No fadas on Leap Cards due to "technical limitations".

Wombatman

Surely they should have seen this one coming down the tracks...ahem?

https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2019/0121/1024593-fadas-leap-cards/

Talisman

Blame ASCII (the American Standard Code for Information Interchange) - those pesky Americans never took the needs of languages other than American English into account when developing early computer technologies. The ISO/IEC 8859 standards tried to fix the issue but their solution led to other issues. Unicode and UTF-8 have saved the day and the modern day developers don't face the head wreck of character encoding nightmares.

It wouldn't surprise me to discover that the Leap card system was implemented on an outdated platform such as Windows 95 where UTF-8 never existed. Python 2 is also a possible culprit - it natively treats strings as sequences of bytes instead of characters and the environment is not Unicode friendly.

beauf

Its a very weirdly designed system.

Usernames cannot be changed.
You can add more emails, but you can't remove one.
So once you registered an email with one account you can't use it for another,
even if you switch the first one to a different email.
Credit reduction, returned. Who talks like this.

Its like a student wrote it.

joeguevara

I was listening to newstalk when this new story broke and a caller rang in and said she had one of the older leap cards and her name was correctly spelled with fadas. So that means a decision was made when upgrading not to include fadas in the upgrade. Seems a strange decision and would annoy me if my name was incorrectly spelled on something (I don’t have fadas in my name).

Dakotabigone

Wombatman wrote: »

Surely they should have seen this one coming down the tracks...ahem?

https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2019/0121/1024593-fadas-leap-cards/

They didn’t.

worded

Dakotabigone wrote: »

They didn’t.

Or didn’t care and just ploughed on regardless rail roaded them really

A head should roll for this fiasco of an over sight or didn’t give a sh1te.

Berserker

beauf wrote: »

Its like a student wrote it.

Lol, nail on the head there! Interviewed a grad who told me he worked on it.

seamus

The ASCII -v- Unicode thing is a bit of a plague.

The main issue is that there are so many places where a character can become mangled if Unicode support isn't automatic - database, API calls, web frontends, printer drivers, etc, etc - that in the interests of getting things working, ASCII support is typically just used with a view to looking at Unicode "later".

This is especially a problem if your solution is built on connecting various other solutions together. Niche applications built in the US often won't even bother with Unicode, their US customers don't care.

For example, the NTA probably outsource the printing of the cards. They may just send a print file to the printing company daily in a text format and have discovered that it breaks if they use Unicode. So they don't, because the people involved in doing this daily export don't even know what Unicode is, all they know is fadas == broken batch.

I think it's a bit overblown to be making a big deal out of it and looking for people to be fired, but it certainly needs fixing, and it's something a senior dev should be able to trace and repair in a week or two.

Charles Babbage

Public transport systems are not mainly associated with America, but with Europe and Asia and these places manage a variety of characters perfectly well.
But if nobody is responsible for a hospital costing €1bn more, then this is small change.

beauf

Berserker wrote: »

Lol, nail on the head there! Interviewed a grad who told me he worked on it.

They made some odd design decisions that suggest a lack of experience. They are kinda decisions you make differently after some experience. (unless its very stubborn programmers who refuse to take advice).

seamus

Charles Babbage wrote: »

Public transport systems are not mainly associated with America, but with Europe and Asia and these places manage a variety of characters perfectly well.

Yeah, but you don't need special public-transport-only software to print NFC cards. They're used all over the world and the lowest bidder wins the contract.

If someone who has seen the system says that they made some decisions that suggest a lack of experience, then I would expect that to be typical of a government system, where most of those who built it were consultants from KPMG or Accenture rather than professional software devs.

beauf

When you say professional are you implying competent? or they aren't actually developers.

Because the things I'm looking at are classic developer behaviour.
Someone who isn't a developer but does development tends to get create a less clunky UI.

Also are you implying that consultants will build a system less well if its for the Govt than for a Private company?

seamus

My experience is that the people who get placed on these sites are people who've done a Computer Science related degree, maybe a year or three in a technology job, before joining one of these firms and going through the process of getting a business and/or project management certification.

So when they go on site, their focus is far more business-focussed than engineering focussed, and like you say they make design choices characteristic of a lack of experience. And because the nature of the work is build-handover-leave, the individual consultant doesn't have to deal with the long-term impact of their design choices. Because the customer signed off on the software, there is no penalty for the firm. A new consultant will come in to fix the unicode issue, and the original guy will go make the same mistake elsewhere.

A system built for the government tends to up end up "less well" than a private company's one because oversight tends to be lacking. Missed deliverables, ignored defects and poor system performance are more likely when you have box-ticking civil servants managing the project.

Granted, it's been about a decade since I was in any way rubbing shoulders with these consultants, so maybe the business has changed.

beauf

That seems to suggest that the PS doesn't have the expertise to deliver these projects so they outsource it to the experts who then fail to deliver the expertise.
I've seen this kinda of stuff in private and public projects both outsourced and internal. I don't think its unique to either personally.

I assume at some point it will be redesigned and v2 will be better.

Fenster

beauf wrote: »

Its like a student wrote it.

That happens a lot.

beauf

Fenster wrote: »

That happens a lot.

When I was contractor I often had to fix or replace existing systems. It was interesting how many quite large systems controlling large business value. Had been largely written by students.

As you say very common.

bpmurray

This is an absurd situation. Ireland was probably the world leader in international software engineering 25 years ago so it's really disappointing that such a trivial thing wasn't done right. In most software projects nowadays international enabling is a must-have, so this would be treated as a serious bug. From the comments, I have to assume that normal good software practices are not common in public companies.

BrokenArrows

Is there any information as to where the problem lies?

It wouldn't surprise me if the problem is with the company that prints the cards.

They probably have a bulletproof government contract to print these cards and don't have unicode capability and don't want to pay to add it until forced.

Anything else would be a simple fix.