I’ve had some time to review, revamp, and re-think some of this blogsite.

Evolution is an interesting thing.  We all evolve.  Not just in the biological sense, but also in the emotional and rational sense.

Projects involving people evolve too.  This site is a prime example of forces at play here.

This started out as a breadcrumb trail, before smartphones and social media became almost a daily utility for some (myself included).  Look around at any public event and you’ll see people interacting with folks far away, sharing their experiences using little devices in their hands.

That wasn’t available to me when I started this blog.

All I had was an “old-fashioned” setup of laptop with an external wifi connected by USB port, surfing the wifi waves of those kind or ignorant enough to keep an open connection free for the taking.  That was when I was out in public; at home in the flat I had my paid-for DSL connection to hook into.

No smartphone.   Texting, yes, but no way of really connecting to others in real-time to share my experiences – and, more importantly – no easy way to electronically record thoughts and adventures for future participants to review and re-live.  (I know such a thing as paper and pencil exist; however it’s problematic to let people across the world know you are ok by putting a hand-written note in the post 😛 )

Which, at the start of my blogging adventures, was very very important.  It was important because I was thousands of miles from home, a stranger in a strange land living in a time zone distant from those I knew and loved.

My original posts were brief and scattered due to the nature of my postings; many times I was out researching for the family and adventuring, and battery & wifi access was limited.

Then, as the family situation evolved into a beast of its own, my musings were evolving in a dark and primitive direction.  Devolving, you would say.  And you’d be right.

Then as I returned to my home land, there was a time of adjustment again and a season of movement.  Evolution in my thinking and postings.

Now, as always, things are evolving.  Relationships have become repaired and in some cases, restored.  My writing reflects that movement.

Some relationships will never be restored, and that’s a very very very good thing.

What’s in store for the future?

Hard to tell.

But blogging is in it for sure.

I’ve a number of older posts from historical times, waiting to be blended into this blogsite.

I’ve also a number of new lines of thinking, new approaches to life that I’d like to record.  If not for anyone else, then for me to review and relive.

Thank you for taking this journey with me.

“The address as entered does not match our standardized database.”

My response?

“The error message listed above does not match a meaningful concept.”

How can an address match an ENTIRE database?

After a few minutes of head-scratching and experimentation, I found that the ACTUAL error message should have been,

“The address field can only accept numbers and letters and no special characters.”

Aaaargh computer programs (and programmers) have enough trouble staying on the good side of the software users. Why do quality-control folks allow this kind of cruddy error messaging to exist?

This is a perfect example of a meaningless error message.  It contains little factual information and does not tell the user what to do to correct the data entry problem.

Below is a breakdown of what was going through my mind and how I was able to translate this message into something that made sense.

———————

This nearly-undecipherable message tells me the program is trying to match a field of characters to an entire collection of data which would contain not just addresses, but most likely people’s names, an assortment of dates, maybe prices, and certainly sets of specialised internal data pointers (indexes) as well as hidden scripting processes (stored procedures, triggers, foreign key cascade rules, etc.)

A “real-world” equivalent of this message would be the following message from a farmer,

“The chicken you describe does not match our farm.”

…and don’t get me started on what a “standardized database” could possibly represent.

Well, too late, I’ve started.  There’s such thing as a “Relational Database“, a “Hierarchical Database“, an “Object/Relational Database” but to my knowledge there’s no such thing as a “Standardized Database”.

Now what the original software coder may be saying in this message is:

“We used some logic to try to find the address you entered in a list of known standard postal addresses but couldn’t find it.”

However, since I know the address I entered actually exists, and could reasonably assume it to be in the database that the software is using, I started looking at things that may cause an error message.

The first thing to look at was the ‘#’ character I used in the PO Box number.  Special characters cause all sorts of problems with database-specific languages (i.e. Perl, MySQL, Oracle/Sybase stored procedures, etc) for reasons I won’t go into here.

After removing the special character and pressing the ‘Save’ button, everything worked as expected.  My data was updated in the system.

This was far too much thinking to have to do at 4:45 in the morning.