April 25, 2011

  • done

       

    a great feeling of accomplishment when we finallllly finished the deferred payment online thing.
    you'd think changing one silly administrative fee for the application is like changing the sales tax from 8% to 9% for the program but it was much much more involved. Namely because they now want it to be 8% fro  m xx date range, and 9% from a different zz date range. Originally it was simply a constant and they would change the 'constant' 8 to a 9 and done. But nooooooooooooooooooo, another words, it is now dynamic with an extra dimension of time.

    it could have all been easily avoided if they gave me the correct function to use in the application. but as usual they are very sneaky. damned Reena. what a lying piece of slime. since my side doesn't change (it is the front end), and they make changes on their database back end all the time, we all know who the real culprit is. But then they accuse me of having a "broken" application. it's only broken because they made it that way, but either they are too dumb to realize this or just playing the deceptive role to the accounting department.

    Of course the change was required immediately but we go at the governmental pace of 4 days = ASAP. came at a bad time since I lost PK, it was gonna happen eventually when he found a better paying position elsewhere. on top of the "regular" duties of 5 other agencies which I now "work for" as well.

    on top of all of this, during the 4 days, I've come to realize a few things. first, Paypal does crap behind the scenes that it doesn't document for security reasons, which makes coding for it a pain in the ass. for example, if you want to test in the sandbox yet you also want to pay as a real client, you CANNOT use the same computer or or same browser or else eventually your browser becomes corrupt and sends the wrong header and "crashes" paypal.
    second, Reena doesn't like to admit her mistakes. after discovering why I was having such a hell of a time not getting the code to work, I finally see the data is bogus. instead of having a properly formatted time field, i get a "23:10.47" when it should be along the lines of "23:10:47". instead trying to make her fix her mistakes in the data, i did a work around to pre-format the data and massage it into what we expect, with the help of our good buddy Chao. Although these days I noticed chao's patience is also wearing thin. It must be his girlfriend's fault. he wasn't like that before he met her. His wild side is finally asserting itself. good for him, but bad for coding.

    anyway, little do they know, me and the interns from back in the days were already immune to the head of the accounting/finance dept who wasn't the head back then when he stopped us in the hallways and tried to discipline us for carrying heavy computer equipment "improperly" or just too fast I forget.... We said to him, "don't worry, we're professionals". Quip added to our repertoire. Bonus.

    Me and Nudy still have a good laugh about it these days.