Copernicus Science Centre
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Thought I'd take the kids here tomorrow so checked the website. First oddity: ticket prices
These continued for a while and can be put down to a strange translation.
The museum offers a year ticket, which makes sense if you plan to go more than about 3 times so I thought I'd buy one. Next oddity: the pages where you can buy tickets are only in Polish, but that's no huge problem. This however leads to the next oddity. Upon clicking the right type of ticket, the following two error texts were displayed:
The first one reads, "Number of owned cards: 0, Limit of owned cards: .' and the second one explains that I already have 0 cards which is the limit and I can't buy more.
After going back to the main menu, re-logging in and clicking through the ticket pages a few more times it eventually lets me buy one:
There are two things here. The first is that the asterisk indicates fields which are not required, going against every web form I've seen in the last 15 years. Secondly, the first field is for a birthday and instead of offering a date picker it's just a textbox, with some red text that appears underneath once you've tried to guess which format it expects.
Last but not least, once you get to this page a 15-minute timer starts which, once it reaches 0, cancels your ticket order and then logs you out of the museum site.
Not bad for a science museum
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@coldandtired said in Copernicus Science Centre:
Not bad for a science museum
I think they're probably studying you.
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@boomzilla said in Copernicus Science Centre:
I think they're probably studying you.
It's Poland not Soviet Russia ...
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@coldandtired said in Copernicus Science Centre:
Not bad for a science museum
Why would you expect a science museum to have a good website? Necessarily.
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@blakeyrat Baseless optimism?
It's a very new museum, and almost everyone working there seems to be quite young. I just like to think that young people doing technical things have slightly higher standards.
I fully realise that they likely have nothing to do with the website, which was probably assigned to the lowest bidder or some intern, but still.
In related news, when I got there this morning I was told I had actually managed to order two cards last night but only paid for one.
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@coldandtired said in Copernicus Science Centre:
Baseless optimism?
That's about all I can think of. When I think "scientists", assuming they built the website at all which they almost certainly did not, I think "guy who barely struggles to make a shitty C program work sometimes".
I have absolutely no association between "science" and "quality software development" in my brain. Hell, I have a much bigger association between "science" and "volumizing shampoo and conditioner", since when I was a kid the most exposure I had to "science" was commercials telling me it made hair care better.
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@blakeyrat said in Copernicus Science Centre:
I have absolutely no association between "science" and "quality software development" in my brain.
If you ever work with scientists who are doing their work by writing programs, that lack of association will be strengthened. It's not an outright negative correlation, but the wise do not expect scientific code to be good. Most of it is just custom one-off stuff with a single author-user, when the crappiness doesn't matter very much, but when it's going to the next level of usability (i.e., use by a second person!) then the awfulness hits. And there are exceptions; some scientists produce really good code.
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@dkf said in Copernicus Science Centre:
It's not an outright negative correlation, but the wise do not expect scientific code to be good. Most of it is just custom one-off stuff with a single author-user, when the crappiness doesn't matter very much, but when it's going to the next level of usability (i.e., use by a second person!) then the awfulness hits. And there are exceptions; some scientists produce really good code.
This is my entire fucking job. Ugh. I taught one scientist about version control and the idea of 'libraries to do stuff'. There's a thread where I bitch about it somewhere.
