The Same Name Problem
The two names I habitually use aren’t the most uncommon and I’ve met more than a few individuals, who use the same pair of names. I also own the .com domain for the names, which must give me a certain precedence.
But at registration for my P&O cruise, I found that I was not alone and because of this my account was changed to the first name that only my mother, my passport, HMRC and the DWP use. It worked after a fashion, although some staff seemed confused that I was travelling under a different name. But checking my statement after the cruise, there doesn’t seem to be any charges that I hadn’t made.
It did give me a bit of a problem with the wi-fi, as my Samsung tablet computer has my used name in its memory and always used that, which meant, there was a lot of typing at each login.
I have a feeling, that their system hasn’t had the requisite amount of testing.
You can always rely that when you program a computer, there will always be a set of obscure circumstances, that you feel will never happen.
But of course they will!
In this case of course they did, but no financial harm was done to any party involved. I just suffered the login inconvenience.
Unbreakable Passwords
Passwords are one of the things that the Internet and computer systems often get wrong.
How many times, does your chosen password, which is of a type that has been acceptable on Site A, been unacceptable on Site B?
There are two things, I really hate.
The first is sites that generate your initial password as a string of characters, which need to be cut and pasted into the logon. I’ve even found sites, that don’t let you change the password. Is there a better way to piss off your clients? There are several shopping sites, I’ve used in the past that think they are being clever and secure. In fact, they’re being stupid and I’ve never used their sites a second time.
The other is passwords that insist you use the shift key for at least one character. As I have trouble with shift and generally span my right hand to type upper case characters, which is not a reliable process, any site that insists on that type of password is out. So I never use a credit card with Verified by Visa on-line. This would be helped if all sites were like Zopa and allowed you to show the password, as you type it in.
So could we come up with better passwords, we’d always remember, that are totally unbreakable?
Here’s a few ideas!
My first car was a 1946 Austin 8. I still remember the registration, which was three letters followed by three numbers. Not long enough for some sites and rightly so, but this would be totally unbreakable, as how many criminals, would know the registration of the first car you owned. If you were someone like me, getting towards the last few decades of your life, it could be a good password. You could even have the simple password hint of “First Car” If I wanted a secure password, who could break it, if I used the registration number of the first Porsche I owned! I doubt that even my son, would know that registration.
And then there are memorable phone numbers and addresses from childhood. I doubt, there are few people, who don’t know these from where they grew up. Certainly, I was told to memorise them, so that if I got lost, I could find my way home.
I can also remember the address and phone number of my father’s print works as 38-44 Station Road and Bowes Park 2165.
The great things about passwords like these, is that you can write them down or put them in something like Outlook as say First Car or First Married Address and nobody will know them, except perhaps your partner or child.
There is a password strength checker here on Microsoft’s web site. It rated bowespark2165 as a strong password. It’s also easy to type.
In my view passwords must be easily memorable, as suppose you want access to say your credit card account in an emergency and you have to do it by using the memorable data, you don’t want it to be something you can’t recall.
The Banks Dismal Record On Innovation
I’ve worked on and off with senior banking professionals and those that think about their banking since the early 1970s.
In that time, I doubt, I’ve seen much really good clever innovation, that would have been to the benefit of either the banks or their customers.
I’ll start with a classic from the Midland Bank.
I was putting together a finance company in the late 1980s and the Midland Bank were keen to be a source of bulk money. We of course, had a beautiful little spreadsheet in the format of the time, Lotus 1-2-3.
The guy we were dealing with at the Bank, then said that he had no in-house facilities to examine the data. In their wisdom, the bank had provided those with a multi-user system based on a PDP-11, so they could run their own spreadsheets. Unfortunately, there was no way of uploading your data to their system. The guy we were dealing with had actually bought himself an Amstrad PC so that he could run them at home. Needless to say, we didn’t deal with Midland Bank. But what idiot in the bank, decided that PCs were a fad, when virtually all of their customers were thinking of or actually using them to run their own businesses.
The second is from the same time and applies to all of the banks.
My accountant at the time was pretty good and for years, he’d felt that one of the banes of his life was the lack of connection between the banks and small business accounting. His ideas, were that you could put a two digit code on all of your cheques in a space by the numbers along the bottom. You might put 67 for electricity, 68 for gas etc. These would then appear on your statement, so all the accountant would have needed to do was split everything down in his accounting software, especially if it was possible to get the statement in a simple electronic format.
He felt that any bank enhancing their service in this way, would have been very profitable to themselves, as they could have offered a simple accounting service. He did of course realise it would have lost accountants like him a lot of business.
But banks have done nothing to move into this area, which would have seen them offering a simple and much-needed service.
And then there was Lloyds Bank and their Cashpoints.
I was still doing my management accounting work for Lloyds as I was writing Artemis and someone there, asked how the bank could use a system like Artemis. As they were installing Cashpoints here, there and everywhere at the time, I said Artemis would be an ideal system to plan the roll out of the terminals. I did suggest, Artemis might be used to predict the cash flow and generate the budgets for the program.
I was then told that banks didn’t have cash flow problems as they used customers money and anyway, all of the Cashpoints they needed for the several year program, had already been delivered and were sitting in a warehouse somewhere. How about that for good management thinking?
The Management Accounting software I wrote for Lloyds wasn’t revolutionary in its own right, as any decent programmer could have written it, but the methods under it were far from conservative. An outsider, who had been the Chief Accountant of a major company had been recruited to try to get a hand on the bank’s costs.
It was truly innovative, but it never got beyond a trial, which seemed to end, when most of Lloyds’ staff were moved to Bristol.
One day, I’ll write up more on that work, which probably had a major effect on the design of some of the parts of Artemis.
Why Can’t I Sort My On-Line Bank Statement?
Often at the end of the month, when my current account has too much money in it, I transfer the excess I won’t need to Zopa.
This morning, I wanted to check, that I had put all of these payments into my Excel spreadsheet, that tracks my Zopa lending and calculates the rate I get.
So I logged into my bank account and looked at the on-line statement. I could of course look at it on a page-by-page basis, but where was the feature to sort all of my bank statement entries to bring direct debits to Zopa together?
No-where that I could see! There isn’t a select either to just bring up the debits to Zopa.
It is just not good enough, in this day and age, where a good proportion of the general population is familiar with handling sets of dat in programs like Excel.
I remember in probably about 1990, I was talking to a senior programmer, at one of the big banks. They had made a proposal to senior management to enable customers to get their bank statements on floppy discs. It was technically feasible and they felt it would have been taken up by customers and professionals, who needed to get the data into their personal computers.
These days, it should be second nature for a bank to offer a simple download of your bank statement in an Excel format.
Why doesn’t my bank offer this facility to everybody?
The Giraffe Web-Site Has Crashed
Tesco have taken over the Giraffe restaurant chain, as is reported here in the Guardian. This paragraph explains their strategy.
For a retailer that accounts for more than one in every £8 spent in UK shops, with UK sales of £47.3bn, the deal is pocket change. But added to the grocer’s recent 49% investment in artisan coffee shop Harris + Hoole, the group’s Dobbies garden centre business, and a stake in the embryonic, luxury bakery Euphorium, and the beginnings of a bold strategic shift begin to emerge.
I also wanted to look something up on the restaurant’s web site and got this message.
Due to today’s Tesco announcement we are experiencing extremely high volumes of traffic to our website.
We are currently working to accommodate the extra demand and will be back online later this evening. We apologise for any inconvenience.
I wonder if the wags will come up with jokes about Tesco swapping horse-meat for giraffe-meat.
The First Lesbian Kiss on British Television
Type the title of this post into Google and you get linked to an episode on Brookside.
But this is wrong!
Last night, David Rose in his presentation showed a clip from the play he produced some years earlier called Girl.
This play doesn’t appear to be mentioned on either Wikipedia or the Internet Movie Database.
So the Internet isn’t always right!
Taking Your Anger Out On Wikipedia
Last night as Manchester United threw their match away, I had an eye on the Wikipedia entry for the referee; Cüneyt Çakır.
Aspersions were being cast by the irate and removed by the moderators.
It’s all calmed down now!
Mincepiration
What a lovely name for a cookery book featured in The Times yesterday. The recipes they showed were all gluten-free or could be made so by using gluten-free flour.
I may not buy the book, but I think I’ll try and find a copy and have a browse.
A year ago, I’d have just bought it on Amazon. But their tax antics and the offensive tee-shirts, they have sold recently, have put me off buying from them.
Yahoo’s CEO’s Stupid Work Ideas
Marrisa Mayer the new relatively new CEO of Yahoo, has decreed that employees can’t work from home any more. I think it is stupid, but just read this article on CNN.
I think that any dictatorial employment policy is bad.
It would be just as bad to say that everybody worked at home as to say that everybody had to work in the office.
Admittedly, I’ve worked at home since about 1970 and in that time, I like to think, I’ve done some world-class work, so perhaps I’m biased one way.
On the other hand a few years ago, I remember meeting a lady, who used to analyse failure reports from government agencies and companies from around the world. Each analysis run took days on the fastest computers available and she used three PC’s on a network at home. The work she did was truly world-class and very important. All of these unusual arrangements were with the total agreement of her boss and the company she worked for. Then the company was taken over and they said that all employees must work in the office. She resigned immediately and I have a feeling that the work is now no longer done with the same thoroughness.
Getting the arrangements right, is all a question of good management.
With some employees home is the right place and with others it is the office.
Increasingly though, it strikes me that more and more people are combining the best of both work places. How many people for instance, check their e-mails before they go to work, so they can deal immediately with anything that is urgent? Are Yahoo going to ban employees from answering e-mails outside of office hours? Now that would be really stupid! On a related point, are they going to stop employees making personal phone calls or e-mails, when they are in the office?
I suspect if you look at really successful people and companies, they will have working arrangements that are not cast in stone.
Playboy Launch A Non-Nude App
I read of this in the Sunday Times, but it’s here in Tech Dirt.
It’s not much good for me, as I don’t buy Apple products.
So perhaps that old chestnut about buying it for the articles might be true. As now you can?
The Anonymous Widower 