ttj - Tom Jones

Another self-defeating Amazon authn fail. I tried to buy thing while on train, they go to the SMS thing, I have the phone on me but the SMS doesn't arrive. Result: thing not bought from Amazon. I've heard that Jeff Bezos likes to ask for root cause analyses for any issues.  Well, here's a root cause analysis for this issue: Jeff Bezos is a drooling idiot.

Twitter doesn't work at all.  Everything is "sorry something went wrong".  The connection is a bit glitchy, but not that bad.  I've downloaded several hundred MB, and simple web sites have worked fine. Twitter, being based on short text messages, would be ideal for being reliable, but is one of the least reliable web sites I've ever used.  The slightest glitch in one's internet connection, for example on a train, and everything is "sorry something went wrong", even what should be very simple and basic pages. Gmail also fails pretty badly, becoming unresponsive and giving no indication of what is / isn't happening.   Zoho failed before login, giving an ever-lasting animation of a cube bouncing around or something, with no progress ever happening beyond that.

It looked like Bitstamp may have left their ill-advised captcha anti-feature behind, but I just got double captcha'd WHEN I WAS ALREADY LOGGED IN. I can not overstate how ill-advised this is.  You are failing at authentication, you are disrespecting your customer by valuing their time at zero.  You are presuming to tell them that they must provide, for free, some of the lowest-value labor in the world, that of training AIs.  In this case, food with motor vehicles, and the question is "what does not belong here".  This is not the future of anything.  If you are doing this, you are doing it very, very, very wrong.

A web site providing a financial service should not pull in resources from any other domains.  It should be simple, self-contained, minimising risk. But when I'm logged in to Bitstamp, with the messages page taking forever to load, it is pulling in all kinds of crap from all over the web, from reddit.com, from analytics.google.com, and those are just two I spotted in the status bar.  It's unacceptable.

When a trading platform provides a report on orders to a custom, some things are important, like the quantities of each thing in the order.  You do not, ever, for any reason, omit part of the amounts and replace with an ellipsis.  Screenshot from Kraken: Taking the top line as an example, a seven-digit amount, three million and something EUR, has been represented as " 3,172,67...".  You can not be serious. Meanwhile, there is tons of free space in the pair column, saying "EUR/CHF" in the middle of a huge amount of whitespace.

A clock should tell the time.  How well does this clock do that: Not bad, in that you can tell the time from it.  But why obscure part of the last digit?  Just to be cute?  It makes it harder to read. This kind of thing is a very active kind of stupidity.  It didn't just happen like that.  A whole team of renegade employees probably conspired to do it, wrote "codes" and "algorithms" to make it happen, and managed to slip it past management and the entire quality management process, to despoil the front screen of the iphone.  On its way, the "codes" probably got reviewed in a "codes" review system, someone commented on a better way this or that could be computed, and someone checked if the graphics algorithm worked for edge cases.  Some east asians then manually tested it. And it would have been better if all of them had done nothing. This is similar to all the effort put into things sliding around the screen and transitioning: huge amounts of...

I did ask about the dirtiness of the Dutch train, and the chap said there had been lots of drunk people on there, due to carnival.  I'm surprised that applied to first class, and lots of the grime looked more ingrained than that, but okay.   Carnival would mean people taking time off work, from cleaning for example, as well as more mess on board.  The ticket inspector did say even when it's not carnival, it's not great. Then this, on an inter-city express from Düsseldorf to Munich: Someone's been putting chocolate powder in the electrical outlets.  Still, it's nice to have power, decent wifi, and a table, to the point where a bit of useful work is actually possible.  But it is grimy.

I had a 12 minute connection in Düsseldorf, but only just made it.  I couldn't find a departure screen / board. Why does every platform not have a general departure board?  People get off one train, and have to make a connection.  They need to go where to go next. Lacking this, I went down a level, to a big under-level where you can go up to all the platforms.  Illustration: But again, no departure board.  Each platform has a specific screen by it, showing departures from that platform: I guess there was probably a general board by the entrance around platform 1.  It's big, so a round trip to there and back would cause a lot of connections to be missed.  Why not have general departure boards around and about in the underground hall, too? I must admit, I don't really understand what these Germans are all about, or what their thing is.

Observe: This is from trying to do a basic web search under google.com.  I am asked to solve a captcha, selecting all images with cars.  This is a first for me, for a web search under google.com, and indicates new lows.  I thought google's main product was advertising for search.  They should be keen, then, to deliver search results under any circumstances.  But apparently, they are not.

I am currently liquidating some bitcoin, and about to liquidate a load more. I have to capture records for compliance. I quite like having decent records anyway. Bitstamp does not provide statements, and the records that one can extract from their service are not fit for purpose. I placed an order to sell a tranche of Bitcoin for over 1M fiats(2024). The order filled. Now to capture the record of the order. There is no orders view. The best i could find was an entry in a sort of log screen, showing everything from logins to order placements. It doesn’t show the order being filled, just placed, but it’s something. The CSV file is much too verbose, not showing useful totals (aggregates), and is not in a compliance-friendly visual format with logos etc. It also doesn’t have balances, at all. No, I’m not shitting you. To check balances, you have to capture them from the web screen, and then calculate them from a CSV of your entire account history. Bankers have told me that they have failed...

Cookie acceptance spam doesn’t get any less annoying. Web site operators, instead of minimising it, seem to want to cultivate it, much like one would cultivate a cancer. In this case, bitstamp are forcing me to “consent” to cookies again, even tho i’m logged in. I’ve been using my account over a decade. Why now? Even if one grants that cookie acceptance should be necessary for this service, which I do not, the maximum number of times i should have to do it is: one. I’m logged in, so they know it’s me. My recollection of the EU legislation that’s the distal cause of all this daftness is: you don’t need permission for cookies that are essential for delivering the service. The intention was to capture stuff like tracking and advertising, especially by third parties. So why are Bitstamp using non-essential cookies to deliver a financial service to a paying customer? And why the kaboodle of other annoyances on the front page, including the animated picture of a phone screen. Why not just ma...

Can a train service really be called “first class” if there are months of grot and grime ingrained into the floors and trim?

Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2024 19:13:59 +0000 From: Kraken Support team <support@email.kraken.com> To: REMOVED Subject: Important Update (Action Required): Simplifying Ethereum Ecosystem-based Deposits at         Kraken Reply-To: support@kraken.com Hello Tom, We are reaching out to update you about an upgrade to our Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) deposit addresses at Kraken, and steps which you will need to take to avoid any inconveniences or potential losses. This upgrade is part of our ongoing commitment to streamline our services and improve your experience. As you may have a Kraken deposit address for an affected token, [..] Given that Kraken recently broke my Monero deposit address [0], which I had used a lot over the years, without me realising, I was alert to this message from them saying "Action Required".  But, of course, it's not.  Because I have no interest in, and have never used, this EVM address. [0] < https://wibblement.blogsp...

I just managed to log in and navigate to so-called "Kraken Classic", which they describe as legacy, which is the one I'd just about worked out how to do things on. I click on "Trade", and instead of being able to define my order, they pop up this infuriating ad for their new service.  Inevitably, it's animated, and very annoying.  And it's in the way of me entering my order and using their service.

Who the fuck came up with this: It's barely visible, but that's a login form, translucent, where you are expected to log in.  The background is a live, changing, and therefore distracting, display of something to do with a market. I haven't tried Kraken "Pro" yet, but based on this, it is going to be some imbecile's imaginings of what a trading thing looks like, rather than anything useful. What real traders want is simple reliable web sites, clear and simple forms for entering orders, good reporting, both for bookkeeping and compliance. It's the KISR princple: "keep it simple, retard".

Instead of having a simple web site that works, Kraken have an extremely complicated, heavy, and bad web site that doesn't work.  Even in basic ways. The login page is completely blank on firefox, for example. On chromium today, I haven't been able to log in so far. The picture of a phone's screen is a distracting animated, flashing, visually disturbing annoyance. There's usually some sort of log in button, but not today. Look at the scroll bar.  That's how much crap is on their front page.

The reason I haven't used my preferred window manager on my laptop for the last 20 years is that as soon as you choose a different window manager, all sorts of laptoppy things stop working.  Like closing the lid and having it suspend. There is obviously no reason this should be so, other than poor software design.  But the behaviour has been basically the same on all linux for decades and decades. I've just checked with fvwm on Debian 12, which is current.  I put my fvwm config there, log in, it's running.  I close the lid.  The red light on the X1 nano gen 2 is pulsing, indicating the laptop is asleep.  Maybe it's actually worked!  I open the  lid.  The screen is already on, too quick, must have been on the whole time.  So why was the indicator light indicating it was suspended? It brings back memories of overheating laptops in briefcases, where I thought it had suspended, and it hadn't.  I have been exactly here before. It's silly...

In the spirit of visual peace, cursors should not blink. Stopping the cursor blinking for the gnome terminal is obscure.  You have to click on the lines to get a menu, then choose preferences.  But instead of being somewhere sensible, the blinking is in a section called "Unnamed".  Because some devtard, suffering from a bad case of generalisationitis, thought: well, these setting don't just need to be set once per user, so let's have multiple ones, call them profiles.  And for some reason the actual profile in use, that 99% of people are using, ends up having a name of "Unnamed".  And it's in this profile, named "Unnamed", that the setting on the blinking of the cursor is to be found. But wait!  If you were going to change "Allow blinking text" from "Always" to something else, that's not it.  That's there to trick you.  The way to get visual peace is the other one.  Change "Cursor blinking" from "Defau...

Every time I print from evince, I have to select which printer, then go to Page Setup and changed "Two-side" from "One Sided" to "Long Edge (Standard)".  In other words, it doesn't remember to print two-sided. There is also a chronic problem with evince opening up much too small for text to be legible and having to be resized, every time.  It doesn't seem to follow my window manager's policy, so I guess evince is overriding deliberately, and getting it wrong. There's also an issue where it has annoying view parameters like continuous, and doesn't remember changes to these.  Sometimes it might, if you explicitly choose "Save Current Settings as Default" from that menu. Really. Just tried Okular.  It has annoying slidy animations for paging, and also doesn't remember about two-sided.  I have to go Options->Double Sided Printing->Long side binding, every time.  What is wrong with people?  Is this a "design pattern...

In summary, Kraken broke deposit addresses for several cryptocurrencies. On the one hand, I am grateful that they have not made me lose money, because they could have done that.  On the other hand, this should never have been a thing in the first place, and they are behaving according to an alarmingly common template of stupid, which is software-developer-driven neophilia and interface breakage. Note the following key terms from the missives: "legacy", "significant time", "manual", and "top developer". You can just see the starry-eyed "developers", always pushing the wonderful shiny new version, why would anyone want to use the smelly old version anyway?  Let's call it legacy.  It's legacy, that legacy version.  Did I mention how brilliant I am?  Many people are just not smart enough to always run the latest version. The problem with this is: if the previous, sorry, "legacy" one was shit, the new one will be just as sh...