Archive for 'Rants'

Yesterday I received another phone call from a blocked caller id. The caller claimed to be from ANZ Bank and proceeded to ask me for “identification” information.

This infuriated me! What sort of security practice is it for a Bank to anonymously call a client and ask them to reveal private information?

At the very least, the Bank could map all outbound calls to a Caller ID that is the Bank’s Primary Help Line. Easy to do with modern phone systems.

Alternatively, the nature of the call shouldn’t be to attempt to pass secure information in either direction. It should simply go like this:

“Hello, this is the ANZ Bank. We need to speak with you urgently. Could you please call us on our usual Helpline Number so that we can sort out an outstanding matter. Thank you”.

In this way, no personal information of any kind is released. No treachery can be involved as you need to source the Helpline Number yourself.

It’s up to the Banks (and other Financial Institutions) to lead the way in making sure all interactions are secure.

And Bankwest, I’m looking at you. You’ve done the same thing to me in the past as well.

This guy is shopping in an American Department Store.

He is carrying a AR-15 Assault Rifle.

He is also carrying a loaded Glock 19c Handgun.

Why does he carry the weapons? To protect people from “criminals, cartels, drug lords and evil men”.

Batshit crazy.

Images by Cindy Yorgason / AP

There is only one correct way to write the date & time and both Australia and the United States get it wrong.

In the Australian system, a date & time notation looks like this: 01/12/2010 13:54:50 – the template being DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS

We use the letters to describe the numbers. So “DD” represents Number of the Day in a Month and is written as two characters to demonstrate you should pad by using a leading zero when there’s only one numeral. Unfortunately, 12-hour notation is the default in Australia but we really should always use the 24 hour clock. This completely eliminates the confusion over AM and PM. There are still people who confuse the two.

The American system is very similar but reverses the day and month: 12/01/2010 13:54:50 – the template being MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS

Both of these formats are wrong. They’re confusing and make no logical sense.

The best way to format date & time is “big endian” YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS – in our example, 2010-12-01 13:54:50

It makes sense because it runs from largest measure to smallest measure, even better – it works for sorting dates and times in lists and spreadsheets.

Writing dates & time in this notation makes it easily readable and writable by software, it’s language independent, it can’t be confused with other date formats and it’s consistent with the existing growing global convention of writing time in 24 hour notation. The form is consistent in size which makes tables and formatting easier and because it’s identical to the way the Chinese already do their dates, some 25% of the World’s population is already using it!

Thankfully I’m not alone in this opinion. There’s an international standard – ISO 8601 that agrees. The general principle is that date and time values should be organised from the most to least significant.

Even in the USA, the widely respected Chicago Manual of Style now recommends using the international standard time notation in publications.

The USA is the only place in the world that uses MM/DD/YYYY, but with over 330 Million people they really don’t need to worry about what the rest of us are doing. It’s probably the same reason they’ve never felt compelled to drop the archaic Imperial measurement system they use. Only Burma, Liberia and the United States have yet to adopt the International System of Units as their official system of measurement.

20 Miles. 18oz. 3 yards. 54 Farenheit. Huh?

Canada, China, India, Japan, South Africa are already using ISO 8601, but most of the rest of the world does it the way do here in Australia. But it has to change – and that change really needs to start at a grass-roots level.

There’s no point in convincing the USA to move to the system the majority of countries are currently using as it doesn’t make logical sense either. Let’s all change to the international standard that does make sense.

Who knows, we might even get the USA to finally make the leap to metric.

Then no-one will understand what a Quarter-Pounder is.