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Bank fees

22 Jun 2009

Australia

There is a definite black art to the design of bank fees and charges.

I imagine a team with spreadsheets open. They design fees and charges based on the criteria of obfuscation and "death by a thousand cuts".

sean's blog

Email is now so ubiquitous in the corporate environment that many employees are reluctant to speak to their fellow employees face-to-face or on the phone. It is surprising how many times in the office something could be resolved or explained better on the telephone, but instead there has been a barrage of emails that then need to be filed or deleted.

For this reason, both traditional email and chat clients should be introduced in corporate environments to improve productivity. Google's Wave appears to be the first attempt to combine the two. The idea makes sense.

But just because something is a good idea does not mean that it will catch on. We will see.

sean's blog

WolframAlpha - making information more usable

18 May 2009

Technology

The launch of website WolframAlpha has been heralded as a replacement for Google. This is not so. The WolframAlpha site is trying something differently - it is trying to make information from different web sources combinable, and taking us closer to the semantic web ideal.

Instead of going to one website to get a piece of data, and then going to a second website to get a piece of data, and doing a calculation, WolframAlpha will do this for you using the best available sources of this information.

Sites like Facebook do you want their content to be searchable and used by other sites otherwise they may lose advertising revenue.

The usefulness of combined data from different web sources will inevitably put pressure on sites like Facebook that want to run their sites like information silos.

sean's blog

The best software that I use

02 May 2009

Technology

This is a list of the best software I have found. It is all free.

Mozilla Firefox - the best web browser due to its extensibility, add-ons. The fact that it is open source is comforting, this means that there are no hidden security vulnerabilities. Google Chrome is good, but at this point does not have the same community support as Firefox.

Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) - same as Lastpass, except for sites that do not need logins and passwords.

Lastpass - this saves all your website logins and passwords, and keeps them stored in the "cloud" so you can use them in any of your browsers.

VLC Media Player - simpler and less annoying than Windows Media Player.

7-zip - for zipping and compression.

Drupal - used to set up a website. It is best web framework for technical people. For people that are less technical, use Joomla! or Wordpress.

nlite and offline update - to make customised unattended Windows installation discs.

sean's blog

The Australian government and web filtering

30 Apr 2009

Technology

The government is well meaning but misinformed in its intended application of web filtering technology.

The type of people that want to access extreme pornographic material will not cease to try to access it because the government it harder to access it.

People that want to look at the illegal extreme pornographic sites can bypass the government web filtering technology using VPNs (Virtual Private Networks). Ironically, forcing these people to use encrypted VPN connections will make it harder for government agencies to detect this activity.

A prior example of government being well meaning but misinformed is the Howard government's million dollar expenditure on its "net nanny" software available for download for no fee to the public. This quickly became embarrasing when it was cracked soon after release. Free software that does this already exists and did exist then. On one estimation, the government paid-for software ends up costing about $AU2930 per installed unit.

sean's blog

The use of email

23 Apr 2009

I have been thinking recently about our use of email and how not much has changed in the last ten years.

We still sometimes use our inbox as a surrogate "to-do" list.

We still keep email in our Inbox that should have already been actioned.

We don't have any markers on the email to show how important the sender is, or how important it is to take action on the email.

I am thinking of an email system that will highlight email based on things like:

1. How long you have looked at emails from this sender in the past (ie how much attention you gave these emails).
2. Whether you replied to emails from this sender in the past. How many words you used in your replies in the past.
3. How many people received this email, whether you are in the To:, Cc; box

Once I have my concepts clear I will start to code a Microsoft Outlook addin to put some of these concepts into practice.

sean's blog

Government blacklist

02 Apr 2009

Technology

The Australian Federal Government has good intentions, but the wrong solution when it talks of implementing a blacklist of URLs that it will ban citizens from accessing content.

The reason why this will not work is that people, such as pedophiles, that want to access illegal material probably already know how to circumvent the blacklist filter that the government wants to implement.

The government here cannot stop someone from using a virtual private network to access these sites from an overseas server.

Like the Howard government's PC filter debacle, this policy is well-intentioned but naive and shows the government's lack of knowledge of how technology works.