Rafblog - Jake Cohen's Blog

Fry's Electronics and Returned Merchandise

As anyone who has ever returned an item to Fry's Electronics knows, the returns process can be very time consuming and difficult. In general, however, the difficulty arises from the inefficient process and the fact that the people working at the returns desks don't actually have the authority to make the transaction go through. The single supervisor on duty is scurrying around trying to verify everything, and it slows everything down accordingly.

A very frustrating thing has happened to me twice now. I purchase an item from Fry's, take it home, open it, then realize that someone has opened the item before and either swapped it out for a different item or just stripped it of any useful parts.

The first happened when I bought a new graphics card. I bought a card which was something like a GeForce 3 with 64 megs of video memory. When I got the thing home, it turned out that someone had taken out the good card and put in some sort of old 16 meg card that wasn't even the same brand or series. I took it back and it took me the good part of a day to get that card exchanged. They wouldn't believe me when I said what had happened, and since the box hadn't had a return label on it, they said it was impossible that it had been returned before.

Today, my fiancee bought a new case for her computer. Her old power supply was failing and her case wasn't that great to begin, so it was a pretty nice upgrade. We got the case home, and I was set to work on moving the computer innards over when I noticed that the new case was missing some parts. Several of the metal flanges had been removed as if to add PCI cards. The metal adaptor plate for the ATX motherboard backing was missing. There were no screws or hardware. The thumb screws holding the case side on had been replaced with ordinary screws.

We took the case back to Fry's, and again they would not believe that the item could have been returned before since it didn't have a return label on it. They seemed to think it impossible that their return label scheme would let a few returns slip through every now and then. As far as I'm concerned, either they accepted a return and didn't label or even check it for completeness, or someone at the manufacturer shipped them a bogus package. I'd sooner believe the former than the latter.

I find it highly irritating to be treated as some sort of crook when I'm trying to do the right thing. I'm telling the truth. I could have just returned it without saying anything, gotten my new part, and left the troubles for the next customer, but that is not something I feel comfortable doing. It is very annoying to get treated like a second class citizen for doing what's right.

What to Tell Your Users

Computer error messages are the source of much frustration and bitterness toward computers and computer software. One thing that the computer programming education industry often fails to teach is the principle of designing error messages.

From the code I have seen on my NoPaste site, it seems that most novice programmers will display a message in their native language that says something to the effect of "Your input was wrong! Try again!" Years later, when they have a job at a software company, their error messages have progressed to say things like "Error 29923: Invalid resource handle."

The only difference between these error messages is their wording. The problem they share is that of failing to tell the user anything meaningful. In both cases, the error message really is designed to serve the programmer because it tells them something about what is going on behind the scenes.

It is not surprising that many computer users would be greatly annoyed to find their work interrupted by an unhelpful error message such as this. The user does not care what the code is doing internally, they just want their program to run properly, and to be able to fix situations that prevent the program from running properly.

It is for this second case that error messages should be designed. If the user can fix the problem, the error message should be one that clearly indicates what went wrong (and ideally, how to fix it). For example, Microsoft does a good job with their Internet Explorer error message when a non-existent web address is typed into the address bar. It yields a page describing possible reasons that it was unable to find the site, and several things the user can try to fix the problem.

In contrast, if you did the same thing in Opera, you would get a small pop-up dialog box error message that says that it could not connect to the site, and all you can do is press OK. The user is left with no information as to why it was unable to connect. The experienced internet user will know to check the typed-in URL, see if other sites still work, and so on. The novice is just left feeling dumber for causing yet another red error message to pop up on the screen.

A case study involves me trying to install the phpBB bulletin board system. This system relies on a database installed on the server on which it runs, and one of the first things the install script does is try to create the database tables, then populate them with some initial information.

When I tried to do this, a slough of database errors appeared on the screen saying that phpBB was unable to insert into a particular table. That's it. No suggested remedies, no places to look. I had to do the looking myself. It turns out that the database tables never got created. I checked into the install script's code, and discovered that the SQL statements to create the database tables had never been read properly from disk. The code that read the SQL statements from disk had been set up to suppress all file-system error messages. That is, they just assumed it would succeed and silently failed if it didn't. When I modified the code to enable the error messages, I discovered that there was a permissions problem on the directory that contained the SQL statements on disk.

A very easy fix, even for a novice computer user, but the process to find out how to make the fix took several minutes and some PHP programming experience. If they had displayed the file system error to the user, the user would have had more options. "A file permissions error? oh, ok. I can look at the file permissions then. Let's see.. the error message says that they need to be X, and whoops.. they're Y on my disk. I'll fix that and.. neat, it works."

The moral of this story? Don't tell the users things that won't help them fix the problem. Do tell the users things that will help them fix the problem. This is the point of error messages, and the general perception of computer software will improve if people strive to follow these principles.

Spammers and Scams

Today we received two unsolicited faxes in addition to the usual daily dose of unsolicited e-mail. Apparently the law on unsolicited faxes is such that they are legit as long as they provide an "opt-out" number. It has long been known that most e-mail spammers use the opt-out link merely as a means of tracking which addresses on their lists are live. I have to wonder if fax spammers use the opt-out number for the same purpose, though it is probably easier to do something about it if they have a telephone number listed. At least a telephone number leaves a paper trail and is harder to move.

CNN ran an article on July 21, 2003, about the rising use of e-mail for perpetrating scams. The scammers send an e-mail message to the victim that appears to be from some sort of company with whom the victim has a business relationship (such as a credit card company). This message explains some sort of problem that needs to be fixed and asks the victim to provide information in a form or by going to a web site and filling out a form there. The scammer then collects this information and uses it for illicit purposes, such as credit card fraud or malicious damage to the victim.

I have to wonder who keeps falling for all these tricks. There must be a significant portion of the recipients of e-mail spam who actually purchase the product being peddled. There must also be a good portion of the people being scammed who take the bait and get parted from their money or their security.

The CNN article lists several pieces of advice for computer users to help avoid being duped by these scams, but I don't think it is enough. Several minor technical details are explained in dumbed-down terms in an effort to get people to pay attention to where their information will actually be sent, or to ensure that the encryption is enabled for their web browsing session. I think this fails to address the underlying problem; Some people need to apply common sense to the world of online interactions just as they do in personal interactions.

Don't take candy from strangers. Don't hand your camera to a stranger who walks up and offers to take your picture for you. These basic principles are just as valid on the internet. Don't give your personal information away. Just as a stranger may tell a child that he or she is a friend of the child's parents to gain their trust, internet scammers will attempt to establish the victim's trust by appearing to be from someone the victim trusts, such as their bank. Use an equal level of suspicion for these internet-based propisitions as you would for a similar situation off the internet.

In terms of what you can do to achieve this goal, this goes beyond simply checking that you're using https:// instead of http://. Is the site in question actually the site you would normally go to to do business with this company? Would the company ever legitimately ask you to provide the information that's being requested? Many companies have security policies (that tiny link on the page whenever you sign up with them) that explain what sorts of information they will keep about you, what it will be used for, and when, if ever, you will ever need to verify any of it to them.

My final piece of advice is simple. Stop responding to e-mail solicitations. The only reason it continues is that it is proving to be effective for the people that do it. People are evidently buying the products advertised through spam. People are evidently sending enough information in response to malicious requests to keep the scammers in business. The only way to stop it is to take away the source of its power: the fact that it is working.

Documentation Hell

Lately I have been writing a lot of technical documentation, and have begun to realize that Microsoft Word is not a great tool for my needs. When I'm writing documentation, I don't need WYSIWYG capabilities, just a simple formatting language that does what it should. I suppose I don't use Word often enough to know the ins and outs of how to use all of its features, but it seems that a good portion of my time is spent dealing with trying to get the document into the right format, or to get an inserted Visio diagram to inline itself with the text instead of floating above it, and so on.

For this reason, I have begun writing all of my drafts using a Wiki. If you don't know what a Wiki is, here is an example. The particular Wiki I use is MoinMoin, a very full-featured Wiki written in Python by Jürgen Hermann. The advantage of using Wiki is that it provides a simple formatting language that is easy to inline with the text you're writing without hampering the readability of the text source. I see this as an advantage over WYSIWYG editors in certain respects, such as the fact that you don't have any "invisible" formatting going on. Everything is in plain sight. The problem with WYSIWYG is that, while you get what you see, it is often difficult to determine how, precisely, to achieve a desired change in what you see.