The Hubris of Politicians

Well, well, well. I saw part of a blurb on the news crawler this morning about Gingrich petitioning lawmakers in Virginia to change the law. Curious, I went hunting for information.

Gingrich failed to qualify for the primary ballot in his home state of Virginia

His campaign manager lamented that "only a failed system excludes four out of the six major candidates seeking access to the ballot". The campaign doubled-down on the stupid by saying that "[...] the analogy is December 1941: We have experienced an unexpected setback, but we will re-group and re-focus with increased determination, commitment and positive action."

Pearl Harbor? Really? That's what you want to compare the mismanagement of your campaign to? How many soldiers, sailors and airmen lost their lives in that event? Now, how many lost their lives because you've known for MONTHS about a Dec 21 filing deadline and couldn't meet it.

The rule of law is the rule of law, Petitioning lawmakers to change the law because you messed up, and to give yourself a mulligan is the worst sort of political hubris. It merely reinforces the notion that politicians think they are better than themselves and that the laws of the land only apply to the little people.

Please go away now.

I don't know what could possibly go wrong

So Czechoslovakia is using fake police officers, kitted out in miniskirts, to slow down traffic.

Um, yeah.  They have a problem with people speeding, so to fix that problem they're going to do something that will take the driver's attention off the road?

I don't see anything that could possibly go wrong with that scenario.

Riddle me this, Batman.

So, what's the difference between these two things?

1. FILENAME.TXT
2. FILENAME.txt

Nothing, right, especially if you're on a Windows system?¹

Well, according to one of our ASP vendors they are completely different.  We are setting up a new interface with them, and have been testing the process through their automated web-portal upload tool.  Item #2 works just perfectly fine.  However, if we try to upload a file named like Item #1, their portal tells us that it's not a valid text file.

As a developer, this makes absolutely no sense to me.  If you are determining file type based on the extension, instead of inspecting the file itself or letting the user specify the file type, then obviously you're approaching this with a Windows-centric mindset.  After all, file extensions don't have any inherent meaning on UNIX/Linux systems, at least not like on a Windows box.  So, that being the case, how difficult is to either either use a ToUpper() or ToLower() type function on the filename, and then inspect the extension?  To require your clients to meet an arbitrary filename case rule is just asinine.

What makes it even more frustrating is that the application that generates the file is a DOS-based app, so it is going through the DOS command interpreter.  Since the DOS command interpreter does not register an entry for long file name, the file name is automatically converted to all upper-case by the system.  The only way to get the file to load is for the user to manually rename the file, changing the case of the extension.

*mumble* *mutter* GRAH!!!!!!

That is just stupid, horrible, disgusting, nasty code, and this is a major national ASP in this particular product space.  (No, it's not Microsoft).

¹For the purposes of this argument I will ignore Posix-compliant filing systems that treat all file names as case-sensitive.  I develop software that runs on Windows systems.