I went to the ACM’s web site to fill out their form for ICPC participants. When I clicked submit, however, I was faced with this upsetting error message:

No matter how many times I clicked “Submit” or filled out the form, this dialog would pop up. Following my geek instincts, I was determined to figure out why. I looked at the source code for the web page. Immediately, I noticed the all the code for the Javascript client-side form validation was right there in the page. A couple of quick searches and I found the reason I was looking for.

In validating the form, the Javascript checks to see that you did in fact enter a Canadian province if you selected that your country was Canada. (That is, if you entered something like “Kentucky” it would tell you pop up the error dialog, since “Kentucky” is not a Canadian province). Fair enough. However the line of code they had for validating Québec was something like this:

if ( form.s_state == "PQ" ) { success = 1; } else { success = 0; }

However in the form itself, as part of a giant list box, was the following option:

<option value="QC">Quebec</option>

Obviously, “QC” and “PQ” are not the same thing. So the form validation fails. What’s a geek to do? So I opened up Firefox, installed Firebug and went back to the form. I used Firebug to modify the <option> tag so that it’s value was “PQ”, thus allowing the form to be submitted. I was met with a nasty error debugging page, since apparently “PQ” is not a valid key in their database. This means that the form isn’t ever being validated on the server side. The values that I fill out, passing the Javascript client-side validation, go straight to their database.

Sufficiently disgruntled, and realizing that there’s no server-side validation whatsoever (other than some foreign key constraints in the database), I opted to simply disable Javascript in my browser. This worked like a charm. My form was submitted successfully, I received a registration number and confirmation e-mail and everything. This is analogous to being locked out of a car, and managing to open the door by pressing the “bypass locking mechanism”-button that is located on the handle.

But I made a mistake. After disabling Javascript I forgot to select “Quebec” from the dropdown box. So according to the ACM, I live in Montreal, in the state of Alabama, in Canada.

Ridiculous. This is the society of programmers, computer scientists and software engineers — and they can’t even get a simple web form right. Forms should always, always, ALWAYS be validated on the server-side. This is elementary. This is basic. This is common-sense.

Don’t worry, though. I fully plan to notify the appropriate individuals to resolve the problem.

I told Dr. Parnas about the time I saw him speak at CUSEC 2004: That one presentation was an extremely influential moment of my life. I remember he was talking about the importance of software quality, and how it needs to be engineered as oppose to hacked together by a rogue band of coders. Most importantly, I remember looking up at Dr. Parnas giving that speech and thinking “that’s what I want to do”. As soon as I got back to school following that conference, I applied to transfer my major from Computer Science to Software Engineering. I think that was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life, and I thanked Dr. Parnas for that.

David Parnas replied to me: “Thanks for that! That actually just made my day.” And Fred Brooks added: “As well it should!”

And I got a picture with both of them.