The central campus IT organization manages site licenses for a handful
of products. Back in the days of yore, they provided this software on
floppy and then cdrom. Now it is provided by a web site which
authenticates the downloader with the campus directory. After giving the
site my username and password, I click the link to download the software
and am presented with--
"Illegal Access!!!
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e14'
[Microsoft][ODBC driver for Oracle][Oracle]ORA-00947: not enough values
/programs/download.asp, line 24"
Having seen similar messages before, I allow cookies from the site,
re-login and all is fine. This is of course broken, I should have
been presented a nice error message explaining something like "You
seem to not have the correct cookie perhaps you are blocking cookies
from this site." Well, all is fine until I try to download
the second part of the package I am after, at which point I am told--
"Central Campus Download Site
There was an error with your download attempt.
You have already downloaded this program. Please re-register if you need to download the program again."
Ignoring the incorrectness of this message (I was downloading a
different piece of the same package), this is a message I should simply
not have recieved. There is no reason to make the user go through extra
steps to assist them logging of information when they could have handled
it inside the application.
These are mistakes that I could tolerate from small time departments,
but not from one that spends more money on trial projects in a year than I
have in my entire year's tech budget.
Update 2005-11-22: I filed this matter as a bug report with the
group that maintains the download system. The case was closed with the
following note--
"While not a critical issue, this seems to be resolved by restarting
the browser and re-logging back in."
