This is a serious, real thing. I’ve wasted countless hours of my life dealing with the XY problem. And be aware: this is NOT only a thing of the engineering world, this is everywhere. I’m almost completely sure that this is one of those things that upon reading about it, seeing the phenomenon in a few paragraphs of text, you’ll start to notice it every once in a while.

For your pleasure, please check out xyproblem.info.

The post The XY problem appeared first on Pietari Heino's personal website.

This discovery is not my own, but I find it most delightful.

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https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/dont-buy-a-5g-smartphone-at-least-not-for-a-while/

The post Read this for a nice view of the 5G landscape in 2019 appeared first on Pietari Heino's personal website.

I’m not happy.

Some party, maybe Acer through Google somehow, I don’t know, has pushed a Chrome extension called Acer Games to my C740. Never had any of that Windows-like OEM crapware on the Chromebook/ChromeOS platform, didn’t even know that existed. But it seems it’s a thing now.

This is not nice.

The post Acer Games Chrome extension pushed to my Chromebook appeared first on Pietari Heino's personal website.

Let me show you a screenshot:

This error message above (it says error in Finnish) is what you get when you follow their domain transfer procedure, provide them with the authentication id and click save. Note that there is no indication of what went wrong, what you can do etc.

Their whole website is full of this crap. Anything you do that deals with ordering a product, changing some settings from their management panel, viewing their product listings and so forth every once in a while shows you an error message very close to the above one. Usually there is some text but it’s in French or English even though the rest of the website is in Finnish. The text, if some is displayed, does not tell you what happened. It gives some general error message and it’s usually impossible to know what happened. And these things happen all the time: if you fill out a form in some wrong way, you get an error message after submitting and it doesn’t tell you what was wrong; if you try to make changes in the management panel, it tells you something in French that has nothing to do with what you were doing in the panel. Very frequently some parts of the site, management panel etc. are covered with some {{templating.variables#}} and so forth.

Some of the information on their website is also completely misleading, untrue or incomplete. Some product listings don’t tell you all that comes in the package (for example their MX services) but you have to ask the customer care for details.

One funny case was when I ordered a .fi domain whose registration was rejected. I emailed the customer support for help and… the problem was that Ficora requires birthdate of the owner for .fi domains but the OVH order system didn’t ask for that. It was broken and unusable. It was of course very nice that you could fill it in after the rejection through the management panel

I have reported over a dozen problems like these to their customer service. I have even told the one poor person who always responds to my emails that I have nothing against him but cannot really understand what really goes in the company’s mind if they cannot fix these problems. Of course, Finland is not their biggest market, but if you have ovh-hosting.fi one would probably assume that you can actually use the site. Also, they have somehow locked my personal account to some “this is a Finn” state and I cannot just switch to the international version of their management panels etc. since they always pop me back to the Finnish one.

This has nothing to do with their product quality. I have used their DNS Anycast services for years, manage multiple webhosting packages for my clients and have some personal stuff on their servers. Everything has worked perfectly hosting infrastructure wise and I’m recommending them to people since they offer a wide range of services that are performant enough for a reasonable price.

But the Finnish website, their ordering system and the management panel are worst pieces of software that I have seen from a company of this size. I really cannot understand it.

The post OVH’s Finnish website is the worst ever. Period. appeared first on Pietari Heino's personal website.

We have lectures and code clinics. In the code clinics the lecturer shows us different technologies and demoes all sorts of stuff. We are encouraged to participate and demo something ourselves. I decided to make a Firebase demo since I’ve been using Firebase for a couple of apps during the past two years.

The demo session/presentation went really well. I talked a bit about the modern shift of moving application logic to the client (JS running in the browser) and how that enables to make fully featured apps with a backend-as-a-service like Firebase (without the need for an actual server instance here or there). We built a simple application (or a static page if you will) that includes a list of messages and a form to submit messages. We connected the page with Firebase’s realtime database and deployed the page in Firebase’s free static site hosting. In the end everyone was able to open the page and submit messages that synced to everyone else’s web browsers in realtime.

It was really nice to make the demo and show how Firebase works to everyone. I think the other students liked it too and many people got some ideas for their project work (in which using Firebase is one of the options). I’m glad.

You may find the demo we built and a short description of Firebase here.

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UPDATE! Please see the discussions here and here.

UPDATE #2! I believe the Chrome team has implemented a fix for this since the now-beta version 55.x.x.x brings up the password management window instantly and doesn’t hang.

I have no idea how many passwords there are in my Chrome password manager but it goes without saying that might have something to do with the slowness. Of course, one might say, an engineering error or a place to optimize the software, since no matter how many pairs of credentials I have stored there, it should be fast and not make the user sit and wait (and really, how many can you even have so that it would realistically be OK to take so long to check them?).

I’m planning to do some testing and go through the db to see if the waiting time cuts off and file a bug report if needed. Huh.

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