Rant - FreeCen changes

[bradburyd]

Golden rule after nearly 50 years in the IT industry : "If it ain't bust, don't fix it".

[hurworth]

I looked at it last night and noticed it also

Doesnt have the same flexibilty as before. ie skipping to the next property to see if family or future in laws lived nearby

That's a shame.  For Scotland in particular that was a very handy feature.

[Forfarian]

Doesnt have the same flexibilty as before. ie skipping to the next property to see if family or future in laws lived nearby

I hadn't got as far as noticing that - it's a major new flaw and will greatly reduce the usefulness of FreeCEN for finding out where places were.

Ah! It is still there, but it's in the row of buttons along the top of the screen and not visible if you have had to scroll down to see all the members of the household. Daft place to put it.

[KGarrad]

KGarrad I think you might have worked for the same outfit as me.  I'd look you up in the old green loose-leaf internal directory I spirited away but I think I might have got rid of it.  It started going downhill for me when a massive development was outsourced to a sub-continent concern whose staff had only a basic grip of our language and no knowledge at all of the UK banking system.

Thankfully redundancy and early retirement came to my rescue.

Jane :-)

Jane, That's a bit too close for comfort!
I worked for the Life Assurance arm of a major Bank/Building Society, which was originally based in West Yorkshire and Scotland
I was based in Maastricht

Those sub-continent concerns sound very cheap, going by the hourly rate, but it takes them 10 times longer to achieve anything!

[DavidG02]

Doesnt have the same flexibilty as before. ie skipping to the next property to see if family or future in laws lived nearby

I hadn't got as far as noticing that - it's a major new flaw and will greatly reduce the usefulness of FreeCEN for finding out where places were.

Ah! It is still there, but it's in the row of buttons along the top of the screen and not visible if you have had to scroll down to see all the members of the household. Daft place to put it.

Thanks

[jonw65]

https://freecen1.freecen.org.uk/
New address for the old version
Although search not connecting properly

No, I always get "Error 503 Service Unavailable
No server is available to handle this request" as soon as I click on 'Search the Database'.

It's working perfectly tonight.

[Forfarian]

It's working perfectly tonight.

Oh, good

[eadaoin]

Martin,

We used to perform:
Program Testing
Unit Testing
System Testing
User Acceptance Testing
Regression Testing

How many of these are skipped, or not done properly, these days?

Why do so many banking system updates (as an example) go so wrong?

When the mainframes were thrown out so were all the proven procedures that went along with mainframe development in analysis, design and testing.

When I was tutoring first-year University students in 1980s, that's what we taught them.
They had to do a project towards year-end, comprising 3 programs, I think.
One of my jobs as tutor was to pretend I was an illiterate user, and try to input weird numbers, etc into their programs - to try to "break" the system. It really showed them a thing or two!

so, when the program screen said "type in 4 digits", I'd type 3 digits, then I'd try 5 digits, then some letters etc etc

[a chesters]

eadaoin, that's the sort of thing I used to do, just to annoy those who were supposed to be the "experts".

I have just checked my grandfather in Durham. They have not yet converted the 1881 for Durham to the new one, and the 1891 does not find him.