Ramblings

I must apologize for not posting recently. I have been trying to get something up here at least once a day, however, the last two days have been living hell to say the least.

Yesterday we were supposed to publish the NonTraditional Web Registration system. I had a small part in that, as I do all the ecommerce stuff and we were taking money online for this project. I thought I had all the bugs in the system worked out, but apparently I didn’t. We had anticipated pushing it ‘live’ first thing in the morning, and we did. However, it promptly broke. After fumbling around with the code and fixing several bugs in my code and in the rest of the system, things smoothed out. Of course it was almost 4PM before all those bugs were squashed completely.

Today I was hoping, and needing, to get to work on a project for Advancement that is due out on the 12th, ya that’s only about a day away now. Things went well overall, we were still getting a few complaints from people who had forgotten their passwords and were not recieving the email that is generated when they ask for it. I still think those people just forgot what email account they signed up with or their ISP is catching it for some reason. Anyways, things were mostly smooth. That is they were until someone reported that their payment didn’t get applied to their account. It’s a long story about how we discovered that, so I will skip that part.

I panicked when I got that little bit of news! I thought I had every safeguard in place to make sure I was notified if something like that happened, and I wasn’t notified by any of my code. Fortunantly we were able to quickly determine that there were correct based on some reporting from our processor (bank stuff) and a lack of activity in our logs or their account. No big deal here, we can simply fix the slip up since we know the student id number.

Since we had the one problem, I thought it would be smart to go back and check to make sure nothing else like that happened in the recent past that we didn’t catch (monthly reporting would have caught this error, but it happened on the 9th so we would have had to wait almost the whole month). I got a list from our processor of every transaction that has every occurred from our website. That was easy. I then pulled up a list of transactions from my log (everything should be logged). That was easy. What took a little while was comparing the two lists. Once the comparison was finished, I found that there were two other transactions that didn’t show up in my log (indicating that something went horribly wrong). I’ve tracked down one of those two people and have fixed their account accordingly, but were having to follow up with the bank to see if we can id the second one.

AHHH!!! It’s a horrible day to be alive.

(Edit 08/11/2004): I forgot to mention here yesterday that I added a few items to the data stream that gets submitted to our processor so that this cannot happen again.