Rage. Uni. Anger. Blood. Tears. Web applications.

I am about to start cry­ing because of a web appli­ca­tion for the sec­ond time in (I think) as many days. No, it’s not MySpace (it was suf­fi­ciently van­quished after some tum­bling about with pointed sticks).

I sup­pose I should have known bet­ter. Just because there’s no warn­ing, doesn’t mean it’s not about to do some­thing stu­pid. Par­tic­u­larly given the Uni­ver­sity of Sydney’s web team’s fetish for ses­sion time­outs like they’re run­ning some high-grade-cipher-required (they use 256bit SSL certs for every­thing) nuclear launch sys­tem. Only not, because Kim isn’t a stu­dent. But, then again, even if he were the usabil­ity issues would prob­a­bly be man­i­festly more suc­cess­ful than the UN/non-proliferation treaties.

What­ever. So I spent too long ago­nis­ing (and I do mean ago­nis­ing) over sub­ject selec­tion for pre-enrolment (I know, I don’t need to worry, I can change it later — what­ever. I’m hav­ing a stress­ful day and for what­ever rea­son am choos­ing to get this out of the way now so that I don’t expe­ri­ence this later. That’s the the­ory.) and then the mon­ster ate it all. What really [exple­tive] me is that when I finally made my last choice, I went and entered it then its bloody popup-confirmation sys­tem (which, inci­den­tally, is quite usable but I despise it on prin­ci­ple) still worked. Sub­mit it? Sorry, you’re not logged in. Log in? Their [another exple­tive] auth proxy doesn’t even pass the right GET vars (strips ? and pos­si­bly amper­sands, too, it seems, so I got a lovely 404 page), let alone every­thing I just POST’d. Talk about stab­bing users in the back.

Words can­not express how irate I am right now.

To top it off, I’m increas­ingly con­vinced I some­how man­aged to screw up my whole degree pro­gramme whilst still in first year Arts. No, I didn’t think that were pos­si­ble, either. I am ade­quately pissed off with the world to leave this post here.

# by Josh on October 30th, 2006 Tags: , , , , ,
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St George Internet banking sucks

It requires Java. I can live with that, it’s a web application.

I had to call up to find out what browsers they offi­cially sup­ported, only to be told that sup­port was lim­ited to Inter­net Explorer on Win­dows, Mac (!!) and Netscape 7+ on both plat­forms. Fire­fox “hasn’t been tested”, Safari hasn’t been looked at. I’m not par­tic­u­larly keen on this, but hey, they’re a bank… we all expect them to be a bit backwards.

The appli­ca­tion sniffs for a Java Vir­tual Machine and refuses to load with­out even pro­vid­ing an error mes­sage if one isn’t detected. This wouldn’t be so bad but for the fact that it checks explic­itly and exclu­sively for the Sun vir­tual machine… so any­one who doesn’t use that plat­form for what­ever rea­son (licens­ing, eth­i­cal, platform) — even if they have another fully com­pat­i­ble vir­tual machine — can’t get access.

My solu­tion? Dis­able Java (not JavaScript) alto­gether using the Web Developer’s tool­bar, then sign in (it doesn’t choke!), wait til you get to the main applet pane, re-enable Java, and press F5. Magic, it works.

There is absolutely no rea­son or excuse for this behav­iour. If this fits into some per­verted notion of secu­rity, I’m not com­fort­able hav­ing my money there. If it’s the prod­uct of an incom­pe­tent web team… well… they’re an incom­pe­tent web team. Grr.

I called up and asked why it wasn’t work­ing, then explic­itly asked for a report to be for­warded to the web team. Please lots of peo­ple do this (heh, you don’t even need to be with St George… they didn’t ask me for a name or account num­ber dur­ing the phone call!)… this ser­vice is unnec­ces­sar­ily stu­pid at present!

On a plus side, their phone ser­vice is good fun. I couldn’t find a sup­port num­ber quickly, so I called the drag­ondi­rect num­ber pro­vided on a let­ter (1300 30 10 20) and when none of the options matched “sup­port”, I just ham­mered “9” repeat­edly. Works on a lot of PBX sys­tems, and it worked there… I got through to a human within 30 sec­onds, who then put me straight into the queue for web sup­port. Good stuff.

# by Josh on February 15th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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ATO e-tax and Wine

The ATO’s e-tax appli­ca­tion is a pretty hor­ri­ble beast, and a per­fect exam­ple of some­thing that really should be a web appli­ca­tion — but it works on Wine near-perfectly. Sort of.

I just filled out my 2005 tax return on Linux, before get­ting to the final step and dis­cov­er­ing it wouldn’t print nor sub­mit elec­tron­i­cally (because, appar­ently, they can’t code and are depen­dent on Inter­net Explorer as a con­nec­tiv­ity layer — and yet they test for secu­rity before allow­ing you to down­load the pro­gram! Hah!)… but it would save just fine, so I copied my tax file across the net­work to a Win­dows com­puter (resent­ing all the while hav­ing to leave my chair, because I really shouldn’t have had to even leave my browser — In this instance Fire­fox — if they’d done this prop­erly) and imported, printed, and sub­mit­ted it elec­tron­i­cally with­out any sig­nif­i­cant problems.

Note that you can’t import a file from any­where — you need to actu­ally copy the file into the e-tax folder itself (prob­a­bly C:\etax2005) before e-tax will let you startup with­out cre­at­ing a new file. You’ve also got to enter your TFN again (pre­sum­ably as a mea­gre form of secu­rity) to get it to open the file.

It annoys me that they don’t even sup­port Mac users natively, instead say­ing that it will func­tion, if “suit­able Win­dows Emu­la­tor soft­ware” is installed. That’s so pre­sump­tu­ous I was tempted to fill in the sec­tion ask­ing for costs incurred in fil­ing the tax invoice, list­ing three licences for Win­dows XP pur­chased ear­lier this year (not really, but it’d be a nice revenge :)).

Okay, rant over.

# by Josh on July 28th, 2005 Tags: , , , , , , ,
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