Forget 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42. The new numbers are 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.

Read update on this post at the bottom

I do my day-to-day banking with HSBC (and I seem to be one of the few non-Asians doing so in Australia) because, to put it bluntly, it’s free: their basic transaction account has no monthly fee and no fee for transfers, and it allows a limited number of free withdrawals a month using other bank’s ATMs. And it even pays a decent (not great, but reasonable) interest rate on the balance. Adding to that, their online banking system works fairly well with any browser.

Or, at least, it used to. This weekend they unveiled a significant upgrade to their system, which had been announced for the last few weeks, and they seem very proud of it. Unfortunately, it only works in Internet Explorer. In Firefox, it simply does not work at all.

And it doesn’t fail gracefully, either. If you try to login using Firefox, after you type in your username and click on “continue” you get a blank screen. Nothing else. No error, no subtle failures, no garbage, not even a JavaScript error. And, because it manages to set a cookie before falling over, you can’t even go back: even trying to access the bank’s home page still gives you only a very blank screen (because it detects that you are in the process of logging in and tries to go forward with the process, I guess).

It would be bad enough if they had a legacy, old system that only worked in IE. But, in this day and age, to build a new application that does not work in other web browsers can’t be described as anything else other than laziness (or incompetence). Especially in Australia, which apparently leads the world in Firefox usage.

Perhaps it would be time to start shopping for a new bank. It’s a pity that there doesn’t seem to be that many no-fee options out there…

Update 02/05/2007: it now works perfectly well on Firefox. I’m not sure whether they fixed something, or whether the problems were actually caused by teething pains in the new system (of which they had more than a few). The e-mail I sent them about the problems received only an automated response. In any case, I’m happy now.

Ok, I give up. Does anyone know how to make an iPod show the date of podcasts in the dd/mm/yy (or yyyy) format without changing the language settings to something other than English? It seems to think that the only English is the US brand of the language, and that is very out of character for a company so concerned with good design as Apple…

In Australia, April Fools’ Day is almost over. In the US, it’s only just begun…

(and just in time for Gmail’s 3rd anniversary)

I’m a bit ambivalent about Labor’s plan for a funding a national broadband (FTTN) network with public funds. On one hand, I agree that Australia has a seriously antiquated communications network and that retail broadband services are way behind much of the developed world; some of that comes from the mix of the regulations placed on the telecommunications industry with the characteristics of the country (quite a few people living in very remote places). Telstra has rejected the idea of building a FTTN network due to the possibility (almost certainty) that there would be restrictions on the pricing it would be able to charge to allow competitors to have access to its network, and I can’t say I see a fault with Telstra’s argument.

On the other hand, I don’t like many of the (limited) details of the plan that came forward. The new network would work as a enforced monopolistic resource, with the possibility of Telstra (if it is not responsible for building the network) being forced to be a customer and prevented from building a competitive network. I can see why the Liberal Party would be against a plan like this, and it also rubs me the wrong way.

Worse than that, the idea of using money from the Future Fund to build the network is very, very bad (not to mention legally debatable). The Fund is money set aside for a specific purpose, and that does not include building infrastructure (or funding private companies building it); if they open the doors to use this money, I can see it being used for other ends in the future (and Labor has hinted that they plan to do it) and creating social security problems for the current employees of the public sector.

So, in principle, the idea is not that bad. The proposed implementation, though, is not very appealing; as always, the devil is in the details.

In any case, listening to politicians talking about megabytes per second in Parliament is highly entertaining.

I’ve been hearing about Twitter for a while now, but recently it has reached a peak: you can’t read a tech-related blog without seeing a comment about it.

Well, I already had an account (created back in November, updated only once with a generic “working”), so I decided to log in and take a second look. Man, is this thing slow! It takes forever to do anything; the process of loading the home page and logging in took almost five minutes. Is it always like that? Or is it peak time now (8.30pm in the SF Bay Area)?

My guess is that they became more popular than they expected.

I’ve just finished watching the first season of Star Trek: Enterprise (yes, I know that I’m a few years behind). For those not familiar with the series, this is a prequel to all other Star Trek TV series and films, and it follows the adventures of the crew of the starship Enterprise NX-01, the first human ship to reach warp 5. The first episode is set in the year 2151.

I was never really “into” any of the Star Trek series, and I don’t think I ever watched a full episode of any series other than Enterprise. That said, I had a fair idea of the “feel” of the Star Trek universe; I did watch some of the movies, and, anyway, Star Trek is part of popular culture.

However, living in Australia, I have to say one thing: the quarantine procedures of the Enterprise crew are appalling! Granted: scientifically speaking, the series leaves a lot to be desired (in one of the episodes, two crewmen land on a comet and walk around in what seems like Earth gravity…). Ditto for social and practical issues; it’s definitely no Battlestar Galactica, you’ll never see engineering going into a strike or the crew looking for a planet to mine for fuel. But, still, they should be aware of the risks of coming into contact with alien life forms. And they get bitten by that at least twice in the first season; you’d expect them to learn after the first one.

However, coming to think of it, the Vulcans are as cavalier about biological isolation as the humans (and any other humanoid race we’ve seen). Is everyone living in denial?

Boing Boing has a link to a scan of a 40-year decal sheet found by a blogger. Now, is it just me, or does this guy look amazingly like Brazilian President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva? The decal even has one less finger on the left hand, just like the President.

Yes, this post is completely irrelevant to anything. I just couldn’t resist.

Sometimes I think that the best argument against having kids is the behaviour of some parents. I mean, it does look like having kids turns you into a raving lunatic — at least for some people. Case in point: an ad for Hyundai was pulled from Australia TV after stations received complaints from parents. The ad shows a very young kid (two, maybe three years old) driving a Hyundai SUV, picking up a girl of the same age on the side of the road and going to the beach to surf.

The parents complained because, among other things, the ad — get this! — promotes under-age driving. Now, I can’t imagine that a 12 or 13-year-old, who might be physically able to actually drive a car, will be compelled to do so after seeing a toddler driving on TV. And a toddler just won’t be able to drive! Not that a toddler will fell inclined to do so, anyway.

Now, to be fair, part of the problem, supposedly, is that the kid is shown wearing a seat-belt, instead of the obligatory child-restraint seat (well, duh! how would he be able to drive from the child seat?) and that contravenes the advertising rules for cars. But it’s a two-year-old driving! How much less real can you get?

The ad is still running in New Zealand, apparently. And, of course, it’s in YouTube (that’s the NZ version; the Australian one was identical except for the URL, the voice-over and the sign the girl was holding — it read “the beach” here). And, as far as I know, no one complained about a toddler going into the sea unsupervised.

P.S.: SWMBO thinks that the parents who complained might have a point, as a slightly older kid (say, 5 or 6) might be encouraged to at least ask his parents for a chance of driving after seeing a toddler doing so; I remain unconvinced.

P.P.S.: then again… Toddler driver pins mum to wall

In 1964, an IBM 1401 computer was delivered to Iceland; it was one of the first large computers in that country. Now, 43 years later, the result of that event is this:

That’s a segment of the stage performance of “IBM 1401, A User’s Manual”, by the Icelandic musician Jóhann Jóhannsson. It has to be seen to be believed. The CD of his work has titles such as “IBM 1403 Printer” and “IBM 729 II Magnetic Tape Unit”. More details at his web site.

And, this, kids, is why Google always launches its products little by little:

Still, Yahoo! Pipes seems like a cool service. I’ll try it out next week.

Good news… ABC (that’s the Australian ABC, not the American one) plans to follow the lead of the BBC and open its archive of TV and radio shows for download. They now offer several shows as podcasts and video podcasts and, reportedly, more than 2 million files are downloaded every month.

The possible catch is that they may charge for old shows; that would be a way to improve the financial health of the network, which is fully supported by taxpayers at the moment (ABC broadcasts no ads in any of its TV and radio stations, but it’s been exploring the possibility of displaying ads in its web site). The BBC does charge for downloads of shows that have been broadcast more than a week ago, but I don’t know how much money they’re making out of it.

MAKE Magazine published, almost a year ago, one article on how to make “throwies”, small devices consisting of a battery, a LED and a magnet and intended to be “released into the world” as a sort of “tech grafitti”.

I couldn’t help but think of them when I read about the recent “incidents” in Boston. I honestly can’t think of a better punch line to the whole “terrorism” paranoia that has affected US officials (and, to a not-much-smaller extent, Australian ones). In fact, I was listening to the Penn Jillette radio show on the subject and a listener actually called in to talk about these devices.

The best comment in the whole story was made by Penn Jillette, by the way, referring to this passage in the news report:

“The appearance of this device and its location are crucial,” [Assistant Attorney General John] Grossman said. “This device looks like a bomb.”

Some in the gallery snickered.

According to Jillette, the fact that some people snickered is a disgrace to the United States. What the report should have said was “everyone in the gallery laughed loudly; a few people wet their pants”. Come on! Does this look like a bomb? If you wanted to hide a bomb somewhere, would you cover it in bright LEDs? And if you were tasked with protecting a city, should you be proud of that fact that it took you three weeks to notice the “suspicious” devices?

As someone else said, it’s way too easy to be a terrorist nowadays; all you need to do is to put a blinking light somewhere.

29 January is Milton Friedman Day. A few quotes to celebrate the day:

If an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can only gain at the expense of another.

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it … gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

The front page of Techmeme has an article from Zunerama about, say, difficulties sharing songs between Zunes (Zune is the Microsoft answer to the iPod, and one of its exclusive features is the ability to wirelessly send songs to another Zune). It seems that the owners of the rights to some songs — the most popular ones, apparently — decided that they should not be shared between customers, even if the shared copy can only be played three times and expires in a few days.

Now, the famous response from Steve Jobs to this “sharing” feature of the Zune is that, by the time you manage to try to send a song to a girl, she’s already gone; it’s much better to get close to her and share the earphones instead (preferably with an iPod).

So… any bets on how long until record companies try to outlaw the sharing of earphones?