simulacra

I’m thinking of publishing some ‘open’ bug reports. I’ll be posting mostly about websites that I (or people I know) use; and I’ll send this as feedback to the site as well, when possible. Lets see if I can get some responses.

Here’s a bug report for bseindia.com:

Sample URL: http://bseindia.com/price_finder/stockreach.asp?scripcd=500325

Issue: The Java applet doesn’t load properly. On further investigation, I can see the following output on the Java console:

java.security.AccessControlException: access denied
(java.net.SocketPermission www.bseindia.com:80 connect,resolve)
at java.security.AccessControlContext.checkPermission(Unknown Source)
at java.security.AccessController.checkPermission(Unknown Source)
…

It seems that the applet cannot open the page it requires, which results in no data being shown. On further investigation, the URL http://www.bseindia.com/price_finder/stockreach.asp?scripcd=500325 works fine—removing the www from the URL causes the page to break.

Proposed solutions:

1. Use relative URLs to open the resource in question.
2. Grant the applet permission to open pages from bseindia.com as well as www.bseindia.com—there must be some method to specify this.
3. Use server-side redirect rules and allow one URL to access the page in question—either with or without the www.

I wanted to provide the site with this feedback, but I couldn’t:

1. First of all, the feedback page for the site, http://bseindia.com/feedback/feedbackbseinfo.asp does not work without the www. I get a 404 error on submitting it. I had to use the URL http://www.bseindia.com/feedback/feedbackbseinfo.asp, this is another bug report in itself.

2. The feedback page contains a textfield scaled to be 200 pixels wide by 50 pixels height. A textfield mind you, not a textarea. I can’t enter multiple lines there. I disabled Firefox’s Javascript support, and used Firebug to convert the textfield into an textarea.

3. On submit of the page to the URL http://www.bseindia.com/feedback/actionfeedback.asp, I get the error message:

   Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e09'

   [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]INSERT permission denied on object 'feedback', database 'Bse', owner 'dbo'.

   /feedback/actionfeedback.asp, line 32

Well, I tried. I’ve published the bug report here, and it’ll hopefully come to the attention of somebody who works there. If a website gets so many things wrong, I don’t think I can trust it with my financial details. So, bseindia.com, I won’t be using you in the near future.