I created a small explosion yesterday. The object of my
Philippic was an organization that my client ships data to. The data is XML and is generated out of Postgres using the XML facilities we introduced in version 8.3. The XML format being used is more than foul, but we have accomodated to that. However, these cretins said they couldn't process our XML because tags don't begin on a new line! This despite the fact that they had explicitly told me that it did not need to be pretty printed. After they told me that, a few weeks ago, I filtered the XML through a stylesheet to pretty print it.
Then yesterday thay came back with two more problems. First, a certain tag they were looking for had to begin in column 1 of its line. Second, they were unable to handle the sequence " " in the data. These two things indicated such a degree of incompetence there that I just unloaded. An XML processor that can't handle escaped characters or requires tags to begin in certain line positions is just broken. These people are charging my clients vast sums of money to process the data, and the least the client might expect is some level of competence.
The staff at my client were very amused by my tirade. One guy there told another "We have to get Andrew to stop holding back on his feelings, and let us know how he
really feels."
