Sunday, May 21, 2006

Google & Sensis - two people chasing the same lunch.

I picked up the AFR weekend edition (I do this a few times a year, if a front page banner catches my eye). I see that Google looks like a threat to Telstra's Sensis business.

I would post a link to it, but AFR appears to be subsidiary of ‘Dinosaur Press’.

A Search on the AFR site gets you this result.

Google begins to map its way around Australia
Google's assault on Sensis and its dominance of the Australian mapping and directory business has begun with the unofficial launch of Google Maps.
The Financial Review 20/05/2006 Cost - $3.30 463 words


There has to be a lot of scope here for playing around with different Google interface and developing new product for the local market (initially).

Thursday, May 18, 2006

ANZ glitch, file processed twice!

One of the banks has stuffed up real big, 45 million dollars big! 400,000 transactions?

The story ran today on the ABC and in the Age.

This is going to be a good story, can't wait to hear it! I have been asking myself Have these guys/gals every heard of run numbers and file headers? I can't believe they have not!

I will say that the non-bank finance orgs I have worked for have always tested the file headers well.

I once built an audit system for an Interface system between a bank subsidiary & a non-bank finance org (who I was working for). I Interfaces' own accounting checks assumed things about the data coming from the bank subsidiary that were not true (but the bank subsidiaries spec said they were true). The most frequent problem was messages from the bank subsidiary say that a transaction rollback had been done when it had not!

I also ask myself, where were MasterCard’s own transaction checking routines when this was going on?

So we have three parties here, ANZ, MasterCard & the Cardholders bank. They did none of them stop these transactions? It's a 'got to get the transactions processed' mentality. This minimizes the cost. Don't check stuff, because if we find anything, someone will need to check it manually, and that costs money! We will wait to see of anyone complains, and then patch it afterward, if it can't be avoided.

Anyone think I'm wrong about this mentality?

So keep checking them computer generated statements.

A new start.

In future I'm going to post all my tech posts here.

Past tech posts will remain in my general blog, Gnolls in Space!


Tech rules! ;)


Gnoll110