Smoking toooooo much PHP

If you know anyone in Hong Kong (or who wants to move here and can get a visa) with PHP experience, and some linux experience (although not essential) , who is looking for full time job, feel free to contact me alan at qsolutions dot hk dot com.

This is a permanent job, working with me in a small company based in Central. The projects are varied and if you can program in D, C or any other language there are even more opportunities.

When you spend a large proportion of your day working on internet applications, and a considerable amount of that time working around annoying browser bugs (IE and Safari win here). You do it out a sense of pride, that you are delivering the best possible product. Solving these problems is a mater of personal pride that I produced the best possible end user experience.

So when I see site that is not only mindbogglingly broken, but has been developed by large corporations with relatively unlimited budgets (well compared to most of mine anyway). It just really makes me wonder how such under qualified moron's managed to get such high paying jobs......

Here's my list of shame.

1. HSBC a) for taking years to realize that intra bank transfers where a phisher's dream, b) waiting until the government mandated two tier authentication and finally when they deploy it. Being so broken that it takes over 5 minutes to get through the authentication system. What is even worse, is the lack of acknowledgment that they have a problem.

2. EsdLife, our governments outsourced 'e' website. Run by a company owned by the largest tycoon in Hong Kong. Which initially only supported IE on Windows, (allegedly), and for what must be now, 5 years, Has never worked once for me. not even for simple things like setting up a e-password to file tax returns or booking tickets for tennis courts.

3. Verified by Visa, or better know as unverified by JavaScript errors. This site not only has numerous JavaScript bugs, but does not correctly identify mozilla compatible browsers. No you should not use the browser name for compatibility testing.

All of these have one thing in common. Huge amounts of money spend on a web site, by a large organization. Which needs only to do a relatively simple task (read "It's just HTML stupid"). Yet manages to complicate it to the point that it makes the sites almost completely useless...

Know of any other great examples. It's just a shame we cant name the project manager's names and shame them into fixing these problems.

Banks, while never perfect corporate citizens usually at least try to behave in a reasonable maner. That is probably why I was fuming with anger at Wing Lung Bank in Hong Kong.

I have a credit card from this bank, that was given out as HKIA uses them for their membership cards, and my spouse being a member, just signed me up for it. I normally use American Express for most payments, but some shops don't accept it so having a Visa card is quite handy.

We always pay off the balance every month, I normally sit down around the 1st or 2nd of each month and clear the bills. I must have been doing this for at least 6 years, and I've had the Wing Lung card for I guess more than 3 years.

So yesterday when I got a letter from them indicateing we had not paid the bill, I was a little supprised. That turned out to be me forgetting to pay my wife's bill last month, as she doesn't use the card normally, so the is normally nothing to pay. However while checking the other bills, I noticed a finance charge, and a late payments charge. I was pretty certain that I had paid last month on time, so I checked closer, I had paid the bill on the second of the month, which was the usual date. Then I spotted the problem..

WING LUNG, THE BUNCH OF CROOKS HAD CHANGED THE PAYMENT DUE DATE!!!!

They had moved it back about 10 days, resulting in the card running up late charges.

Not only that, I started checking the older statements,and realized the had pulled this slight of hand 5 months ago, raking in a tidy sum for their criminal coffers.

By this time I was fuming, and called their hotline, my temper not subdued by their annoying 'press 2 for..' and playing adverts for their services while waiting.

After practicalling screaming at two idiots who refused to refund the money and change the payment date, and listening to them try and justify this crazy action 'your agreement states we can change the terms at any time' They promised that a manager would call back.

Of- course, this call never arrived, so today I cancelled the card, filed a complaint with our consumer council. (Hopefully at least they will issue a warning about them Changing the due dates, so other customers don't get caught out.)

From what I've been hearing, this is not the first bank to pull this scam.. Well, Wing Lung will not be one of the place's I'm going to get a mortgage from...

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A good friend of mine is also looking for staff, this one is a full time position in a small company based in Wanchai.

The company specializes in selling second hand routers / computers and other IT components

Requirements:

• reasonable english, good cantonese
• enjoy variety of work
• work independantly
• self organizing / able to priorize work
• interested in all areas of IT
• configuring / refurbishing CISCO's, SUNS and PC equiptment (exact experience not required but prefered)
• on-site work (lots of variety)
• customer support for email services
• Ideally suited to graduates.

Not a bad job if you want to get into telco's eventually....  email maren at hk dot com if you are interested.

If you know anyone in Hong Kong with linux C experience, and a bit of exposure to the ARM platform (not totally essentail), who is looking for either full time, or a short term contract, feel free to contact me alan at akbkhome dot com.

This is a 3 month initial contract, probably extending into a full time job. Mainly to help me out on a new project.

Hell seems nicer than the eternal hunt for reasonable housing at an affordable price. Last week we went up to Island resort, (about 45minutes from the center of Hong Kong CBD, which may prove to be too far..) to look at flats. For a change, we saw something that looked really good (incredible sea view, nice clubhouse/pool etc.), the meager ~1011sqft, actually looked like that figure. Unlike Sam Wan Towers (south side of Hong Kong Island), that says it was ~1000sqft, but looked alot more like 7-800.

The big trouble comes from cost..., for these tiny apartments, which we could just about squeeze everyone in, along with 10 years worth of collected crap. We would have to fork out HK$7 million dollars (or pretty close to US$1million).. Well, like most people we are not rolling cash, so morgageing that kind of property works out at around HK$25-30,0000/month (US$3-4000), leaving out the issue that interest rates may rise soon, pushing that monthly figure even higher. (which was already over budget!)

So this weekend we sat down with an estate agent near our current house. and informed him of our requirements....

Cluesticks for estate agents

• Dont tell us how difficult our requirements are and how crap the properties are going to be.
• Dont tell us, we must buy now as the market is going up.. (and dont bother arguing/discussing with the us, if we dont believe you) Do you think we take advice from someone who has a vested interest in saying that? It's just downright annoying
• Dont tell us about the area, if we already live there!
• When we say that we have certain requirements, dont ignore them... even so you can show us round places..
• If we found prices on the internet for properties, listed them out and asked to see them, even though they may be wrong!, show us the buildings we wanted to see...!!! (just let us know that on your books they are for XXX)
  

I actually asked my wife to avoid speaking cantonese to the agent to see if the blabbered on so much in english.. They do, and apparently it's the same rubbish.!

Anyone living in a civilized country (definatly not asia's world shoebox), would have been amazed at the flats we where dragged round to. Swinging cat's would be a miracle, and the fact the only view from your living room window is your neighbours bathroom, is classed as 'open view', does make you wonder if there's more to life...

It was not all bad, I did see one I liked, but let's just say my better half did not approve of the idea of renovating it.. (at least we could see the sea from the lounge.)

It will be interesting to see where all this is going, as for the first time in 10years, we actually have a budget for this, just have no idea if property prices are in a mini-bubble at present, or is just holding steady prior to the climb....

Well, It's not that bad, but these days, adding new methods to DBDO is being overridden by trips to toy shops and shopping centers.

As a born again child, I always have fun picking toys for my kids, while it is a little more difficult these days (forget toy-r-us, they generally on cater for brain dead 5 year olds or less.). We managed to hunt down a few toys that actually might entertain more more than 5 minutes, and excercise a little bit of that brain juice.

I've also been toying with going through a linux install with my oldest son, and in combination buying myself a new motherboard, and giving him the old one to build his own computer, we might find something to play with :)

But back to those shopping trips, the question this year has been 'real tree or fake', While the nice authentic smelling, and extremely messy, real ones have been shipped down from warmer climates in previous years, a sense of "been there done it" is creaping in. So we have been looking at the plastic versions.

The latest versions freshly produced across the border in China, include fibre optic leaves/branches, which supprisingly look quite elegant. However, in a sense of how to masacre Christmas they include 8 polymophic tunes, or enought to drive you to burn the thing at the end of Christmas. Sometimes it's a shame that we end up getting the offshoots of what American consumers expect for Christmas.

ah well hohoho, and lets get back to work :)

This week saw an amazing jump forward in internet banking security in Hong Kong, HSBC's security rating jumped from bungling idoits to have trained chimpanzees. Kind of reminds me of Microsofts attitude to security. Features first, until something starts going wrong.

HSBC Hong Kong, probably overflowing with compaints from people who had been caught out with phishing attacks, and transfered their life savings to some nice guy in nigeria. Finally put a stop to transfers outside of registered accounts..

I had quite a long conversation 6 months ago, when I though It might be quite usefull to monitor my bank account on-line.

"So can I sign up for a read only account?"
"Sorry we dont offer that facility..."

Well duh, yeah, they only offered the "give your money to compete strangers" type of facility..

Of course it's pretty damn obvious that to do internet banking properly, any kind of transaction should be confirmed via SMS or simple automated phone calls.. But since the banks only wanted to say 'we have internet banking', rather than actually doing it properly. We end up with a plug and prey banking system.

I bumped into an 'unnamed source' involved with IT at HSBC, while he didnt know much about the internet farce there, he did reveal something even worse.

HSBC HQ in London have decided to go with Windows XP for their next generation ATM's. Well, in kind of nice to know that hong kong hasnt got a monopoly on stupid decisisions.. They did have a few redeaming facts, it was being written in Java.. (I bet it would quicker/simpler/more reliable in PHP/Python.. - but suit's and smart IT dont always go together).. And they did retain the option to use Linux. (although their major suppliers appear to have been slacking on delivering that option)..

Maybe it's time to start moving the savings to a safer bank.. like sticking it under my mattress :)