Typhoon fail - flooded

So there had been an insanely slow but powerful typhoon around, which brought close to 1000mm of rain over 3 days, and made me experience my first real flooding. Though noisy, I went to bed last night without worrying much, because my house is on the hill, which means the water goes _down_ to the river. Unfortunately a big-arse bag stucked in the sewage, which exists for the purpose of getting the rain down to the river rather than... getting into your house!

Ipa went to the bathroom in the midnight and found the hallway to be... of flowing water... I got up and found scarily quite a few extension cord and plugs are in the water, and tried to figure out WTF is going on and where the water is coming in, then found the old kitchen is totally overflowed from outside... found my headlamp and went to clear up the congested sewage, crisis contaminated. Except the floor is now all wet, and the state of the unplugged eletronics is unknown. With help from Ipa we got rid of most of the water, and started the huge fan to hopefully dry things up a bit... that was 4am. Unfortunately both of our laptop adapters failed to survive the water, unlike the other stuff plugged to the another extension cord which totally in water.

Now I am having fun clearning up...

Internet Banking SNAFU

Well, seeing how old the US banking system (that everyone is still writing cheques!), I can't complain about the three-day delay for UK wire transfers made online, which would be instant if you make a transfer in Taiwan.

One of the largest banks in Taiwan, Taipei-Fubon bank, who I bank with for about 10 years now, has always been rather friendly for online banking, as in, I haven't had major troubles using firefox to do online banking.

Until now.

So like most places, E-Statement is what the banks are pushing, as it saves some bloody trees, and more importantly, the cost for printing and delivering the papers. So there's whole lot of incentive for banks to do so. I have been getting summary of my account (including current account, USD/GBP account, mutual funds etc) monthly, in plain text. Last month they started to introduce some kind of encrypted statement, but unfortunately it's not documented about what format or scheme they are using, and they only provide an (unsigned) exe file for windows to read those ".fubon" files.. So each time i receive such gibberish, i prompted send them a reply:

[[[
敬啟者，

貴行新電子對帳單安全機制令人感到對客戶的用心，

唯所採用之技術似乎未註明是否使用開放標準，而貴行僅提供 windows 下的瀏覽程式，令不使用
windows 系統的客戶無法再使用電子郵件閱讀對帳單，著實不便。希望能儘速予以改善。

如果貴行使用的是 Symmetric-key 並以使用者生日資訊或自行設定之密碼作為 key, 請告知加密規則及演算法及檔案格式。

]]]

In English:

Dear sir,

The adoption of encryption for e-statement is certainly considerate and valuing your customers.
However it is not made clear that if the technology used is an open standard, and you have only provided a browser under windows. This makes non-windows customers of yours unable to read the statement, which is rather inconvenient. Please make it better.

If you are using some symmetric-key based on custom password (which default to date-of-birth), please make your encryption scheme, algorithm, and data format known.

Best,

So I usually get a polite reply after two days. Being the company that makes issue tracking software RT which should certainly be used in this case for customer service, I was curious enough to take a quick look to see if there are traces in the mail header that denotes such software system is being used.

Well, first of all, it was depressing to see "X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1914", meaning this was replied by a real person, in a normal outlook mail client. Which means if I have further followup regarding this reply, it will not be tracked and is likely to be handled by a different customer service representative. But that's alright, we know a lot of large companies do that, and that's where our product could help.

However I also noticed some very interesting headers in the path before it reaches our mail server:

 by sms4.fubon.com (Symantec Mail Security) with ESMTP id XXXXXXXXXXXX
Received: from EXFE03.group.fb.com ([10.201.13.33]) by exfe01.group.fb.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.1830);
Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:01:36 +0800
Received: from user008 ([172.16.205.8]) by EXFE03.group.fb.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.1830);
Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:01:21 +0800
Message-ID: XXXXXX@fubon.com.tw

I didn't know my bank is rich enough to obtain fb.com (and not use that as their website?), as if Merrill Lynch would want you to use MerrillLynch.com rather than ml.com. a quick whois shows that fb.com is owned by American Farm Bureau Federation, and also the message id, fb.com.tw, is owned by someone else as well.

What does this mean? The fubon folks will not be able to send any message to fb.com, because the mail servers think they are fb.com, and internal network is very likely to decide the fb.com MX records for themselves. Maybe they don't ever do business with each other, but whoever configured this that way should get fired.

OSCON 2008

I went to the oscon last week, for the first time actually. Lots of interesting talks and people. My favourite is definitely: Exceptional Software Explained: Embrace Error (video) by Robert Lefkowitz, and An Illustrated History of Failure by Paul Fenwick.

Jesse talked about Prophet, our latest toy that we started to hack together in hawaii back in April this year, it's essentially a toolkit or platform for building distributed application that can synchronise without a central server. Our first sample use case is a bug tracker, which can sync bidirectionally from rt and hiveminder, so we can fiddle with tickets offline, and also in hiveminder's upcoming slick project management UI (sorry, you can't have it just yet, but soon!) Ironically, this Chinese article translated Tim's quote of Jesse from Best Practical Solutions: "Web 2.0 is sharecropping" into something clashing and literally "The Best Solution is Web 2.0".

And of course, the Cloud is making a lot of noises despite our (presently) seemly futile attempt to build distributed application. But, there's always more than one way to do it! (and your is probably wrong!) This reminds me back when I work in fotango, we were trying to build a utility computing platform with server-side javascript. The one thing that makes very much sense is that this platform should be open-source, or at least an open-standard, which Simon Wardley had more discussion. The problem with sharecropping is that when the landlord finds better uses of the land, byebye farmers. A platform of openness is essentially enabling the "farmers" (in this case people relying on hosted computing or API consumers) to hyperjump around onto other platform with the same skillsets they have.

Anyway, so incidentally Brad Fitzpatrick started to hack on the Perl support for Google App Engine, which I had some minor contributions making the CGI environment of the sandbox server working (Gosh I did feel 15years younger once my script gets all the CGI variables!), and hooked up the Moose guys to do help with clean meta-programming for the protocol buffer support in perl. The churning of a baby project just really amazed me, especially in the perl land. The last time I felt the same is probably back when Audrey started pugs.

I gave a talk about the Pushmi project, for multi-site subversion support (and found out WanDisco is putting google adwords for pushmi!) with the upcoming fancy admin UI. I also gave a lightning talk, "the secret of success in open source", which is essentially a parody of Tom Lehrer's Lobachevsky (slides). I think the singing bit wasn't so well-practiced, but it was well-received ;)

In summary, portland is a nice city, and Vault is a fabulous Martini Bar, the conference is fantastic in all aspect, thanks to the excellent effort from Allison & all other people from O'Reilly.

Oh right, blog

Following Greg, I am starting to blog. Actually I thought about that a few times in the past year but couldn't actually come up with a blog name - though the content is the most important bit, right? to recognise my own failure i'd just call it random failure. Here be my blog talking about random tech, rants, etc. I also have one on vox: http://clkao.vox.com/, which is currently mostly in Chinese.