’s G-Cloud CloudStore was among the sites affected by the outage, which Microsoft says has mostly been rectified.

  (Source: Reader Isarian.)

Is that it?

That’s all we know about.

Sleep tight, and remember that December 31 is Day 366, as Microsoft knows. Or should know. But given this is the second Microsoft product leap year crash in as many leap years, who knows what Microsoft knows.

Well, unless they’re doing some strange counting in binary, which they well may be.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it now, and I’ll say it again: Error messages are not debugging tools.

Error messages need to convey something useful to the user. This error message does not. A good error message should not only tell a developer what’s wrong, but it should also help a user determine what to do next to fix the error.

We goofed.

That is the message Ally Financial is delivering to some of its customers.

The online lender mistakenly failed in December to credit year-end interest earned by some savers who hold its certificates of deposit. The company also provided these customers with incorrect tax information that didn’t reflect the interest they should have earned.

Uh, oops. This might be the first case of a bank itself doing a Salami attack.

On the other hand, no doubt they made the launch date.

I guess that’s one work around.

The New York Giants web staff committed a major gaffe on Saturday and may have given the Patriots some bulletin board material for the Super Bowl.

On Saturday, NYGiants.com posted an ad on their website declaring the Giants Super Bowl Champions.

The ad also contained a link to buy championship merchandise.

Someone eventually noticed the error and took down the ad.

Unfortunately, it was a prophetic defect.

Where was I? Oh, yes. I was talking about trusting your application, particularly one with complicated rules whose violation might result in a prison sentence. You want to trust that application, don’t you? So do I.

But I get the software installed and get into the mandatory registration (that is, give us personal information so we can target more in-application advertising pop-ups to you), and I get confronted with obvious slops on the design.

To whit:

A couple missing lines and slurred text, probably caused by poor compression or sizing.

Next up:

A stray bracket in the corner.

Man, oh man, I can’t wait to find out what strange punctuation marks it leaves in my figures.

Do I trust the application? Not so much. Which is why I don’t use it for much more than a glorified check register. And if it continues with its unrepentant, unrelenting barrage of “Collect credit cards with Intuit!”, “Print checks with Intuit!”, “Let Intuit have access to all your financial accounts!” banners popping up before I can pay my bills, I won’t have to trust it in the future, as I move to Microsoft Excel where it’s nice and quiet.

Take the Progressive Insurance contact us form:

Now, if you don’t select a topic before you click Submit, it asks for a topic. But only a topic

When you select a topic, it changes the fields on the form to reflect what they want for that kind of inquiry (enquiry for our R.P. friends). If you click Submit then, it shows you a list of the fields you need to fill out:

But if you click the Reset button to reset the form, well, that’s not cricket (cricket for our R.P. friends):

You know, any time your form changes the controls on the screen due to AJAX or other techniques, it’s a different form. And it never hurts to check your reset button in various forms of filling out the form, especially if there are look-ups or state changes as you fill out the form.

UPDATE: Welcome, Progressive Insurance readers!

How many prescriptions are affected?

90,000,000:

An Express Scripts spokesman say their customers previously filled 90 million prescriptions at Walgreens. Now they’re taking them elsewhere.

It’s my understanding that the Express Scripts processing system was down all day on January 11. Is it related? I don’t know.

But I do wonder whether Express Scripts load tested its system to handle 90,000,000 change orders in a matter of days while handling its normal processing for all other normal maintenance.

It could be a valuable lesson anyway: Even after you’ve load tested your application to the limits of your budget for virtual users or to a level where the stakeholders are comfortable with very gradual ramp up times, sometimes events out of IT’s control could lead to a catastrophic meltdown.

After destroying 99% of the first city (what, I missed some part up to 1%?), I got an error:

What? There are other lockup errors one can find? I’ll have to try them to collect them all!

While I do that, join me in recasting the lyrics to this song to fit the occasion. Consider it your Friday software testing exercise: