Month: July 2015

fun with credit card expiration dates

I’m doing some work on credit card processing right now. This is all related to my company’s upgrade from Dynamics AX 2012 RTM to 2012 R3. There were major changes to the credit card processing code in R2, and we’ve customized the code from RTM quite a bit, so there’s a lot to do. I’d like to write more about it, but it probably wouldn’t be of any general interest, plus I don’t want to get into any company-specific stuff.

But one very minor thing came up yesterday that was a little bit interesting. I noticed a support ticket from a user who was entering a new card, and wanted to enter an expiration date that wasn’t shown in the drop-down. (It was too far in the future.) This didn’t have anything to do with the upgrade, per se, but it made me curious enough to look at the code in RTM and in R3, to see what was being done. I was curious if maybe we had something in there like this example from The Daily WTF, or something where the upper-limit on the year was hard-coded to a specific year.

Well, it’s not quite that bad, but it is a bit questionable. In RTM, there’s a drop-down that is populated with years from (current year) to (current year + 7). In R3, it’s pretty similar, except that, when editing the expiration date after initial entry, you can go to current year + 8. (That’s probably an off-by-one error, rather than an intentional extension of the range.)

This all made me wonder what a reasonable upper-bound for expiration year would be, which lead me to this Stack Overflow question, which seems to indicate that there’s no agreed-upon maximum, but that it’s probably safe to go with 15-20 years. So Dynamics AX could stand to be be a bit more flexible on that range.

The other thing that bothers me about the way AX handles expiration dates is that (in 2012 RTM) they’re stored in the database as “MMYY”, which makes it difficult to sort and filter out expired cards. I was hoping that would be corrected in R3, but they’ve only changed it to “MM/YYYY” (without any leading zeroes on the month), which has the advantage of being more easily-readable by a human, and also of storing the full 4-digit year, but the disadvantage of being even more difficult to sort on, since the year sometimes starts in the 3rd position and sometimes in the 4th.

And let me end this blog post with a link to my very favorite publicly-documented method in AX, related to credit card processing: CreditCardWizard.codeCoverageFudge. I’m not entirely sure why this method exists in the released product, but I’m guessing it was added to fudge the code coverage numbers in some unit testing metrics. Maybe a certain percentage of code coverage had to be achieved, but there was no easy way to write meaningful tests for the remaining uncovered code, so they just wrote a method that does nothing, and a unit test for it?

anime and manga companies

With my inexplicable renewed interest in anime and manga, I’ve been doing some digging on the internet, and finding that some of the most popular web sites, periodicals, and anime/manga companies from back when I was really into this stuff have disappeared. I’d already heard about most of this, in passing, but hadn’t ever sat down and realized how much had changed over the last 5 or so years.

Tokyopop (mostly) shut down in 2011, and has been going through a bunch of drama since then.

ADV shut down in 2009, apparently, but might be coming back?

One of my old favorite web sites for anime reviews, AnimeOnDVD.com, was sold off in 2008, but the founder went to the new company. Then, the founder left that company in 2011, and started a new site. (And the new site looks pretty good!)

AnimeNewsNetwork.com is still around and mostly unchanged, though. (Obviously they had a redesign at some point, but not a drastic and/or horrible one.)

Newtype USA went away in 2008, to be replaced by something else that didn’t last long. Now, it appears that Otaku USA is the only US-based anime magazine left standing. (Which, I guess, isn’t surprising, since the magazine industry as a whole isn’t exactly thriving.)

Crunchyroll seems to be doing well, and has developed into a pretty impressive “Netflix for anime” site. I’m tempted to sign up for it, but there’s plenty of anime on the real Netflix that I haven’t watched yet.

I’m currently working my way through Big O season two, by the way, having watched the first season last year. I acquired the DVD set for this via eBay, and it may not be quite, shall we say, kosher. But it doesn’t appear that anyone is currently selling an official US version of Big O, so eBay was the best I could do.

The Amiga’s 30th Anniversary

The Amiga 30th Anniversary Event at the Computer History
Museum in Mountain View this weekend looks like it should be really fun. Too bad I’m in NJ and not CA.

I get nostalgic about the Amiga once in a while. I keep thinking I should try the emulator from Amiga Forever, but I never get around to it. (There’s enough current technology that I don’t have time for; not much point in messing around with a 30-year-old dead OS. Heck, I’ve done almost nothing with the Windows 10 preview that’s installed on my laptop, and working with that would actually be useful.)

The Amiga 500 was my third computer. (The first was a TRS-80, and the second was a Commodore 64.) I bought it when I was in college. It was the first computer I owned that had a real OS, and multi-tasking, and all that good stuff. I could actually use it for some of my programming assignments! (Prior to that, they were all done on the school mainframe, or on shared Unix machines.) I remember that picking up a copy of the Lattice C compiler was a big deal for me. It wasn’t hugely expensive, but it was a significant purchase for a college student.

I wonder if I have printouts of any of my old programs around here somewhere. If so, it’s probably best to leave them buried. I’m sure the memories are better than the actual code!

Too much anime, again

I decided today to make a list of all the anime DVDs and Blu-Rays that I own but have not yet watched. I have DVDs and Blu-Rays scattered around the apartment in several places, with no real system, but I have a general idea as to where most of them are. I just went through them all (well, most of them) and made up a list in Evernote.

My list contains 16 entries, which doesn’t sound too bad, until you realize that most of them are series with 4 to 8 DVDs. And a number of the items on this list from 2006 are still unwatched, which is kind of silly.

I’m kind of in an anime mood right now, so maybe I’ll start watching some of this stuff again. But, then again, watching too much TV might raise my risk of Alzheimer’s. I wonder if that would apply to subtitled anime, though. It seems like that would stimulate the brain in a similar way as reading a book. (At least to a certain extent.)

Akira

I just finished reading the sixth (final) volume of Akira. I read volumes 1-3 quite some time ago, and decided to read 4-6 just recently. I’m not sure why I waited so long between 3 and 4. (Volume 3 was a good breaking point though.)

I find myself wondering if there’s some really deep meaning to Akira that I’m missing. There’s definitely a lot going on, and I’ve seen various people drawing out various themes and metaphors from it. I stumbled across this video today, which doesn’t really get into the deep stuff, but does do a good job of summing up the narrative of the manga vs the anime.

And finally finishing Akira makes me think back and realize how long it’s been a part of my life. I first read Akira via the Marvel/Epic color series, from the late 80s and early 90s. I didn’t read the whole series, and I don’t remember exactly when I stopped buying it. But it was definitely the first major manga I ever read.

I can’t quite remember the first time I saw the Akira film either, but I distinctly remember buying a pirated version of it on VHS back in the early 90s, at a comics convention. (I know I’d seen it before then, but I’m not sure where. I don’t think I could have seen it when I was in college, since it wasn’t released until after I graduated.) Either way, I’m pretty sure that it was the first anime movie I’d ever seen. (At some point, not too many years ago, I bought it on DVD, and have watched it at least once; I think it’s due for a repeat viewing soon!)

I bought the six Dark Horse black & white volumes a few years ago, at a con, probably San Diego or WonderCon. I’m pretty sure I got them out of somebody’s discount box, possibly TFAW‘s. (I’ve gotten some good deals from them.)

I gave the first three volumes, and the Marvel/Epic issues, over to Superheroes for Hospice, when I donated most of my collection earlier this year. I’ll likely donate volumes 4-6 next year, assuming I can talk myself into going through the piles again and donating a few more boxes.

I thought it might be cool to have a digital version of the Akira manga to maybe reread at some point, but it’s not available on the Dark Horse site or on Comixology. (Apparently, Kodansha now has the license for the manga, not Dark Horse, and I don’t see any sign that they’ve made it available digitally.)

Now that I’ve finished Akira, I have no idea what to read next, but I have a few things in mind. I never did get around to finishing the Rurouni Kenshin manga; I have several volumes of that series gathering dust. And I have a random sampling of Oh My Goddess! volumes waiting to be read. That would make for a nice change of pace from Akira!

Trying out Blogo

So now I’m trying out Blogo, another Mac blogging tool. It’s kind of nice, but there doesn’t seem to be any option to view/edit a post in HTML; there’s only the rich-text WYSIWYG editor.

So I think maybe this would be a good tool for someone who didn’t want to get too fiddly and just wanted to stick to WYSIWYG editing. But I know I’m going to want to at least look at the HTML once in a while.

It’s kind of a shame that it doesn’t have HTML editing, since, otherwise, it’s got a really nice user interface. But, I think MarsEdit is more my speed, if I’m going to use a desktop editor at all.

trying out MarsEdit

I’m writing this post in MarsEdit, just to see if I like it better than the normal WordPress admin interface. So far, it works fine, but I’m not sure it’s that much better than just using the WordPress admin. I think maybe if I could memorize the keyboard shortcuts, it would be quite nice.

I’ll keep it on my Mac until the trial period runs out, at least, then make up my mind if it’s worth spending money on.

I’d heard of MarsEdit before, of course, but hadn’t really thought about it much lately. I was reminded of it when listening to MPU 264 with John Gruber. He uses MarsEdit with Movable Type, which I did not realize was still around and being used as a viable blogging platform. (Shows how little I know!) I’ve never been that interested in Gruber’s blog, Daring Fireball, but he does have an interesting history, and has been involved in some interesting work, so that episode of MPU was definitely worth listening to. And of course his big thing is Markdown, which the MPU hosts also love, but which I’ve never been able to talk myself into trying. I like the general idea, but I just haven’t been able to find a good use case for it, for myself.

a little more SDCC news

I haven’t been paying too much attention to SDCC news, but I did spend some time today looking at CBR, Newsarama, and Comics Alliance. In looking at the list of Eisner winners, I see a number of creators and books that I’m familiar with, of course, but I haven’t actually read any of the stuff that was published in the last year. I’m definitely interested in some of them, though. Meanwhile, there’s a live stream of a Doctor Who panel that should be starting up in a few minutes, so I should get ready for that!