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Metro

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-Dont-Worry,-Well-Fix-It!.aspx

I'm at the Business of Software conference in San Francisco this week and thought it'd be the perfect opportuntunity to revisit a classic. Don't Worry, We'll Fix It! was originally published on November 28, 2006.

We're in a bit of a jam, an email to the support desk read, we accidentally ran an entire day's worth of transactions for 11 Oct 2009 instead of 11 Oct 2006. Can you fix this?

In the world of retail, it's not an uncommon practice to "open" for a business date that is not the current date. Think of 24-hour stores that want to "close" the day at 11:00 PM instead of midnight, or the cases when the registers are out of commission. Whatever the reason, it's a feature that customers want and a feature that T. Ferguson's company provides in their point-of-sale systems.

Obviously, there's no way for the software to know if a different date is purposeful or accidental; all it can do is default the "open" date to the current date and hope that someone would notice a mistake on the registers, receipts, etc. before the day was "closed" out. The support email was the first "problem" that T.'s company had with this feature since first offering fifteen years ago.

Despite having a nation-wide chain of stores, with each bringing in nearly $500,000/day in sales, this company decided not to go for the extended-hours support contract. With no one to call at 9:30 PM for support, the shift manager ignored the incorrect date and "closed out" the store's point-of-sale system. He left a note for the general manager, who promptly emailed support the next morning.

The general manager also called the support line at 9:01 AM -- just after it opened -- to make sure they got the email. He was very concerned that the error would gravely impact their October reports, forecasting reports, inventory, and just about anything else that relied on that day's transactional data. The support rep assured the general manager that the development team was working on a way to fix the issue.

From a programming perspective, this was actually an easy thing to fix. All of the daily transactions are stored in a single database table, so a simple UPDATE script and a "re-close" should do the trick. They reproduced the "problem" on a test machine, ran the fix script, and watched it worked like a charm. T. called up the store to let the manager know how they planned to resolve the issue.

"But," the manager asked, "what about when someone makes a return? Their printed receipt will have a different transaction date. Won't the register refuse the return?"

"Nope," T. replied, "we only use the store number, register number, and transaction number when we validate the receipts for returns."

"Sounds great," the manager said in a much less stressful tone, "what a relief! I was really worried about how bad this would be."

The fix was sent to a technician to fix the problem on site. Before running the script, he noticed one thing that the development team missed: not only was there only one day of faulty data in the database, there was only one day. Period. All the transactional history was gone!

That, of course, would present a problem when trying to process a return. Or receiving merchandise that was ordered in the past. Or verifying an employee's time clock punches. Or tracking special-ordered items. Or knowing whether the store is on pace to meet its weekly sales goal. Or just about any activity of any consequence in retail that ISN'T selling merchandise.

The technician reported this back to the development team. After a bit of digging, they figured out why only the one day of data was left: part of the register closing code purges data that's over three years old. And how does one find three-year old data when the system clock is not a reliable indicator? Why, by taking the business date of the newest transaction and subtracting three years, of course!

The manager's day was about to get much, much worse.
 

http://www.cartoonlabs.com/comics/index.php?date=2009-11-10&show=sinfest

Sinfest
Tatsuya Ishida

http://randomreality.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2009/11/10/4376741.html

Once more I find that I'll be checking some research when I come round to editing this. Right now I'm struggling with SAD. Where I was on schedule two days ago I'm now dropping behind because I'm self-medicating on World of Warcraft which is the only thing that'll get me out of bed at the moment. Maybe I'll get a chunk done later today.

-----

I got to Gatwick airport for our flight to Jersey with plenty of time, despite my luggage (one carry on and one booked suitcase, plus several pockets full of gadgets) weighing a ton. Judith was waiting for me through security sipping an over priced coffee.

Our flight was due to leave on time so we had time for a breakfast, something light for me while Judith tucked into a plate piled with bacon, sausage and eggs. With more coffee.

The was a joke once upon a time that the safest flight would have an autopilot, a dog and a pilot on the flight deck. The autopilot would fly the plane, the pilot would feed the dog and the dog would bite anyone who tried to turn the autopilot off. It was no longer a joke. Too many planes had crashed when one of the pilots had started showing symptoms of CLBD-7, either the hallucinations or the paranoia. So the new policy for all airlines was three pilots and one autopilot. The autopilot would fly the plane and it would require codes from at least two of the three humans in order to be turned off.

Crashes were now at an all time low.

The few times I’d flown were in the big commercial jetliners, so the little propellor plane that would fly us out to Jersey made me a little nervous, there is something strange about sitting in your seat at the back of the plane, yet being able to see all the way down to the door of the flight deck.

I think that Judith noticed my nervousness and she just grinned and me and told me that we’d no doubt be flying in smaller, and far more rickety planes than this. All I could think of was the comedy films where the hero was flown over mountainous terrain in a plane held together with bailing wire and flown by a crazed lunatic. It didn’t make me feel any better.

The flight was through beautiful weather, looking down and the ground, the cars, the towns, the fields, it all seemed so peaceful - as if there were nothing wrong with the world.

We soon landed at Jersey after Judith took advantage of the duty free to buy a huge bottle of vodka.

The sun was shining and the skies were blue as we cleared customs, it was a scene spoilt by the remnants of the machine gun outposts pointing at the doors of the airport. It was the reason for those that I was here to talk to Ben Slade, who was a Jersey Senator during the early years of the outbreak.

We caught a taxi to his townhouse at St. Heliers.

“We were worried”, he told me after pleasantries were made and tea was served, “We had heard reports of an unusual disease, the same stories we all heard, of people suddenly going crazy, of being overcome with mental problems, of violence and terror. You have got to remember that no-one knew what was happening in those days. We didn’t know that the incubation period was so long. After all we’d just got over the second wave of Swine ‘flu, isolation had worked for us there.”

He was right, in the second wave of Swine ‘flu, Jersey had implemented strict quarantine policies - thermal imaging at airports and docks, reduced internal travel, mandatory health checks for people in certain professions. This had limited the spread of disease in Jersey to minimal levels.

“We thought that we could do the same with this new disease. After all, we’d barely wound down the Swine ‘flu systems so it would be a minimal matter to bring them back into effect. Of course, then we’d had the airport attack.”

“I read the reports after the attack, they said that we were just unlucky, that a family with a predisposition to the disease had all manifested symptoms on the same flight from Russia. I can only imagine what it must have been like, three people running through the terminals, attacking people, biting them. You may ask why our security didn’t shoot them, but can you imagine shooting an eight year old girl just because she is biting people?”

“We weren’t sure that it was the disease at first, but the newspapers got a hold of the story and it was on the front page for several days. That caused panic and the public demanded that we do something. So we got more strict. Tests on people before they could leave the airport. Of course that took time, especially because we didn’t know what we were looking for.”

I interrupted him, “What happened to the people who were bitten?”

“Oh, they were sent to a quarantine camp. Well, the Jersey people were, those bitten who came from other countries were denied entry and sent back to where they had come from. Possibly not a wise idea in retrospect but the officials at the airport were scared, they acted without understanding what had just happened. I think they had seen too many zombie movies”.

“More and more people were being turned away, mostly those with high body temperatures - we didn’t know that this way of screening was useless, and with the frenzy whipped up by the papers about these ‘zombies’, we were forced to do something”.

“And so we closed the ports and the airports to non-commercial traffic.”

“No private citizen would be allowed onto the island, only those with a valid commercial reason, and they would largely be restricted to the ports and terminals. No-one would be allowed to come onto the island to stay. We had been lucky after all, the only cases of CLBD-7 that we had were from those bitten at the airport. There were no cases of infection within Jersey proper”.

“But there were attempts to enter the island, after all, we were famously ‘infection free’, us and Madagascar at least. So people fleeing from France and the UK tried to breach our borders. They would sneak aboard the mail planes, or aboard the container ships brining us supplies. After one or two near misses where someone managed to breach the cordon we put up the machine gun posts.”

“Understand that we didn’t want to do that, we didn’t want to end up shooting people who were just trying to be safe, but you have to remember that we were all scared in those days, we thought that Clubbed was going to end the world, that we’d all be dead, or worse, within ten years. We wanted to to be safe long enough to give the scientists a chance to find a cure.”

“But that day never came. Instead, despite our paranoia, we started to get cases of infection within our borders. We now know that this is because the incubation period was so long, that the infected were already living here before the first symptoms started showing up on the world stage, but that we’d been lucky that in our cases the incubation was very long. I suppose it’s just because we have less people here to be infected.”

“I still remember when the WHO declared Jersey as ‘infected’, all our precautions had been for nothing, the people shot while running for the fences were killed for nothing. The quarantine camps were a waste of time and the endless hours that I and my fellow senators spent trying to protect the people of this island was for nothing”.

I asked him why he stepped down from being a senator.

“You might think that it’s because I was ashamed of what I’d done, the people who we’d killed in an attempt to save ourselves. But it wasn’t, it was much simpler than that - my wife was showing signs of infection and I didn’t want her to go through it on her own, with me away from home for long hours at the States building. So I shucked my duty to the island for the duty of caring for my wife”.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DilbertDailyStrip/~3/lRer8R6VRAY/

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-11-10/

http://www.explosm.net/comics/1853/

http://www.chabad.org/article.asp?aid=107464

http://www.chabad.org/107464

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Metro

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(Please note: if you participate, you will be asked to create a login for the survey website that consists of your email address. This information will be for your own use and will not be used to identify you or link you to your responses in any way).

https://www.psychdata.com/s.asp?SID=121784

SSRIs include:

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fluoxetine (Prozac, Fontex, Seromex, Seronil, Sarafem, Fluctin (EUR))

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sertraline (Zoloft, Lustral, Serlain)

dapoxetine (no known trade name)

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/org/YOXN/~3/hZaMGtt1z7g/

http://www.mentalnurse.org.uk/?p=2621

Yesterday I posted about the Maresfield Report, which offers a “devastating critique” (well, according to their press release) of the case for regulation of the psychotherapy profession by the Health Professions Council. Among other things they offer the stunning revelation that psychotherapists shouldn’t be regulated because, er, they aren’t required to abide by child protection or Protection of Vulnerable Adults legislation.

This really is quite an unbelievable claim on their part. If I stated in work that confidentiality could override child protection/POVA concerns, then I’d be hauled into supervision to have some very fundamental questions asked about whether I’m safe to practice. If I said it in a job interview, it would absolutely guarantee that I wouldn’t be offered the job. But here it is stated in a report that’s endorsed by no less than ten psychotherapy organisations – including the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, the Arbours Association, the Philadelphia Association and the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis.

The authors claim that this report is a “a major embarrassment to HPC”. It’s a major embarrassment to somebody, all right, but I’m not sure it’s the HPC.

I’ve been reading more of the report, and in between smacking my own head on a desk, I’ve discovered more examples of outright stupidity. So, ding-ding, Round Two of my critique of the Bible of Boswellox that is the Maresfield Report.

There’s some stuff in the report that’s a bit more valid than “but we don’t have to report if a child is being abused, do we?”. They point to inefficiencies in the HPC and backlogs of cases. This may well be true, but here’s thing about regulatory bodies. I moan about the Nursing and Midwifery Council all the time. Likewise, Fighting Monsters moans about the General Social Care Council. But neither I nor Fighting Monsters have any disagreement with the core aims and principles of the NMC or GSCC. We just want them to do their jobs better. I’m not saying the HPC is a perfect organisation. I’m just saying that they may be, to borrow a psychotherapy term, good enough.

A lot of their other claims are rather less valid. In fact, they’re downright silly.

Silly Claim#1

Although [the HPC's] complaints expenditure is the largest part of its budget, with £4.66m spent in 2009, only a tiny percentage of complaints from the public are heard each year. Of these, more than 70% are found to have no case to answer, compared with only 10% deemed to have no case to answer by one of the field’s main regulatory bodies, the UKCP. (page 6)

So, the HPC dismisses 70% of the complaints it hears from the public, whereas the UK Council for Psychotherapy upholds 90% of them? Wow, that’s a lot of psychotherapists that the UKCP is raking over the coals…

…except that the UKCP, unlike the HPC, doesn’t actually take complaints direct from the public. The UKCP is an umbrella organisation for 80 different psychotherapy organisations. You have to first go through the complaints procedure of the individual organisation that your therapist is registered with. Only after it’s been through the member organisation’s complaints process will the UKCP hear your complaint. If it’s gone all the way through one complaints procedure, and then on to the UKCP’s, then it’s inherently more likely to have substance to it than if it’s come straight from somebody writing in to the HPC.

Surely the authors of the report must know how UKCP complaints procedures work? After all, several of the signatory organisations (the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, the Arbours Association, the Cambridge Society for Psychotherapy, the Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy etc) are UKCP member organisations themselves.

Silly Claim#2

They make great play of the fact that the HPC finds a case to answer in significantly more of the complaints that come from employers than they do of complaints that come from the public.

So, far from protecting the public, the HPC upholds the interests of employers of the practitioners it registers, whilst being funded by registrants rather than their employers. (page 40)

Well, yes that could be a conclusion one could draw from the fact that a complaint is more likely to be upheld if comes from an employer rather than a member of the public. It’s because the HPC is on the side of the fat cats.

Or, it could be because a complaint from an employer will already have gone through its own internal disciplinary procedures, and, as with complaints that have already been through a member organisation before going to the UKCP, it’s more likely to be a substantial case.

Silly (and possibly libellous) Claim#3

On page 30, there’s a few unpleasant, possibly even libellous insinuations about Witness, a charity that has been campaigning for HPC regulation of therapy.

Witness circulates stories to the media of abusive therapists and promotes the HPC as the solution to this, yet there have been questions as to the possible conflict of interest that may be involved in their approach, and the HPC’s collaboration with Witness as opposed to actual user groups. According to Companies House, Witness has been in administration for some time now and there have been concerns that if funding were to be a key issue for their survival, and if the DoH and even HPC were funding this organisation, there is the risk that Witness may not be in the best position to articulate critiques of HPC.

Love the phrasing there…”there have been questions”…”there have been concerns that”. Way to heavily imply something you’ve got absolutely no fucking evidence for! Classy.

As for “HPC’s collaboration with Witness as opposed to actual user groups”, well, Mind have been campaigning for HPC regulation for some time now, and they’re heavily user-oriented.

I could do more fact-checking of the report’s claims, but the more I read of this ridiculous publication the more I’m losing the will to live. Maybe I need therapy for it.

All I can say is, with such stunning logic employed by the Maresfield Report, it’s no surprise they’ve received such overwhelming interest from the media.

http://forums.explosm.net/showthread.php?t=57803