141–150 of 150 posts
"Wikipedia has a photo of a parcel where a Russian/Cyrillic address was displayed on a computer with the wrong character encoding, and transcribed from that. Reportedly a russian postal worker was able to reverse the mapping and deliver the parcel." The linked URL doesn't work anymore but thanks to Archive.org and reverse image search in Google I managed to find it: https://web.archive.org/web/20130909052627/http://e…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Punt and let customer support handle it" is a pretty lazy solution, in my view. Additionally, what a developer might think of as a "99.9%" solution is more often than not a 99% solution, or a 90% solution. With enough customers, dealing with everyone who can't use your slapped-together form will be more expensive than doing it right. Software doesn't become great by assuming someone else will handle the edge cases a…
Except, in this scenario, it's relatively easy to come up with a good 99.9% solution: Seven text fields will cover greater than 99.9% of users: Name Address Line 1 Address Line 2 City State Country Postal Code So much of that article discussed stuff that was irrelevant - Live in Singapore? Great, just fill in Singapore, Singapore, Singapore. I've done that on many, many sites and it's always worked fine. Don't have a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least it helps if you don't block on empty fields then - I keep getting annoyed when sites demand I enter "state/province" for international shipping when my country doesn't have that concept. Or demand that I enter 6-digit postal code when we only use 4. Or not being able to handle non-ASCII chars. And things like that - helping people is fine and useful, but blocking a user because you set up assumptions valid o…
> I keep getting annoyed when sites demand I enter "state/province" for international shipping when my country doesn't have that concept. And uses a select box of US states, so even if your country did have such a concept (and used it for mail, which may not be the case) you couldn't give it.
I read this article a long time ago and I took it seriously. So instead of asking for address, postal/zip code, city, state/province, I just put up a big text area labeled "Full address" so that people have complete freedom about what to fill in. 80% of the users ended up only filling in their street address, not their postal/zip code, city and state/province, even though they're from countries where (most?) addresse…
This is where most of the "falsehoods programmers believe" articles fall flat. The thing to do is not try to design a single form that accommodates every possible address or name or whatever. The thing to do is examine your use case, design a form that works for, say, 99.9% or more of the people you want it to reach, and then if you really want to get the last 0.1% have someone who can do customer service and has acc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I keep getting annoyed when sites demand I enter "state/province" for international shipping when my country doesn't have that concept. And uses a select box of US states, so even if your country did have such a concept (and used it for mail, which may not be the case) you couldn't give it.
You could manually set it via the "inspect element" I guess? If you realllly must set something.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excel is the bane of my existence. I give a lot of speeches about how to preserve data precision. However It seems to be largley in vain, as there is often a lot of back and forth when handling data between different groups, even programmers don't seem immune from screwing up a csv file with excel.
Oh god office workers love putting everything in Excel. Even when it makes no sense...
And I guess that's one of the biggest mistake programmers make - assuming that real-life data will conform to some imaginary, bureaucratic, fixed format. Even schemas ain't fixed in real life. That's why people use Excel.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excel is the bane of my existence. I give a lot of speeches about how to preserve data precision. However It seems to be largley in vain, as there is often a lot of back and forth when handling data between different groups, even programmers don't seem immune from screwing up a csv file with excel.
Oh god office workers love putting everything in Excel. Even when it makes no sense...
I've personally seen a building with a fractional street number, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I've also had to deal with irregular addresses in Canada. Working on a Canada-only program, I was expecting addresses to have the components: [unit-number, ]building-number street-name city/town, province/territory, country postal-code I was fortunately already expecting characters from the two official languages of Canada,…
There's at least one fractional street number here in Victoria, BC along Fan Tan Alley: https://www.flickr.com/photos/goddess_spiral/3377009251/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Picking an arbitrary starting point like 'country' still has problems. I'm in Jersey Channel Islands, which isn't a country at all (much like Vatican City & other territories). We are British but not part of the UK nor members of the EU. We're served by the British Royal Mail system and use UK-style postcodes, but sometimes when I input my address I must chose a country, so pick UK, which triggers UK VAT on my order.…
Sorry I'd this comes off as tangential: What kind of internet service do you have where you live (speed wise) ? I've always considered island life, but poor internet service has put me off.
I have an unlimited Gigabit fibre to the home connection here at home, and I pay £60/month for it. My 'high score' so far was 1.4TB transferred one month but typical use is 600GB or so.
We are in a pretty unique situation here with a government minister betting big on switching our entire island's copper telephone lines over to fiber optics, part subsidised with taxpayer funds.
If you are fortunate enough to have piles of cash you can gain residency here through a special programme for attracting inward investment http://www.locatejersey.com/HighValueResidency/Pages/Jerseyf...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry I'd this comes off as tangential: What kind of internet service do you have where you live (speed wise) ? I've always considered island life, but poor internet service has put me off.
Jersey is a tax haven (40% of the economy is evading tax), lying 20km from France and 160km from Britain, so there's no reason the internet access has to be bad. http://www.jtglobal.com/Jersey/Personal/Broadband/Products/H... — it's a bit expensive, and has a usage cap, but that seems more to do with the lack of competition than it being an island.
Citation needed. You are welcome to pay maximum taxes where you live if you like, but jurisdictions with lower tax rates keep the pressure on governments to deliver a good return on investment to their citizens. When I moved from San Diego to Dallas after the dotcom bust I slashed my taxes which was great (no income tax in TX). This wasn't tax evasion, it was common sense. San Diego was no longer a good investment.
Also, you totally missed the Gigabit fiber-optic broadband plans[0]. I have a 1GB unlimited plan from their competitor for £55/month[1]. Standard fair use clause applies but I've never been throttled and I use massive amounts of data every month.
[0] http://www.jtglobal.com/Jersey/Personal/JT-Fibre/Fibre-Tarif... [1] https://web.sure.com/jersey/internet/home-internet/unlimited...