kickaha: (Default)
kickaha ([personal profile] kickaha) wrote2007-12-21 12:43 am

UI? What's UI?

What do you get when you have a major, huge company who has traditionally done enterprise Windows apps, with a smidgen of Linux?

SUCKTACULAR UI!

Take Eclipse. (No, really, please. Take it, beat it into submission, strip off the laughable UI and make something worthwhile. Really. It's embarrassing, it's so bad.)

Or Lotus, well, anything. It's even worse.

But tonight... tonight I hit the nadir. I use an internal proprietary (Standards? What, those things we convince our customers they need? Pah, we don't need them... they're too expensive.) VPN solution to hook into the company intranet. The guts of it are pretty solid, as far as I can tell. It's yet to fail me. The UI though?

Go to connect tonight "Cannot connect." Well gee, that's helpful. Try again. "Cannot connect." Hmm. Once more time, with feeling. "Cannot connect." How odd. One last time...

"Your account has been locked, possibly due to multiple logon attempts with an incorrect password."

Right, I changed my intranet password yesterday.

And... that's it. I have no indication of how to contact anyone to find out how to 'unlock' my damned account, it never gave me a hint that perhaps it was a password problem (which would have jogged my memory immediately), and of course to get any useful information, I need to be... you guessed it... on the intranet.

SOL, up shit creek, humped, boned, dry fucked and left hanging... pick your phrasing.

Unbelievable.

Saddest part? Five gets you twenty, when I bring this up with the VPN client team, I'll get utterly blown off, because this is how they think software is supposed to work. Or not.

[identity profile] georgmi.livejournal.com 2007-12-21 07:11 pm (UTC)(link)
Ah, but security folks *do* define 'users who slip up' as bad guys--the potential effect on the system is often the same, or even worse.

Security guys only trust their users as far as management forces them to, and they're not happy about even that much.

[identity profile] kickaha.livejournal.com 2007-12-21 08:01 pm (UTC)(link)
Wait... management has power over IT security direction?

Dude, pass me some of what you're smoking.

[identity profile] georgmi.livejournal.com 2007-12-21 08:24 pm (UTC)(link)
To the extent that management can say, "Let the damn users connect to the damn network or you're fired", yeah.

IT will then do the absolute minimum necessary toward clause A that allows them to avoid execution of clause B. :)