Marc Palmer

Check out today’s error message from Co-op online business banking. It is amazing, it always seems to be broken when I need it. Either I am unlucky or it is broken a hell of a lot of the time:

Support Information
Error Number:    8516
Severity:    E_MT_ERROR
Message:    org.omg.CORBA.NO_RESOURCES: vmcid: 0×0 minor code: 0 completed: No

A delightful message to show your user. Sounds very much like the system is overrun. Which means either an inability to manage load/scale your system properly, or the system is falling over.

CORBA. Yes CORBA. Really. In 2008.

Co-op bank, I am sick of this, and sick of writing to you about this crap that you forced on us customers. Nothing changes. No announcements. No road map. No improvement.

I’m getting very close to registering co-op-online-business-banking-sucks.com and setting up a forum for people to air their complaints…

I have to admit I’m finding it increasingly difficult to stay abreast of the developments in the Groovy and Grails spheres. Clients and family are keeping me too busy to trawl the mailing lists and blogs.

As a result I’m starting to listen to Sven & Glenn’s Grails Podcast more frequently. They’ve got a new nice Grails-powered website and the double-team presenting style is refreshing and entertaining. It sounds much better as a dialogue than a monologue.

I have to say guys that you do crack me up sometimes with your “woooh!” and “awesome!” soundbites. Keep up the great work, it must be pretty time consuming to keep up with all this stuff, record and edit the content. Thanks for putting it all together.

Subscribe to the podcast – its actually the only podcast I sub to – and is proving invaluable now my time is even scarcer!

I love the iPhone. However there are some shocking failings that persist even after several software revisions. They have particularly managed to completely miss out very basic features of SMS (texting) that every phone under the sun has. I don’t care about MMS and picture message crap – its the basics that matter.

Notable omissions include:

• You cannot forward an SMS you have received to another person
• You cannot send a number/vCARD from your address book to somebody else via SMS. Even my 9 year old Nokia 6100 did that.
• You cannot send an SMS to a group in your Contacts book, without adding each person from the group manually. They added group SMS in an early firmware revision, but didn’t add a way to select just the group and have all members added. Sending a message to 20 people in a group is very boring.
• When choosing the “Text Message” option in address book it does not automatically select their mobile number
• SMS is treated as a separate feature from Phone where dialing, contacts, voicemail are. This is a bizarre and false separation. Contacts appear in the main home screen and in Phone – SMS should be the same.
• There is no “mark all read” option on the main SMS summary screen – so even for short messages you’ve already read in the preview/alert screen, you have to go and view each manually.

This functionality is so basic and fundamentally affects the usefulness of SMS on iPhone.

Come on Steve, give us SMS we can be proud of!

Graeme revealed yesterday on his blog that SKY TV now use Grails for the main website, as well as their sub-sites.

Its great to see another recognized brand using Grails for their public facing websites.

Grails is brilliant because it works wonderfully for medium-sized websites as well as enterprise systems. It has nothing that restricts it to either of these markets.

The USA obviously has a stranglehold on much of the world’s behaviour one way or another.

Politics is a rotten game at the best of times, but anybody who votes Republican in the USA surely needs their heads examined. A vice candidate like Sarah Palin seems to be a global catastrophe in waiting.

Check out this page of links to news articles giving some background to Palin’s views. Amongst the gems:

Soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill town of Wasilla, Alaska, she startled a local music teacher by insisting in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth created 6,000 years ago — about 65 million years after scientists say most dinosaurs became extinct — the teacher said.

and

In November 2006, then gubernatorial candidate Sarah Palin declared that she would not support an abortion for her own daughter even if she had been raped.

Granting exceptions only if the mother’s life was in danger, Palin said that when it came to her daughter, “I would choose life.”

Oh dear oh dear. Looks like the McCain/Palin ticket at the election could be… and this is hard to even write… worse than George Bush being in power.

The question is, will there actually be a revolution in the USA if the Republicans manage to get in again.