Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

After years of waiting, after every single tiny village around Leeds getting fibre, the city centre finally has fibre! What a glorious time we live in. Top marks to BT Openreach, they turned up when they said they would and got it sorted within a hour.

This was us before:

And then this was us after:

And now:

If it keeps increasing like this, I will have all the world’s bandwidth by Christmas!

I was dragging an image from my desktop into a folder when it happened to pass over my browser with Google open on it. Suddenly, Google suggested that I might want to search the web using the image.

How well it works is debatable, but it is certainly interesting.

For example, if I upload the image I use as my avatar I get a series of pages that that image is used on. It also shows me visually similar images, but none of them are me.

I can see that finding where an image has been used can be useful. Not sure about the similar images though. However, it works better if you use a photo of a celebrity. It identifies the person and then tries to find relevant pages.

The image I uploaded was just called 11.jpg and doesn’t have much metadata, so it is quite impressive that it worked all that out from the image.

Recently, I wrote about some of the poor user experience encountered when using HSBC’s online banking.

Today, I am going to show you how to fix some of it. These instructions are for users of the Google Chrome web browser. If you use Mozilla Firefox, you can probably achieve a similar effect using Greesemonkey.

Tampermonkey is a browser add-on that allows you to run custom user scripts on existing websites. The first thing you will need to do is install it.

Once you have done that, the Tampermonkey icon will appear in your browser. Click this and when the menu appears select “Add a new script…”. Wait for the page to load, then copy and paste the following in:

// ==UserScript==
// @name       HSBC online banking
// @namespace  https://www.business.hsbc.co.uk/
// @version    0.1
// @description  Improves HSBC's online banking
// @match      https://www.business.hsbc.co.uk/*
// @copyright  2014
// @require http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js
// ==/UserScript==

$('#benSortCode').attr('size', '8');
$('#benAccountNumber').attr('size', '10');

This code will then be run every time you access a HSBC online banking page. So, as if by magic, when you try and create a new payee, the boxes will be big enough:

HSBC have had a number of what I would consider problems with their websites for the many years that I have banked with them. A few years ago I submitted an online feedback form, but nothing changed, so last month I wrote them a letter (as you do when you get to my age).

It would be nice if they could find the time to fix these issues. They recently had time to issue me a new, more complicated, security device and add an annoying pop-up trying to get me to install their Rapport malware for example. However, they have not had time to make their passwords case sensitive.

I really don’t know how these issues arise in the first place though. As I told them in my letter.

4 June 2014

RE: INTERNET BANKING

To Whom It May Concern:

I have been unable to locate a postal or email address for your internet banking service, so I have resorted to writing to the branch and hope that you will be able to pass it on to the relevant parties.

Over the past few years I have consistently run into a problem with your internet banking for my personal account.

When I go to “make a payment” I have the option of selecting “pay a bill or organisation” or “pay family, friends or other”.

I need to make a payment to HMRC, to which I am given the account number and sort code. But when I go to “family, friends or other” and try and enter the account details it says the payee already exists and that I must use “pay a bill or organisation”.

When I go to “pay a bill or organisation” I then have to select HMRC and then select one of their tax offices. But I have no idea which office I am supposed to pay. All I have is that the account name is HMRC and then I have the sort code and account number.

I do not for the life of me understand why you will not let me make a payment in the usual way using the sort code and account number.

However, even if we overlook that, how you expect anyone else to translate nonsense phrases likes “HMRC NIC DEF PYT”. I don’t know what that is! How is anybody supposed to know?

I have included a printed-out screenshot of the bewildering screen.

I think at very least you should list the sort code and account number next to each entry, and use descriptive names for them, so that we can check we are paying the right account. Better still, just allow people to make payments using the sort code and account number like you would reasonably expect to be able to do at any bank.

MAKING PAYMENTS ON BUSINESS BANKING

Another piece of feedback I think is important is regarding your business internet banking. When you go to make a payment on there, you are able to go to “new payee” and enter the account details.

However the sort code is only 4 characters wide and the account number box is only 6 characters wide.

As you know, sort codes are 6 characters long and account numbers are 8 characters long.

This means that it is very difficult to check you have entered the correct account number and sort code because they do not fit in the box at the same time. I have enclosed a printed-out screenshot with this letter to demonstrate the problem.

As a software consultant, I have literally no idea how this situation could arise. Surely, if even the most basic testing can been carried out on your website, someone would have spotted that this was a significant design defect.

I would suggest that the boxes are extended so that you are actually able to see both the sort code and account number.

Yours faithfully,
Chris Worfolk

I received a letter back from them saying they had passed my feedback on. The issues still seem to be on their website though, as shown by this screenshot:

Clearly there is not enough space in those boxes to enter the account number and sort-code and be able to see the full number to check you have entered in correctly. I would not even dare pass that code to a tester; Chris K would be appalled.

If I ever get the time I am going to write a browser plugin to fix these issues myself.

Pretty gutted that after seven months of having my Sonos Playbar, it died.

Sonos were very good about it. I spoke to them on the phone and we tried a few things to no response. After that they send me through a return request that came with a pre-paid UPS sticker, so I just had to wrap it up and schedule a collection from UPS. They even shipped me a new one straight away, though that did require a credit card pre-authorisation.

Pretty annoying though, if that happens just after the warranty runs out, I will be very unhappy.

Unfortunately it is also the world’s most useless USB drive as it it failed to register the first time I plugged it in and then died when I tried to copy a file to it.

Recently my iPhone had stopped charging properly. Every time I would plug the lightning connector in, it would either not start charging or start and then immediately stop. I had to plug it in over and over again until it started working.

After having a search around, someone suggested that it might be due to an accumulation of crap inside the lighting connector port and that you could get it out with a toothpick.

I straightened a paperclip and had a dig around to see what I could find. It is amazing how much lint came out!

Last month I attended a Leeds PHP event where the guest speaker was Konstantin Kudryashov, author of Behat. He made a great case of how using BDD can really help you stay on track with the agile process.

Unfortunately I was sat directly behind a massive dan boy who spend the entire time enthusiastically nodding to everything that was said. I am sure he is a nice guy, it was just very distracting.

Richard had a very different opinion. He described most of what BDD did was nonsense. It works fine on your Symfony2 stack, but it just adds massive overhead for little benefit he argued, citing an example of how the company he is working with at the moment has just ripped years worth of it out.

I know what he means. It does work great on some stacks but become difficult on others. Also, I was working with a company that had done half their unit testing in it. I will not mention which mayor subscription TV company that was, but it was a great example of applying Behat to the wrong use.

However, on the whole I think BDD really can add a huge amount of structure and benefit to a product. You can knock “value” as a buzzword, but actually it just means actually focusing on what makes a product better and that genuinely is all that matters.

I’m really enjoying my Sonos system. Being able to play music throughout the whole house is amazing as I regularly move from room to room.

However the support for Audible audiobooks is not very good. The way it works is that you link your Audible account to your Sonos. Then, every time you buy an audiobook, you have to download it, load it into your music library and then you can play it. It then just treats it like a song so it does not remember your place or understand any of the meta data.

Compared to the Audible software, where new books just appear on the list and download and playing with one click, it is just an unusably bad experience. Audible also has chapter and marker supports and remembers your place in each audiobook that you are listening to.

Luckily, there is a solution. If you have a line-in on one of your components, such as the Sonos PLAY:5, and an Apple AirPort Express, you can take the line-out from your AirPort Express and then feed it into your Sonos.

Once this is done, you can use AirPlay to direct the output from your iPhone, iPad or Mac and it goes into your Sonos and plays through all of your Sonos system – not just the one you fed it into. This means you can use the Audible software and still play it across your entire Sonos.

There is a definitely delay added by the latency of the two systems combined. It takes a few seconds between me pressing play or stop on my iPhone for it to actually happen. But that seems to be the only drawback, and is not really much of one.

Using AirPort Utility, you can name the AirPort Express line-out anything you want. I have now renamed it to Sonos, so that is what I get on the list on AirPlay.

Being without a proper internet connection I needed to go mobile for a while. I went to O2 and bought a dongle, but it didn’t work, as they never really do. I don’t know if it is the dongle, O2 or a combination of the both, but they are a mission to get working and usually end up never working at all.

So I went to EE and got a 4G wifi hotspot.

My experiences so far have been really good. You literally just turn it on, it connects to the 4G network and you connect it to as a wifi hotspot. The speeds are really impressive too – 20mb down and 10mb up – way faster than you get on a fixed internet connection in Leeds city centre! Unfortunately the data is quite pricey but as a short term solution it has been wonderful.

I also ordered an Asus 6-in-1 router that lets me connect to the wifi hotspot and then gives me a network port to connect my router in. So my router, which has all my wired devices connected into it, was then connected to the Asus, when then connected to the hotspot. Complicated but it got all my devices online with no connection problems!