Murphy
Courseware update.... Along with doing the real work of coding and graphics, I've been hassling for the last week with a classic Murphy's Law situation.

For the next phase of the work, publisher needs to have me tied into their QA system so I can submit the individual lessons and fix individual details. For "security" reasons their QA system isn't run as a direct-access website. Instead, they run it through Cisco-built software called VPN, which installs a separate SSL channel on your computer. We know how secure SSL is, don't we?

The CORRECT instructions should have been as follows: (1) Download and install the Cisco VPN software. (2) Run the VPN thing and connect it to our main server. (3) While VPN is running, use any browser to connect with our QA system.

The instructions they gave me were written for a situation where the remote employee already has the VPN installed. Because I know what's on my computer, I immediately realized the instructions were useless, so I began asking for appropriate instructions. The non-tech people at the other end were accustomed to operating with everything already installed by their IT guys, so they didn't understand the problem.

After that, we spent a week of email and phone tag, with misunderstandings of the procedure on both ends and wrong URLs given at each stage.

When I finally had the VPN thing working, I ass-u-me-d that the actual QA needed to be reached through the VPN thing, because the whole setup is a "private channel". But the VPN thing wouldn't select any new destinations after it was running. I told them this, but they didn't catch my bad assumption. Properly, at that stage the VPN doesn't need to select anything else. It's already doing its single job of diverting the browser's connection into an allegedly "more secure" SSL connection.

They were so thoroughly accustomed to the proper way of doing things that they couldn't see what was wrong. I hadn't bothered with the REST of the original instructions after seeing that the FIRST step was inappropriate. (Why would the REST of it be any better than the first step?)

The situation was resolved in a strange non-verbal way. They had me install a remote-control thing .... again with a wrong URL, requiring correction after I couldn't download it. With the remote-control thing, their IT guy ran my computer, turned on the VPN thing, and used IE to reach the QA site. This was all fast and automatic for him; he was only verifying that the setup would actually work. When I saw him open IE, I understood my bad assumption.
  ¶ 2:06 AM