Technical Inadvisory: Enter Trek support

The USS Enterprise... the ship with perhaps the richest history and greatest legacy of any in science fiction. — Handout

Hello and welcome to Technical Inadvisory, where a web developer with far too much free time discusses technology, programming, and videogames.

Any knowledge you glean from these articles may technically be usable, but shouldn’t be construed as actual advice.

Let’s start this off with a haunting, terrible question that I’ve been asking my friends for the past month: Would you be willing to work as tech support in the Star Trek universe?

I mean, think about it: tech support can be a highly stressful job where you have to deal with irate users, unexpected glitches, and malfunctioning technology.

The Star Trek universe can be a highly stressful place where you have to deal with irate aliens, unexpected anomalies, and malfunctioning technology that will gain sentience and try to kill you.

Combining these two things could lead to a hypothetical nightmare scenario.

I know how difficult things can get, because I spend half my working day solving technical issues (and the other half listening to Star Trek podcasts complaining about mushroom-powered spaceships) so I often get emails that begin and end with: “your webpage stopped working, help pls.”

O... okay? Which page? Which website? Which feature stopped working? What actions did you perform leading up to the error? What’s the error message, if any? Which web browser are you using? Are you viewing the page on a mobile, tablet, or computer? Are you logged in to the correct account?

I really want to help, but a lot of problem solving requires knowing as many details of the problem as possible.

There are so many ways for software and hardware to malfunction that an engineer has to ask a lot of rudimentary yet important questions to rule out various possibilities and close in on the root cause.

Now imagine the number of variables a troubleshooter needs to consider when the problem occurs on a Federation starship. “The chronometric sensors insist we’re stuck in a time loop and my android co- worker is acting weird, help pls.”

Okay... Did your subspace sensors pick up any space-time anomalies recently? Did you check that you’re not on a malfunctioning holodeck? Were you or your crewmates recently possessed by aliens with the power to alter your memories? Did your captain anger and/or canoodle some space entities? On which class of starship did you attempt to break the laws of physics? Are you sure you’re not in the mirror universe?

You might think I’m stretching the comparison here, and that “real world” problem solving is nothing like the nonsensical mumbo- jumbo technobabble of a sci-fi TV show. But last week one of my website’s users told me that they couldn’t update the content of a specific webpage, and this happened:

I checked the website’s page editor to make sure it’s working. I asked the user to try different web browsers to rule out browser incompatibility. I even asked them to try a different computer in a different building to rule out hardware and network issues.

Turns out the glitch only occurs in a very, very ridiculously specific scenario: the page editor crashes if, and only if, the user attempts to embed a YouTube video on one specific page, and that video URL has an underscore (_) character, and the video tag is directly adjacent to one of their existing image tags, and that image tag doesn’t have a caption.

Honestly, at this point, what’s the difference between me saying “the Markdown parser of the page editor is entering an infinite loop when it encounters an image tag followed immediately with a video tag with a specific configuration of characters in the URL, due to an uncaught permutation in the Regex expression, so add a space between the tags and it’ll magically work”, and Geordi La Forge saying “the warp field is collapsing due to tachyon radiation emitted from a dark matter nebula, so we need to charge our deflectors with antiprotons to reverse the ionic decay”?

As technology gets more complex, the problems get more complicated and confusing, so the exercise of troubleshooting gets harder for both the people experiencing the issue and the support crew trying to help.

Clarity absolutely matters when we’re trying to solve problems, and it’s often taken for granted. So, I’ve developed a rule for myself: when I ask for help, I always try to be as thoroughly descriptive (and polite!) as possible to the person on the other end of the line.

“I attempted to listen to the latest Star Trek podcast from the URL www.example.com/janeway-is-awesome at 2pm Tuesday, but had problems. When I click the link titled ‘VOY2x15’, the whole page goes blank and white, instead of the expected result of the audio player loading as usual. I’m using Windows 10 + Chrome version 79, and if I open the advanced dev console, I think I see the message ‘Error 503’ appear as soon as I click the link.”

Or in space: “I attempted to break the transwarp barrier, but encountered anomalies. When I tried to reach the theoretically infinite speed of Warp 10, I vanished and teleported to everywhere in the universe at once before reappearing, defying every law of physics, instead of the expected result of reaching my destination. I’m piloting a modified Class-2 shuttle from an Intrepid-class starship, and also I think I may be transforming into a salamander.”

I still can’t say whether I’d want to work in the Star Trek universe, but hopefully you now know how to get better quality help from tech support the next time you have a problem – whether it’s your browser crashing every time you open a website or your antimatter reactor inexplicably reversing its polarity.

Of course, you could always try switching it off and on.

(Raised by wild Nintendo consoles and trained in the ways of the computer scientist, Shaun A. Noordin tries to use his knowledge of web development, technology, and video games for the greater good. Or for entertainment and amusement, whichever’s easier. He has a lot of advice to share, but they’re all inadvisable to follow.)