5 ms·

I recently bought a Panasonic camera - in the compact travel zoom class. One feature is wifi support, where for example it can upload pictures to your computer

I recently bought a Panasonic camera - in the compact travel zoom class. One feature is wifi support, where for example it can upload pictures to your computer. There are several places the camera lets you enter text such as names in face recognition, and in SSIDs. But for some unfathomable reason a Panasonic engineer added extra code so that spaces are disabled for wifi passwords. This was actual extra effort, and completely and utterly wrong. Spaces are allowed, every domestic access point I use has them, and everything else is perfectly happy with them including iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, Mac, Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii, and Roku. Oh and Panasonic TVs and bluray players (the "smart" ones). It is impossible for Panasonic to find out about this or do anything about it, because like many companies they value interaction with their customers so little that it is outsourced to the lowest bidder. Those companies business model is to give out the same answers to the same questions over and over again. They cannot cope with an answer they don't already have. The one Panasonic uses in the US is even worse, refusing to tell Panasonic about the issue. They also have a cunning system where links to surveys after chats don't work, and the phone survey won't recognise giving them low scores! If anyone is curious I wrote about the whole saga at http://www.rogerbinns.com/blog/support-tale.html http://www.rogerbinns.com/blog/support-tale.html

tombrossman 13y ago
I enjoyed the blog post mostly because 'misery loves company' and I've been through this same nonsense before. Bottom line is that when a support system like Panasonic's isn't working for you, quickly to abandon it and resort to a proper business letter sent through the mail. Format it properly, keep it very short and clearly state what you want, and include at least one complement as this works wonders. It takes less time than all the bullshit on the phone, plus I have seen a 100% success rate after resorting to this myself. I do 3-4 a year, easy. Look up the company's address and CEO, or head of that particular product division. Spend a tiny bit more than normal postage and get signature proof of delivery, it really is worth it. Include your email address on the printed letter and you will hear back from someone at the company who can actually help you. And be quicker to abandon the traditional support channels when they frustrate you. I'll set a hard limit of 10 minutes to get a human on the phone who sounds competent before I hang up and send a letter. I'll hang up right in the middle of their script, I just don't care anymore. The letters work.
- dclowd9901 13y ago
  This is absolutely true. During the housing crisis, I couldn't get the time of day from Wells Fargo. I must've spent half my days playing phone tag with their useless reps. I finally got fed up and looked up the names of every executive member of their home mortgage group from the vp of service up. I included them all on an email (including the CEO) explaining my situation. No more than an hour passed before the VP of service had called me directly.
userbinator 13y ago
Five buttons, all for spaces? That would already be a sign to me that whoever designed that UI wasn't really thinking straight... And I'm almost willing to bet that not letting you enter spaces might be the result of a "security fix" because they pass the contents of that field, unescaped, directly through to a wifi configuration shell script, and someone doing some testing discovered that spaces would "cause things to break", so the solution was to disallow spaces instead of performing escaping on the password string. Also related: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Securing-Secure-Security.aspx http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Securing-Secure-Security.asp... Edit: while Googling around for some other devices that might have this interesting issue, I found... https://github.com/xbianonpi/xbian-package-config-xbmc/issues/12 https://github.com/xbianonpi/xbian-package-config-xbmc/issue... Why is escaping input such a difficult concept to comprehend?
- kalleboo 13y ago
  > Five buttons, all for spaces? That would already be a sign to me that whoever designed that UI wasn't really thinking straight... It's a sign to me that they're extremely lazy, or their code is so bad that making small exceptions are very difficult/brittle. http://imgb.mp/jvs.jpg http://imgb.mp/jvs.jpg "Now that we're translating this UI to English, what do we do with all these buttons that aren't needed?" "Too much work trapping into the UI drawing code to hide them, let's just remap them to something else... how about space! That's harmless!"
  - userbinator 13y ago
    I see what looks like the Japanese equivalents of single and double quote, full stop and comma, so it's still a bit puzzling why the English version doesn't have those there.
    - kalleboo 13y ago
      The "single and double" quote are actually Dakuten and Handakuten, which are essential parts of the language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakuten http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakuten Good point about the punctuation.
DanBC 13y ago
The keyboard screen shot shows a grid for uppercase, lowercase, numbers and symbols. Do the 5 space keys not work in all of those options? Do you get a working space key if you're in symbols for example?
- rogerbinns 13y ago
  The 5 different spaces on the alphabetic screen all work as spaces in other contexts, including manually entering an SSID. When switched to numeric there are 3 grayed out spaces, and punctuation has 1 grayed out space. The developer who decided to disable spaces in wifi passwords was very thorough.

tombrossman 13y ago

I enjoyed the blog post mostly because 'misery loves company' and I've been through this same nonsense before. Bottom line is that when a support system like Panasonic's isn't working for you, quickly to abandon it and resort to a proper business letter sent through the mail. Format it properly, keep it very short and clearly state what you want, and include at least one complement as this works wonders. It takes less time than all the bullshit on the phone, plus I have seen a 100% success rate after resorting to this myself. I do 3-4 a year, easy. Look up the company's address and CEO, or head of that particular product division. Spend a tiny bit more than normal postage and get signature proof of delivery, it really is worth it. Include your email address on the printed letter and you will hear back from someone at the company who can actually help you. And be quicker to abandon the traditional support channels when they frustrate you. I'll set a hard limit of 10 minutes to get a human on the phone who sounds competent before I hang up and send a letter. I'll hang up right in the middle of their script, I just don't care anymore. The letters work.

dclowd9901 13y ago
This is absolutely true. During the housing crisis, I couldn't get the time of day from Wells Fargo. I must've spent half my days playing phone tag with their useless reps. I finally got fed up and looked up the names of every executive member of their home mortgage group from the vp of service up. I included them all on an email (including the CEO) explaining my situation. No more than an hour passed before the VP of service had called me directly.

userbinator 13y ago

Five buttons, all for spaces? That would already be a sign to me that whoever designed that UI wasn't really thinking straight... And I'm almost willing to bet that not letting you enter spaces might be the result of a "security fix" because they pass the contents of that field, unescaped, directly through to a wifi configuration shell script, and someone doing some testing discovered that spaces would "cause things to break", so the solution was to disallow spaces instead of performing escaping on the password string. Also related: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Securing-Secure-Security.aspx http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Securing-Secure-Security.asp... Edit: while Googling around for some other devices that might have this interesting issue, I found... https://github.com/xbianonpi/xbian-package-config-xbmc/issues/12 https://github.com/xbianonpi/xbian-package-config-xbmc/issue... Why is escaping input such a difficult concept to comprehend?

kalleboo 13y ago
> Five buttons, all for spaces? That would already be a sign to me that whoever designed that UI wasn't really thinking straight... It's a sign to me that they're extremely lazy, or their code is so bad that making small exceptions are very difficult/brittle. http://imgb.mp/jvs.jpg http://imgb.mp/jvs.jpg "Now that we're translating this UI to English, what do we do with all these buttons that aren't needed?" "Too much work trapping into the UI drawing code to hide them, let's just remap them to something else... how about space! That's harmless!"
- userbinator 13y ago
  I see what looks like the Japanese equivalents of single and double quote, full stop and comma, so it's still a bit puzzling why the English version doesn't have those there.
  - kalleboo 13y ago
    The "single and double" quote are actually Dakuten and Handakuten, which are essential parts of the language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakuten http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakuten Good point about the punctuation.

DanBC 13y ago

The keyboard screen shot shows a grid for uppercase, lowercase, numbers and symbols. Do the 5 space keys not work in all of those options? Do you get a working space key if you're in symbols for example?

rogerbinns 13y ago
The 5 different spaces on the alphabetic screen all work as spaces in other contexts, including manually entering an SSID. When switched to numeric there are 3 grayed out spaces, and punctuation has 1 grayed out space. The developer who decided to disable spaces in wifi passwords was very thorough.