Are You Sure It's Going To Be Fixed Within Weeks, Mr. President?

Mail Online ^ | 11/7/13 | David Martosko

[Lmo56]

Healthcare.gov 'is not firing effectively on all pistons,' White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters on Thursday, in what may be the understatement of the week.

When MailOnline visited the website shortly after Carney's daily briefing, the Obamacare portal spewed a nonsensical mixture of computer code instead of a typical login screen.

Gone were words like 'Username' and 'Password.' In their place were jumbled programming strings like '???ffe.ee.myAccount.login.username???' and '???ffe.ee.myAccount.login.password???'

[Lmo56]

What I got on the screen was:

SWQ**143VFG__++.../897aqswt,II--$$$^^#DCW321567GH

Using my Little Orphan Annie Secret Society Decoder:

It translated as:

"DRINK MORE OBAMATINE ..."

[Vince Ferrer]

In systems that are intended to be used with multiple languages, the development environment separates the strings that are on the user interface into separate string files, with pointers to point to them. This way, an application can change languages by swapping out the string files, rather than deploying a whole new compiled application. What it appears happened is that they updated the website, but deleted the old string file without installing a new one. Therefore the application had nothing to display, and defaulted by displaying the internal code pointers.

This is not a terribly large mistake, however it is embarrassing, since it does indicate that even their release procedures are screwed up.

[ArmstedFragg]

I’m pondering this issue of the system failing to find all possble policies because the word “recommended” was misspelled on some of them. How in the heck to you create a DB where an important variable is an 11 letter string that has to be hand entered for each record?

[hosepipe]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYog4WaB4qQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woBC5b3Ti0M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZQ5TH86fm8

[Mr Ramsbotham]

Suppose it does get fixed, the odds of which are Slim and None (and Slim is lying cold and dead in the ICU, waiting for the undertaker’s men to come and remove him)? Being “fixed” means more people discovering just what a costly and personally damaging fiasco Obamacare is. We’ll be able to move away from a pointless discussion about a technical problem and on to the crux of the issue, which is that Obamacare needs to be repealed, before any further damage is sustained.

[Seeing More Clearly Now]

If the Dems were smart, THEY’D let the thing die as quickly as possible, so by the time of the next election, people will have forgotten their role in bringing the monster into being.

[spokeshave]

Ha ...dims caught between a rock and a hard place....

That is between the reality that normal people see....and the parallel universe of utopian socialism that dims think they see.

[spokeshave]

If the Dems were smart, THEY’D let the thing die as quickly as possible

The problem is that the system was designed to fail...leading to a single player solution.

The basic problem for the dims is that it failed much too quickly.

That is...they screwed up by incompetent programming so it failed in hours not months.

[rawcatslyentist]

SO, what are you gonna do with your Promised $2500 savings?

[rwoodward]

Maybe it was never meant to work in the first place. Remember rule #1 in Alynski politics is that the ends always justifys the means. As much as I would like to believe that the democrates are a bunch of incompetent fools...they still run circles around the republicans. They play multilevel chess while the Rinos play tic tac toe.

[Irishguy]

been in software for over 20 years. Been involved in fixing some major major disasters and ahem, may have created a few ahem. what i see here is classic panic fire. they have lost all control on their development, test and production environments. i would bet if you asked them now to deliver a working version, no one knows what version is where. they are scrambling now to keep up. a classic example of that is above. i would bet they have a couple of developers hacking code together testing it to see that it works and they have full access to the production environment to upload the minor changes. thats how errors like that above happen. whats really scary is that access to the production environment will lead eventually to a whole series of security flaws as they rush to give people access to upload point fixes to problems. so some guy will bounce into the server to fix that issue. he wont fix it in their development or test environment...their production environment is now test and development. they are using test code on a production environment, that inevitably leads to a hack at best or a database accidental purge or change the hobbles the whole thing.if you dont think it can happen, oh yesy yes it can...honestly if you have private data there...i would guarantee its going to appear on the web at this stage. what they actually need to do now is STOP! they need to identify what the problems are and systematically fix them 1 by 1 in a controlled manner. thats the hard part. you need to have the will power to tell the people screaming from the top one simple word...NO. here is the process and no matter who calls...even the President your answer is we develop on this server, we version control, we test here in test with a full suite of system tests and user tests. on completion we identify the errors and agree if it goes production...i had some bad experiences enforcing this in the past (career affecting one to be brutally honest) but if you flex at all, the dam will break and, well, you get, healthcare.gov. even when they get it working it wont finish. they will do a big song and dance about it now working at some point..thats when they will hide data breach after data breach. trust me it will be held together with the software equivalent of spit and duct tape. by example suppose they get a partially working in december...you need to make a change or fix a very open security flaw. what do you do? you cant fix it in development and test environments, they are no longer the same as the production environment.so do you fix the security flaw and potentially have an issue again where no one can login? or do you say, its working leave it alone...99.9% of people in a high pressure environment like that will choose the latter...which is the wrong answer. so get the popcorn, this is far from over, even if they get a cobbled together version and the press start hailing it as a success...watch for the security breaches that are coming...i would say that is inevitable at this point. lets be honest, lets assume you are a chinese or n korea hacker or one from iran...what is most vulnerable now to a breach for maximum embarrassment to the US govt..the weak spot is what they will target and that concern is way way down the issue log at the moment for the development team..instead they are thinking ..login strings..what a fiasco...and they havent even delivered a health plan yet...

[Resettozero]

Who knew that when we finally heard him speak, Alfred E. would have such a lovely, reassuring voice.

This pic is right in so many ways.

[Resettozero]

Been speaking English for over 20 years. This ain’t it.