Marc Palmer

I used to think twitter was a load of crap. But now I get it. At least it get it as a direct channel to your self organising network – not “what are you doing?”

Anyway followbot spam is boring and will just get worse and worse.

So why not require email confirmation with captcha entry for the first follow request, and then random
Spot confirmations on future follows on accounts with a high follow to followed ratio?

Problem solved.

The uselessness of Co-op Bank’s online business banking is a long running saga on my blog.

The latest twist, which I noticed some weeks ago, is as follows. Previously lots of problems with CORBA_NO_RESOURCES errors coming back to you when you try to do stuff.

It doesn’t take an IT consultant to guess this means their servers are overloaded.

Which is why I am a little cynical when I see that they have changed all the payment reporting screens to default to show only payments from TODAY by default. Where you used to see a history of recent payments immediately, you always have to select a date range and do a report now.

Why cynical? Well you could argue that this was a cheap way to further inconvenience customers reduce load on the database systems.

Dear Co-op bank. I’m getting more and more people contacting me via blog comments saying how fed up they are. You are going to lose a lot of business if you don’t sort this out.

I was in a car park today and genuinely struggled to press the RED button to get my ticket. Which idiot designed that, and put up instructions to press the red button?

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…