You’ve probably heard the expression “five nine reliability,” which is shorthand for saying that a product, Web site, service, application, or whatever is fully functional 99.999% of the time, the equivalent of less than six minutes of downtime per year. Most Web sites don’t need to achieve that level of reliability. However, when you’re in… Read More: National Grid gets 66.666% confused with 99.999% »
Apparently it’s “big companies that can’t keep their Web sites up in the middle of the day” week. Yesterday, Citizens Bank online banking was down for over two hours. Today, National Grid’s main US Web site and online account management site are both down:
I’ve added Not Invented Here to my comics aggregator. Enjoy!
At 9:45am on a weekday:
For those of you who use my comics aggregator, please note that the charming folks at GoComics.com mucked with their site again, possibly to make aggregators like mine more difficult to implement (they want your eyeballs and your clicks on their ads!), and I’ve just fixed the aggregator to compensate for their changes, so their… Read More: GoComics fixed in comics aggregator »
The Citizens Bank Web site recently added a new feature: bill payees can be put into groups. When you first visit the “Add/Manage Groups” page, it looks like this: The first stupid UI decision should be obvious after a moment’s thought. Once you’ve set up your groups, you will rarely if ever create new ones,… Read More: Terrible UI Design of the Day »
I have to confess that at this point it seems like posting examples of Citizens Bank incompetency is sort of like beating a dead horse, but here’s one that might amuse a few people. (Stay tuned for a future post about the >$300 in fees that Citizens Bank stole from me, which I’m holding off… Read More: More Citizens Bank idiocy »
About a month ago, I dived into the world of Mozilla add-on development by adopting the abandoned Thunderbird “Send Later” add-on and porting it to Thunderbird 3.1. The learning curve was pretty steep, and it took a lot more work than I expected to stabilize the add-on, but I think it was worth it, considering… Read More: I guess I’m now a Mozilla core developer, too »
Citizens Bank has been particularly idiotic recently. Here’s the round-up of all the disappointments we’ve suffered at their hands…
Yesterday, I decided I wanted to unsubscribe from one of the e-newsletters published by SANS, which bills itself as, “the most trusted source for computer security training, certification and research.” There were no instructions in the e-newsletter for how to unsubscribe, so I went to their Web site. It told me that I had to… Read More: Supposed SysAdmin & Network Security experts don’t know how to… »