When technology is abused or misused, government has a right to step in.

It is good to see a government in Shanghai stepped in to ban the taxi driver from receiving bookings from smartphone apps during certain peak hours to avoid creating a situation that severely disadvantage those that have been left behind by technology.

The following story illustrates the dire situation that requires intervention:

The following story was widely circulated in Shanghai recently, and illustrates the point. It is about an old woman who stood on the street, in front of a hospital gate after she had just visited the doctor for some medical checks.

She waited on the street for about an hour trying to hail a taxi without success.

Many taxis stopped but the first question the drivers asked her was if she had this or that taxi-booking app in her smartphone in the hope they could get the bonus on top of the normal fare. She didn't have one of the apps so those taxi drivers said sorry and left her on the side of the road.

Companies & individuals should never be allowed to have a one-sided view exploiting technology to benefit a few and leaving those less capable and sadly the most vulnerable behind. Technology can both benefit a society but can also destroy it depending on whether one can strike a balance.

The government of Shanghai should be congratulated for recognising

new technology should improve the quality of life for the general public, not just allow some people, like taxi drivers, to make quick money or help app developers quickly gather enough users so they can get listed on Nasdaq and make their own fortune.

 Can we direct his energy to humanize the bank?

Software is not created to serve human. A banking example.

This is a rather provocative title for a purpose. Recently I read a very good article from ACM Communication titled "Center Wheel for Success" by Poul-Henning Kamp, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 57 No. 2, Pages 52-54 in which the author questions the high costs of some of the large scale software developments and the finding so many for failing to meet the objectives while many died prematurely. He was citing the a system designed to meet US government's Obamacare as the example.

He attribute this largely to "Blindly deciding that IT be substituted for humans is unenlightened. IT is not a magic potion that makes unpleasant or inconvenient things disappear."

It is nice to find someone that shares my feeling on this topic and that they do not really serve human. At best they should be a tool to help human to deal with mundane and repetitive tasks, which computer and IT programs are apt to do. Human is a master of creating changes and master in complexity and adaptability to deal with ad hoc matters.

Let's consider a real life example.

Today, I was in a bank - it does not matter Which Bank - as I am sure this happenstance is found in any bank any time of the day.

A relatively matured lady was waiting in line patiently for being served and a bank staff approached her to ask how she could help her. She told the staff all she wanted was to get a list of recent transactions of her account that was accessible from the card in her hand. How hard could that be and I am sure that is probably the most required action from any customer.

Without a second to digest the full requirement, the staff (could she be a developer in her previous job?) shepherded her to an ATM machine protruding from the wall and attempted to show her how to get the list. After some moments of fiddling with the ATM without satisfying the customer, the staff realised how stupid she was that did not even listen carefully.

Eventually she took the lady to stand beside a bank teller using her terminal to view the list of transactions. She did not receive a print out despite her money funding the running of the bank.

Is this service? Does the banking system actually serve the customer's needs? Her needs is nothing complex and must be known to anyone in the banking industry without even involving a neuron and yet she still could not get what she wants other than 'being a bank teller' literally.

I contend that the banking system has missed the mark by a long shot. Consider not long ago, she would not have to walk to the bank, waste her time standing in queue and explaining the simple thing that she took for granted for so long  when she was clinging to an information rich bank book; she could simply look at her bankbook. Now she has been given a piece of plastic devoid of any useful information. I have a feeling that she did not enjoy such an experience that the system has successfully made her feeling useless.

Sure time has changed but human's needs and modus operandi have not. What good is a system if it cannot meet the human's basic needs other than to satisfy the fancy of the developers.

In this case, why can't the ATM has an option that allows the user to list and print the transactions one is interested in. This is a simple operation and it is definitely a good way to ease those bankbook dependent customers over to a new system. At best the current crop of ATM could only show the current balance.

In HK MTR, they have a balance checking device next to the ticket dispensing machine that allows the Octopus Card holder to list the 10 most recent trips, their costs and the balance remaining. That's a good service.

Surely any bank system analyst would have sat in a bank branch observing how customers interact with the bank over days, recording and understanding their needs and expectations before attempt to develop a system to 'serve' the customers?

It is not hard to replicate a simple bankbook and doing so will make many happier and imposing less burden on them. It is worth remember this simple phrase "You (the developers) are not the users".

If the system requires the user to buy a modem, have an internet connection, learn how to deal with a computer system and to fire up a web browser (web what? to many) to do the job of a bank teller, how can one calls that system serving the customer. It is basically a DIY operation and not serving the customers at all. The bank is passing the buck to the customers making them the pseudo-bank employee with no pay.

Buggy CBA NetBank Term Deposit Management facility

In the CBA Internet Banking Service, one could supposedly manage one's term deposit investment online. However, the following two examples show the bugs in this program making such a simple task impossible and downright frustrating. Not only that, the design of it is so confusing.

One would expect the largest bank in Australia would not commit this kind simple programmatic mistakes. Before making accusation, the NetBank optimisation check facility was used to ascertain that my operating environment meeting the specification and here is the result:

Please note the facility is not sensitive to operating system and all versions of the operating system contains the latest updates.


1) Select a New Term Deposit option.
The facility displays a list of term deposit option as shown here:

Looks good but on the above mentioned environment it does not allow the user to click on any radio button to select the prefer option unless I am using IE8 & 10. This part also fails in IE11 like Firefox. To ensure no Firefox add-in was causing the problem, the Firefox was re-run in safe mode and it produced the same result. I have also test them using Firefox in Win7 and producing the same result.

Hence this part of the web page appears to be very sensitive to the browser version and type or one could not trust the verification service of NetBank.

2) This is the best one I have seen that even a primary school kid knowing real number comparison could see the folly.

In a section available for entering maturity instructions - which do not appear to apply for the imminent renewal but from all the descriptions, this section appears to be apply at the maturity of the imminent renewal. That confusing part (prime candidate for "Why Software Sucks") is not relevant to the current issue.

In that section there is a field where you can specify "Additional investment amount" and next to the field is a maximum figure of $1,897,643.83, which I can guarantee anyone that I do not have. Please note this figure.

When you enter a value of 0.5, representing 50 cents, the entry validation control raises an error like this:

The error message is:

Since when is 0.5 NOT "less than or equal to the maximum amount ($1,897,643.83) shown"?

I believe what happens under the hood is the application of "Everything is a Nail" anti-pattern looking like this:

    if ( !ValidateInput(amount) )
         ErrMsg = "Please enter an amount less than or equal to the maximum amount shown";

As long as ValidateInput() returning false, the same error message is used, irrespective if it is appropriate. In the ValidateInput() $0.5 is probably not a valid entry - being below the minimum of $1.00, I guess. The developer probably expects the user to possess psychic power that can see the rule table residing on the CBA Server.

If you have previously defined an additional investment amount and wanting to remove it. In IE10, you can delete it but it then raises another error like this:

In Firefox, when one tries to delete the entry, the program raises the above mentioned error message. In IE10, you could ignore that protestation and the submit button allows the user to commit the changes even when it says the field is required but with no data. Is it a required field or is it not?

Now you see this buggy program creates more frustration and raise the blood pressure higher.

Worthy Pdf readers in Linix Mint/Ubuntu

There are plenty of questions on the Internet asking whether there are any PDF Readers (free of course) for Linux that have more capability than the one that is packaged with Ubuntu/Mint, the Evince, that allow the users to annotate and highlight the materials.

Adobe Reader 9 can do this provided that the document contains a policy allowing the users to comment and annotate. In the absence of such a policy, this reader defaults to denying such capability.

There does not appear to be any native Linux PDF readers that can do this. Some such as Okular can do highlighting etc but they are stored in their private format that only the viewer that created it could display them. Hence their annotations are not shown in say Adobe Reader. Therefore this class of viewers are considered not supporting the annotation and highlighting requirements.

As a last resort, I am using 2 Windows PDF viewers running in WINE in Mint/Ubuntu. They are PDF XChange Viewer and FoxIt Reader.

At the time of writing, I have uninstalled "PDF XChange Viewer" because in Mint-64 bit, it consistently crashed the reader when I was switching documents in the tabbed view of the reader. My experience is also supported by reported behaviour in the WineHQ. It is ashamed that it misbehaves in this manner. The other problem with this is with the display when scrolling the document. However, one can alter the display settings to prevent this.

While FoxIt Reader also has a native Linux version, it is a very basic reader similar to Evince that does not do annotation and highlighting. Consequently, this is not used. Instead FoxIt Reader version 6.1.2.1224 is installed with the support of WINE.

So far, it behaves well with the only exception that it fails to account for the height of the task bar in Mint when one maximizes the FoxIt window. As result, the navigation bar is partially covered.

The other issue which may unsettle some is the automatic installation and activation of the FoxIt cloud plug-in and the Reader does not have an easy way to uninstall this plug-in.

To disable this plug-in, close the FoxIt Reader and use the following steps in Mint/Ubuntu:
1) Bring up the File explorer, Nemo or Nautilus
2) Press Ctrl-H to view hidden file
3) Locate the Windows system tools in WINE installed directory which is by default located here:
~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32
4) Then use the "Wine Windows program loader" to load Control.exe, the Windows control panel program and you should see a window like this:

5) Double click on "Add/Remove Programs" to start the program.
6) Locate the item called "Foxit Cloud" and uninstall that program item.

Next time you start FoxIt Reader, you will not see the "FoxIt Cloud" menu item. I only wish FoxIt would offer a more user-friendly way to disable it and also seek user's consent before activating the plug-in and FoxIt cloud.

Common reasons in software system failure

A post by Charette in IEEE Spectrum on the failure of various government systems sums up pretty much the general reasons why they fail:

put all the blame for the fiasco on Deloitte, which Deloitte heatedly contests. News reports state that at least one Florida lawmaker is suggesting that Deloitte be barred from future Florida contracts, something that Australia’s Queensland government has done to IBM as a result of Big Blue's role in the Queensland Health payroll debacle.
[...]
The bottom line was that no one was in charge, vendors and the state did not get along, the vendors themselves did not get along, no one wanted to hear about the myriad significant technical risks, and political motivations dominated decision making. In other words, all the makings of an all-too-typical government IT project.

Could it be that we are trying to develop software to do far more complex stuff, instead of being a tool to help human, they are being developed to replace human? In many of these systems, the common theme in all these failures - hire more human to remedy the failure!

In most of these large systems development, by the time the system is ready, the world has changed; the political scene has changed causing requirements to change; rules are changing all the time before the ink is dried.

Do not accept answers that you do not understand.

Not only it is the duty of the purse string holders needing to know precisely, without being clouded by technical jargon, what a software solution can do for the enterprise, every users need to know. This ensure that the buyers and users know precisely what they are getting and what they are paying for.

It is refreshing to come across this article in Financial Times relaying the experience of a very wise and persistent director of an enterprise that "demanded the computing experts translate their plans into plain English."

Far too often, as I have observed, that the recipients of software products choose to keep quiet for fear of showing up their ignorance or failure to comprehend of the materials from the so-called "technical experts". They all should emulate this "Dennis".

In fact, it is the communication fault of the "technical experts" that fail to explain the materials, particularly the functional part, in the terms that the users can understand. I don't expect them to explain how data base schemas are designed, XML messages being passed around or how to pool connections but at least they should be able to answer user-centric questions like what is the response time of say 20,000 users accessing the system, the stability of the system in terms of how often one expects a failure.

In a theme similar to the "Why Software Sucks" but at a different level, the  messages from the FT article are worth remembering. Admitting one does not understand the gobbledegook, often silently, and then not demanding answers to one's satisfaction is an abdication of one's duty.

Caveats in using GnuCash - Time Zone dependent

For anyone that uses GnuCash to manage an account and then making this account available to someone in a different country (more correctly different time zone), you need to be aware of the treatment of transaction date in GnuCash as it can cause disagreement.

Or for traveller that takes their account on a trip and diligently changing the time zone on arrival of each location and then recording transaction en route. For example, if you travel from NYC and visit HK record a transaction, and return to NYC, GnuCash will render the transaction date for the HK transaction differently when viewed in NYC.

To understand this time zone dependency one needs to understand how GnuCash records the transaction date, which is stored in transactions.post_date.

GnuCash stores each transaction date (entered in local date) in UTC by converting the local date you enter taken as at 0000 hour using the system time zone and it does not stores the time zone information of the transaction date. But GnuCash always displays the transaction date in local date by conversion using the system time zone. If the transaction journals contain records recorded in different time zones, the user can be confused when viewing these transactions.

Recently I ran into a problem when I was reconstructing an account from a pile of statements from Hong Kong. I was entering the transactions, whose dates were clearly in Hong Kong Time zone using Brisbane Time zone (UTC+10) unaware of the conversion mechanism underneath.

When the GnuCash account was then shown in Hong Kong, after changing the system time zone to that of Hong Kong (UTC+8), all the transaction dates were one date behind even though the time zone difference was only 2 hours difference. How could this small change resulted in a 24 hours shift?

It turns out GnuCash drops the time when rendering the transaction date. Hence a transaction date of May 23, 2012 (at 0000) in Brisbane Time Zone recorded as 20120522140000 is converted to Hong Kong Time zone as 22/05/2012 2200 and displayed as 22/05/2012 after discarding the time.

Because GnuCash always uses 0000 hours on recording and then dropping the time after converting to local date/time, this can give an incorrect date, like a 24 hours shift.

For some other time zone difference the change does not yield any difference. It all depends on the shift.

This date treatment means:
1) that the database of GnuCash is tightly dependent on the time zone and one is ill-advised to change the system time zone. If you move domicile, you may have to create a brand new GnuCash database for that new time zone.

2) If dispatching the database to a different time zone, warn them conversion may alter the transaction date.