Well, that was an ordeal

This is what happens when you don't log in to BlogSpot for a few years...

Tried to get onto BlogSpot. Oh no, it's been digested by the Googleplex. OK, fine, I don't remember the email address I used to create it in the first place, and forget about remembering the password, but that's what the "Forgot my ..." things are for. It has me give the blog URL, and it tells me that it sent instructions to ... my sbcglobal address. That narrows it down to 4 email accounts.

Start going through accounts. The admin account? Nope, no email there. My professional account? Also nope. I would not have used the iron.chef account (yes, of course I snagged that), so it's gotta be the one I created 8 years ago (and have never touched since) to create my MySpace account. And no, I don't remember that password either. And in the intervening years, they've added security questions and stuff, which I've never given answers to.

Go back to the admin account and see if I can reset passwords on the sub-accounts, and ... there's no link, no button, no nothing to let you do that. ?!?!

Fine, I call a number given on the website and talk to someone whose name sounded like Rain Man. Here's my name, here's my phone number, I'd like to reset a password on a sub-account, they offer to forward me to someone that will do it for a fee, wait, what?

Let's try this "chat with a live person" thing instead. Name, phone, address, etc., and "Timsy" wants the 4-digit security code that was assigned a decade ago. Ummm, I don't remember that. Favorite restaurant? Yeah, I know the answer to that one. Finally, progress; I have a fresh password for the account that may be the right one.

Log in to that email, and the friendly email from Google that gives easy-to-follow instructions to reset that password is not there. Check the iron.chef email and it's not there either. Repeat step 1 to send the email again, and it's still nowhere.

Aha, I bet I set it to forward emails to my work email... and indeed, it's forwarding them to an old old old work address. Set it up with a current address, repeat step 1 again, and ... well, here I am.

Of course, if none of this had happened, if I had just logged in and had access, then this post would have been a lot shorter...

Bad code

I'm a software engineer by trade, which means that occasionally I get to look into really old code that someone who quit years ago wrote (sometimes to make it do something that it wasn't designed to do in the first place, but that's another post), and I often find things that make me want to laugh and cry at the same time. Other übergeeks will understand this because they've gone through it too.

What follows are some examples that I've recently seen. I'll attempt to translate from geek to English as needed. All these were written in VB6.

If SW = True Then ...
This is like saying "If it is true that you are going to the store..." It's simpler to say "If you are going to the store..."

Delimited = FreeFile + 5
"FreeFile" is a function that gives you an available file handle number N so you can open a file with N and later read from or write to that file using N. Apparently the programmer decided that N plus 5 would be better. This is the equivalent of being told that parking space 11 is open and proceeding to park in space 16, even if another car is already there!

If IsNull(drs!TaxID) Then
   ...
   If IsNull(drs!TaxID) Then
    ...
   End If
Else ...
Translation: Check if tax ID is empty; if so, check it again! I left out some intervening code in this one, but it didn't change the TaxID in any way.

If InStr(ProviderName, "NULL") And Len(ProviderName) = 4 Then ...
If the thing contains the text "NULL" (a four-letter word) and the thing is only 4 letters long, then isn't the thing "NULL"? This should have been just If ProviderName = "NULL" Then ....