Today, I realized that I hate software.
First, it was FedEx
It has been 45 days since I reported to FedEx that the new SmartPost integration offered by their Web services simply does not work when an EPL2 label is requested:
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I Hate Software, Part 1
The problem is that the USPS Delivery Confirmation barcode does not print when an EPL2 label is requested. That’s because in the EPL2 document that FedEx sends back, quotation marks in the barcode command are not properly escaped:
A90,473,0,3,1,2,N,"ZIP - USPS DELIVERY CONFIRMATION e-VS" B50,535,0,1,3,4,175,N,""F1"42023221"F1"0000000000000000000000" |
That should read "\"F1\"420..." for it to print correctly. (The ZPLII version of the label works fine.)
I understand that larger corporations have fixed software release cycles and different bug triage mechanisms, but having to through three levels of support and waiting 45+ days to simply say “this simply doesn’t work please add a backslash” is somewhat frustrating.
Then, there was UPS
Similarly, I’ve discovered a recently-introduced error with the UPS Web services. If you request a 4″ x 6″ EPL shipping label, then the UPS Web service will happily ignore request and send back a 4″ x 8″ label instead. That’s because they’re sending back the wrong width and height settings in the label response:
q795 Q1600,24 |
That would be 795 dots / 203 dpi == 3.91″ wide (OK) and 1600 dots / 203 dpi == 7.88″ high (hmm, not what I asked for). (The ZPLII version of the label works fine.)
Finally, SmartFTP sent me over the edge
Since updating to the latest version of SmartFTP, I found myself frequently being unable to connect to the Skiviez private FTP server that is used to manage software updates, e-mails, and product catalog images. It would fail about 80% of the time with
[13:51:38] 234 Using authentication type TLS [13:51:38] SSL: Error (Error=0x80090308). |
I’m sure that this means something. And even if I knew what it was, sometimes it would just work without me changing anything (about 10 percent of the time). Further still, I hadn’t touched the FTP server for some time.
That’s when I noticed in the SmartFTP change log:
FTP: Completely rewrote SSL layer |
Sigh. Downgraded to the version prior to that changelog entry, and it works fine.
Conclusions and delusions
I have certainly done my part to contribute buggy, crappy software to the world. I continue to spew out more buggy, crappy software with each passing day. But it is extra depressing and disheartening to know that I, some idiot working at a small company, can run across such simply-does-not-work bugs (and, in FedEx’s case, never-actually-worked-ever bugs) in software produced by large corporations and used by presumably hundreds to thousands of people around the world.