Zac Bowling’s Mind

This is is funny. I’ve been fighting this bug in this javascript library used by my bank’s online banking system. Contacting my credit union goes no where (I get responses like “use IE”, fluuugg).

So I did some digging and it looks as if they don’t write their own software. It’s apparently a product of Princeton eCom (before they got bought out), and a lot of banks use it, so I know there are a lot people fighting this same issue. If you use Firefox (which has less issues but its still broken) or Safari (which is completely unusable) then you probably see this problem.

It’s kind of funny though after doing some digging. Just check out how many banking sites are really using the same software. Recently my bank had a core system upgrade and afterword an automated bot called me that the system upgrade was done but the caller ID had one of these other banks on it. I’ve also wondered why the root of the domain on these sites returns that the directory listing is denied. Made me wonder how many of these sites may be running on the same systems.

Check it out for yourself.

Veridian Credit Union:
https://homebanking.veridiancu.org/veridian/ForgottenPassword/ForgotYourPassword.aspx

Texan’s Credit Union:

https://online.texanscu.org/Texans/ForgottenPassword/ForgotYourPassword.aspx

Oregon Community Credit Union:
https://internetbanking.oregoncommunitycu.org/OCCU/ForgottenPassword/ForgotYourPassword.aspx

And tons more…
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I just don’t know what to make of this video… I guess Microsoft is trying to break the stigma around Vista as best they can (I don’t think this video is helping their case much).

Texas Instruments, my company, will not support upgrading to Vista across the entire corporation as was leaked to the inquirer back in late 06 to early 07. No Vista machines in sight here still (except in the testing labs). Everyone is running XP if they are using Windows, but you do see a lot of Mac’s running Leopard, or and few laptops running the latest Fedora, Ubuntu, SuSE, and OpenSolaris desktops for those of using in various development and engineering roles.

I’m sure TI would probably use Vista if Windows 7 isn’t out by the time that XP goes into legacy support status, but XP works and we don’t have any problems with it. We already bought our huge corporate level volume licenses for XP so I can see the logic into why really IT doesn’t want to upgrade more then 10,000 users machines here when there isn’t a significant gain (and more of a loss really) by doing so even still. Nothing in Vista (even in SP1) is really worth upgrading for.

What the hell is the world coming too. I found this in my local grocery store tonight. $1.50 + credit card interest is totally worth the convenience of not having to handle a dollar bill.

Update -
Found the company’s product docs. “Bright, flashing blue LEDs to attract customers.”