15 Feb 2006
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.
15 Feb 2006
I discovered an article on setting focus on the next field after a selection is made in a select option menu thingo, which looks pretty handy to have around. It could potentially be a bad thing, too, (if the user selected the wrong option + does repeatedly), but generally speaking this looks like a handy piece of code to have around.
14 Feb 2006
This is one of those “blanket” posts that attempts to cover everything that happened (or didn’t) over the last few days. As you may have picked from the thoroughly disconnected title.
Sunday saw a trip to the day/night cricket semi-final between Australia and Sri Lanka (I say that like I know what’s going on, but I had to ask Dad who was playing that morning. ’twas purely a social thing for me!) with various friends from church.
It was pretty good times, but I managed to get burnt despite putting sunscreen on every hour (it was 4hr SPF30+ cream!). I think I missed part of my arms (the underside!) in the first hour, and by the second hour they’d already been sufficiently damaged to start turning bright red (it was about 2pm… yeah, easy to burn here in Oz). The Sri Lankans (spelling?) lost, but looked like they were having the most fun of anyone in the ground regardless!
So yeah, it’d rock to be Sri Lankan!
Anyway, I ate some horrendously-overpriced-sport-venue food, probably didn’t QUITE drink enough water (probably drank about 3L at the cricket alone, but was sitting in full sun, so…), and hadn’t been sleeping terribly well for the past week (or two). I’d been sticking my hand up for a few too many things some weeks back and it all finally started to come unravelled last week, I guess. Hopefully things will get better from here, we’ll see. So yeah, various factors… I got home and inside okay (albeit with a massive massive headache), went upstairs, and lost nearly everything I’d eaten that day. I got to bed but only for fourty minutes or so before I woke up again… found I apparently had more food left in my stomach! Doh.
I didn’t go to work yesterday, and spent most of the day in bed… reading Harry Potter (because I still hadn’t read book 5 and a whole day is time enough to finish pretty much any book). The headache had mostly subsided and stomach was fine by the end of the day, but I’ve got a cold now… shrug. Tis very odd. I was at work today but felt kind of lethargic + not that productive… but it was better getting some stuff done than spending another day in bed doing nothing (mind you, it would have been back to Great Expectations followed by North and South if I’d stayed home… hmm…). We’ve got a whole bunch of exciting stuff lined up for the Sunrise Family website which is getting rolled out soon, but obviously don’t waste your time looking if you don’t watch the show (I know I wouldn’t! Once various features launch I’ll probably post geeky details here… we’re looking at social media stuff especially (which shouldn’t come as a surprise to those who know Yahoo!’s acquisition patterns, but seeing as 7 is very much MSM it’s pretty exciting), integration with products from Yahoo!’s stable, etc.
So yeah, that’s what’s been happening. Consider blogging un-slipped.
11 Feb 2006
I found the perfect laptop for me. It’s cheap ($700, plus whatever it’d cost me to add wireless and 512MB of memory to it — has 256 at the minute), compact (12.1″), and insanely lightweight (3.53 pounds, which Google reliably informs me is 1.6KG).
But it’s an IBM, so it’s not an option. I didn’t realise this until after I’d got all excited over the specs and it was a shattering moment!
IBM have always epitomised appalling laptop design for me, mostly because of their insistance on a joystick as a mouse (what the HELL is with that?!) but also because of the inanity of their decision to arbitrarily change the layout of the keyboard… particularly omitting a Start key. I don’t care if I use Linux… I’ve mapped my start key in Ubuntu so that it works the same way! It’s a brilliant innovation (unless, of course, you’re a gamer with chunky fingers and dislike being dumped out of games… though that ceased to be a problem post-3dfx/dedicated 3D-accelleration-only cards!), and IBM have to go and ruin it for everyone. Angry angry angry.
It was such a nice laptop…
10 Feb 2006
Or, at least, I think they must think that everyone else thinks that they are. (Read that slowly).
A while back we filmed something and had a preview monitor underneath one of the cameras, which was pretty funny because whenever we were looking at it we appeared to be asleep (because our eyes were pointing down + eyelids followed, relative to the camera). It occurred to me on a bus today (observing someone’s eyes in a mirror overhead) that tall people must think that everyone they’re around must be constantly falling asleep, perhaps attributing it to their presence, as in other images people never look that sleepy!
Then again, maybe it’s just down to people who don’t make eye-contact enough (too-often me, as some have observed in the past!)
Shrug, struck me as being an interesting idea. Probably doesn’t actually work that way, but it’s kinda funny to think that the taller you are the more sleepy the rest of the world seems ;-)