Today, after almost a month waiting, I picked up the access details for our company account at Deutsche Bank, which would enable me to manage it through DB’s online banking. After one day of using this thing, I can conclude it’s the biggest [expletive deleted] -ever- in the history of online banking. One would be hard-pressed to think up a more unusable system. Let’s go through the chain of events:

1. Pick up the credentials from the branch, sign a few pages of contracts, receipts and whatnot. I am given a numbered code card, a piece of paper with instructions on accessing and using the system, two papers inside blacked-out ‘secure’ envelopes, and a normal envelope with more papers inside. They tell me I’m good to go.

2. Arrive home, and try the instructions. Load DB’s online banking site in Firefox. Actually, the page doesn’t even load. Try Safari – seems to load a login page. In theory, I must enter my username & password, which is given in one of the ‘secure’ envelopes, and change the password to a new one right away (the system will ask you to do this, it’s mandatory).

3. Safari doesn’t load past the login screen. It seems the system only works with IE7 in Windows XP, thanks to a convoluted set of Java and Javascript, which totally doesn’t work on any other browser (not even IE on the Mac). This means I have to use an XP VM to use this crap.

4. Load IE inside the VM, and point it to the login screen. This time, after entering my username, which instead of being something easy to remember such as name and surname, or my eight-digit national ID number, it happens to be something like a.bbbbbb@cccccccccccc.dddddddd.eu, I shit you not. After entering the new password, I am greeted with a red error message: “This user is not authorized”. WTF! Did I not sign all there was to sign at the bank? What else do they want to make this work??

5. Call the online banking hotline, where they tell me I have to fill in a small receipt I should have been given in an envelope, and take it to my branch, so they will then activate my login. I am almost shouting at this guy by now. He tells me this is how DB does things, and they are not going to change, because their system is oh soooo secure.

6. I scan and email the receipt to my branch, and they finally activate my login. I can now login and check transactions, the status of the account, and so on. But I cannot do any operations, such as a transfer.

7. The instructions tell me to insert a 1.44″ floppy disk (in what ***** century do these people live!?!) or a USB memory stick, and follow a convoluted process to generate a public key certificate that will be used to sign all operations. It’s not enough to have a login, password and PIN code card, apparently, I also have to carry around a USB stick and an XP machine if I happen to need to operate with the account.

8. The Java code fails miserably to detect the USB drive the first two tries. And yes, each try means closing IE totally, loading it again, logging in…you get the drift. Finally it manages to detect the drive, and a popup window that looks like it was designed in Windows 3.11 asks me to type randomly on the keyboard, which I do. Eventually, a progress bar reaches 100%, and a key file is written to the USB stick.

9. This should have been the end of it right? I now have a login, password, PIN code card, public key certificate, and a bucket full of hate towards DB’s engineering department. Wrong! There is one more step – I now need to print out the resulting screen, which shows my login, domain (?), the hex digits of the public key, and the hex digits of the hash, plus a signature field. Not a digital signature field, but a “physically sign below” field. The instructions below tell me I need to print this – yes, on actual paper – and fax it, or send it via snail mail to DB’s Corporate Clients Department. Here it is in all its glory (click for a full-size view):

This is as far as I’ve gone, I will update the post once I get past this latest barrier of entry. In comparison, La Caixa offers a very complete, fast and efficient online banking system, with an easy to remember login, and a PIN code card to sign any operations you have to do. They even have an minisite designed specifically for the iPhone, with Safari’s buttons and UI specs! It’s a joy to use on the iPhone. I think my first and only operation once I get this thing working will be to transfer every penny to our account in La Caixa, and kiss DB goodbye. I hope they grow out of 1995 soon…

Edit: cleaned up some of the language, it’s not my usual style, but I was so incensed I could not help it.

It seems that Boingo didn’t want to carry on improvements to their own hotspot finder service, which I wrote about a few months ago, and have chosen JiWire’s white-label service, found at http://boingo.jiwire.com. The maps look very nice, and are much more usable than the previous hotspot finder – kudos Boingo!

The cat is out of the bag, so I guess I can now disclose that we had a few talks with Skype regarding integration of the Whisher client with the Skype client through an API, which would allow Skype to get its users online at over 150.000 hotspots through payment of a per-minute fee deducted from their credit. Below you can see the mockup of the Skype-branded Mac client (click for a full-size view):

It seems that Skype used some of the ideas we threw around (which is nice to see!), but it would have been even better if we had closed a deal with them of course. In any case, it’s an important step for Skype, as they now allow their users to place cheap calls over commercial hotspots for a flat per-minute fee. Since we launched Whisher 3.0 in early 2008, we targeted the no-monthly-fees user group, those who were occasional WiFi users that would not pay for monthly commitments, so Skype vindicates our vision in this blog post.

For those of you wondering what is happening at Whisher, I can say that there is a very important development that will take place in the next couple of weeks, we just couldn’t disclose it and had to work hard to make it happen, thus the lack of updates during the last few weeks. I now expect the trolls and idiots to start rolling in the comments, have at it – the delete button is very convenient (actually, I think I’m going to start hitting the ‘spam’ button and let Akismet deal with it). If you post thoughtful and/or constructive criticism, and use your real name and email address, I will approve your comment. Those who post annonymous crap, feel free to not even bother.

For some reason, the power utility and my DSL provider decided to take a dump during the last week, both at the same time. It all started with a day without power, which was blamed on maintenance work. Until today, I ran an APC BackUPS 350 to filter out any power problems that could affect the desktop and other things plugged in it. Well it seems that the power cut and subsequent voltage fluctuations managed to terminate the UPS, rendering the phone line protection port useless. This caused my DSL line to effectively grind to a halt, and also killed my Linksys AG241 router in the process. A couple of days after all this happened, the phone line went dead for almost 48 hours, after which I spent one day running normally, and then all hell broke loose.

The power failed once again for the best part of a day, this time due to a blown transformer taken down by the heavy rain we had during five days, non-stop, and since I was without a UPS, the main hard drive on my desktop got totalled. It would just not boot up.

Drastic times call for drastic measures

Fed up with all this crap and having to reinstall Leopard, apps and get my data back from the latest Time Machine backup, I decided to overkill the problem.

Scotty! We need more power!!

Enter the Honda EC5000 gasoline-powered generator. I plan on converting it to LPG using a Honda kit so that it can run off our house’s big propane tank – much cleaner, longer run times, and no problems with fuel going stale.

I also had to buy a 50A switchover, disruptor, cable, connectors and other stuff to get the generator plugged into our home grid. The first part of the problem, our power utility, had been solved.

A big pile of Duracells

The second big part of the problem was the busted UPS. I decided to replace it with something beefier, not just present to filter out surges and drops, but to provide at least 15 minutes of runway to allow the generator to come online, while keeping powered the Mac Pro, two external hard drives, the new Cisco 877 DSL router that replaced the busted Linksys, three monitors, the Time Machine, and a Mac Mini I use as a media server. A 2,000VA UPS would cover this, but it cost just shy of 1,000€, but instead two 1,000VA SmartUPS units cost 250€ each, and would allow me to distribute load.

Right now, my main UPS handles the Mac Pro plus the external FireWire drives, and the secondary handles the rest (monitors, DSL router, etc.). After powering everything up, the main UPS is at 40% load, while the secondary sits comfortably at 20%. This gives me at least 30 minutes of runtime on the desktop, plenty of time to go outside, fire up the generator, and switch away from the outside grid.

Cost of all this? Almost 4,000€, but in the long run, it will be money well spent. It will be the difference between falling behind work schedules by a full week and keeping up as if nothing happened.