Programming design lesson for today. Programmers should be forced to use the software that they design, in an actual real-world scenario, before it is released.
The only time I ever look at the lease list on a DHCP server is when I want to find one and add a reservation for it. So, you bring up a device, it acquires an address, and you wish to make that address permanent.
So, I go to the lease list, find the device, and look around for the "Add as a reservation" button, which doesn't exist. Grr.
So I try to copy the MAC address, so that at least I can paste it in over in the "Add a reservation" dialog, which is in a separate part of the interface - and I can't keep the one window up while I go over to the other one.
Nope, sorry, copy disabled in this interface.
So, I bring up a notepad and type in the address, then switch to the "add reservation" interface. Turns out I can't copy from notepad and paste it into this interface. Paste is disabled here. Grr.
So I type it in. It tells me that the format is invalid. Turns out that the MAC address format in the one interface - with colons - is invalid here. I have to enter it without colons.
So, I ask you, in what design meeting were such stupid decisions made, and have the people responsible been fired?
Sure, I know, you'll tell me that it's fixed in a later version. Perhaps in Vista? But, seriously, if these people had used their own product for even 10 minutes in a real environment, these kinds of issues would surely have been discovered. Or are they the kind of people who memorize their MAC address?
I see the error in your thinking. You assume that there was a design meeting.
Seriously, this was one of the things that made me want to put my foot through the screen when programming in Lotus Notes. There were no less than 3 distinct dialog boxes to do a simple File | Open. Not only could they not lower themselves to use the standard Windows dialogs that everyone is familiar with, they couldn't even bring themselves to decide on one among themselves.
I cursed those idiots every single day I had to deal with that God-forsaken piece of crap.
Welcome to my world. Wait until you have the DHCP service pass out the same address to two computers - both of which are on the network at the same time! I kid you not, it's happened to me.
There is a setting that actually tells the service to check (with a ping) to see if the address it's about to hand out is already in use. What's worse is that it's not enabled by default.
I guess that stands to reason though, because a properly working DHCP server should KNOW which addresses are already in use BEFORE it attemtps to give it out. I mean that's the whole purpose of the lease, right? Not Windows 2003's DHCP service - my experience is that it simply ignores the leases that are in effect.
Yes, I totally agree! "Programmers should be forced to use the software that they design, in an actual real-world scenario, before it is released." You really struck a nerve with me on this topic. All too often the programmers have tools or utilities they use which work around (or negate) the applications they create. So, they never really use the products as regular users would. There are SO MANY times I've run into this over the past 25 years.
Of course, for larger development teams and software companies, there really is no excuse because they have full time people just to test the applications. They give feedback (or should) to the development team managers who then make value judgments about the proposed changes and improvements. If they are getting that feedback and not acting on it (sometimes because they think, "it's not big deal, the testers are just being picky") then the software development managers should be fired.
In the end, somebody isn't doing their job by catching and correcting silly things like this that show up in operating systems and applications. Attention to these things that seem small and silly to programmers writing the code make a world of different to end users who have to live with that code and the consequences of those decisions.
Don't let your programmers (or yourself) fall into the trap of not actually using the software being developed. Now that you know what can happen, use that knowledge wisely.