ATM ate my money (and bank vomited)

Story
Once I was at an ATM machine, of course to get some money for a gift to a friend of mine. I keyed in the amount & was waiting for money. The machine took a while, printed the receipt, gave out the card. Yes that’s all. I got no money but a receipt saying that the machine gave this amount of money & that amount of money left in the account. I lost my tongue except to murmur Faaaark!. I pushed my card back in checked the balance in account & the machine was very happy to say that I’ve just lost this amount of money.
The gift I was planning to by was intended to be a wedding gift & my friend was/is not the kind which is gonna marry again ;). I went to the bank, talked to the pretty girl & my story didn’t amaze her in any mean. Hmmm…That’s something to think about.

Thoughts
Facing that inconvenience, my mind kept thinking of the very thing a lot, I mean about the technical stuff. Why the machine don’t handle that very little but so very important event? What’s the system run on an ATM machine? is it an embedded system? does it run GNU/Linux? :) hell a lot to think.

chit-chat
After few days I went on a long tour with two of my geek friends & the topic ATM took priority at a time. And my friends provided me with these info. There are ATM machines which runs Microsoft Windows XP :D (in Sri Lanka) & earlier days it was OS2, according to Such. Kunchana has seen windows XP booting on an ATM after a power down. [Wikipedia confirms Such and Kunchana :)]

Assumptions/Solutions
In thinking deep about ATM machines I made some assumptions in my mind.

1) The machine keeps track of the money using some kind of a hardware mechanism or someone adds money & update records on the machine. So that the machine keeps track of the amount remaining. If this is the case it’s only a matter of a software modification to compare the remaining amount and requested amount to stay away from hassles.

2) Since there was no evidence to backup above assumption, I happen to think that ATMs don’t keep track of the amount of money they have. So in order to avoid problem I faced, the machines have to have a mechanism to keep track of remaining amount of money and of course compare the remaining and requested amounts.

appendage (17/12/09) :
This was quite an old writeup I never had chance to post till now. This is totally black boxed thinking without looking up Internet for more details how an ATM works. The incident I mentioned happened at Commercial Bank Nugegoda. I got the money back in my account in few days (The bank fixed it manually, I guess). I’ve heard few other cases like this but never again happened to me. And also Things should be changed and these problems should be ironed out by now. Anyway Off to Look up “How ATM works” :D

PS: And the friend who got married was geekaholic :D . The incident occurred  someday around 20/06/08, the wedding day.

Would you rather ask Google than a friend?

The privacy is again in hot zone of topics in communities I follow. The reason is @ericschmidt, Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

The register reports, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” under the heading “Google chief: Only miscreants worry about net privacy”. That’s how journalists do it. Let’s have a better perspective on the subject.

“Judgment matters… If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place… If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines – including Google – do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”

Quoted from Eric Schmidt on CNBC video found here (some interesting stuff about Schmidt too ;) ).

Doesn’t really sound as bad as The Register report, but still it’s bad.

Google has to obey the laws, I agree, and the laws are not perfect. Anyway laws and regulations is not the only reason they track and log certain information. It’s a part of their business model.

Google offers simply awesome services and I find it really difficult to stay away from all that awesomeness thinking of privacy issues that doesn’t seem to be hrmful for the time being. Hope it’s the case for you too.

It’s not only Google that we should be alarmed of. Recently Yahoo said something similar to “Our Spy Capabilities Would ‘Shock’, Consumers“. Is that sound frightening?

So I think it’s the time to at least stay concious about these issues, if not to stay away. I would rather ask Google than a friend, of a private and sensitive question, thinking my secret is also gone with the closed search page. But it’s not the case anymore. Unfortunately.

Note: Find some interesting ideas about privacy, on secutiry guru Bruce Schneiers blog

What I learned from past 12+ hours of compiling tamasha?

I was compiling Qt from source. And had loads of issues. This is what I learned after all.

1. Errors are chances to learn.

2. Never copy paste command / code blindly from somewhere on the Internet.

Even if it’s very trustworthy source. Copy paste process might produce errors to ruin your day :). Check the code for yourself. Especially beware of commands/codes looking ‘obvious’.

3. When you ask for help give the helper everything.

Not what YOU THINK is useful.
When you get troubles your sanity shakes a bit :).

4. It’s always helpful.. well.. to sleep.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8090730.stm . They are right. Believe me.

5. Sometimes it makes sense to “start it all over again”.

Hunting errors one buy one might probably be a Goose chase.

6. It’s always good to have nice & helpful friends & community around :) .

7. You should never trust a machine.

8. You better have good Internet.

I’m not talking about these guys. ?

Are Geeks really multitasking?

I’ve read this fine article by rands, about the Attention Deficiency Disorder which nerds normally known to have. And it sounds like “Geeks are multitasking”. But I have another explanation for that. I’ll use the word Geek instead of nerd since it’s better known at the time.

I think I have most of those qualities which are known to be in Geeks. I never called myself a Geek until another geek called me so. I used the word tech-freak instead. But there are many people calling me a geek & I have no problem with that. So the so called explanation is based on what I think/know of myself. I know it cannot be hundred percent true or hundred percent false.

When I’m at home & at the computer, if mom comes with a hot tea & a good topic, normally in few minutes she gets angry with me & start complaining that I don’t LISTEN. When I’m on the phone, if I look into the computer screen, money spent for making the call is gonna be a big waste. What actually happened to that multitasking feature? Gone with the wind?

Most the time when I take input from my computer screen all the other inputs are getting closed. Or at least loosing priority. But why, I am supposed to have multitasking built-in.

Maybe I don’t have multitasking. But still there are 10-15 Firefox tabs open, few terminal windows/tabs open, email client, may be the text editor with few more tabs, IM client & irssi too. And also some music playing in the backround streaming through the net or in Amarok. I think I’m Alt-Tab-ing through them so many times. Hmmm… complicating huh?

OK, here’s what I think of “what’s going on?”. Let’s face it, I don’t do multitasking. Yes they say that normally men can’t do multitasking , But women can . I don’t know whether they are right or wrong. But I’m sure I’m not multitasking. It’s just dividing time. My brain divides & allocate times for each task. Listening to music at a given chunk of time & quickly jumping in to some coding at next chunk & then something else. (The task list has a priority & the way priority is given is another story & a half). Sounds like TDMA isn’t it? Time Divisional Multiple Access if you haven’t heard of it. For this to be done, ones short term memory and organizing of stuff inside brain should be very good. I’ve personally experienced good short term memory & relatively poor long term memory in my brain wiring.

This is what I have to say. I’m really sorry if you don’t understand what I’m trying to say. I just wanted to put these thoughts out and free up my brain. BTW did my post get any good position in your priority list? :D

Drop-manage yourself, the wiki way.

I am really good at procrastinating, I forget little things so easily, I have N.A.D.D and I work on specific projects. So in order to make my life a liiitle bit hassle free, I was looking for a ToDo manager tool. First I found Tiddlybackpack which had a dead simple interface but unfortunatley didn’t work with Firefox on Gnu/Linux. Then I found MonkeyGTD which looked too complex for my needs & then I checked tiddlydu2. However what I use now is GTDTiddlyWiki which is even simpler. It’s not as simple as tiddlybackpack but it’s a decent GTD tool which would fit anyones needs. May be you have already realized that these tools are based on tiddlywiki.

Yes you have to learn a bit before you start to actually use any Tiddly based GTD/ToDo tool. I found a good guide here.

You only have to download one single .html file to start working with any of those tiddly GTD tools. Once you save the .html file to somewhere on your computer just open it & start managing your todos. You can put it on a flash drive & take it anywhere with you. Or you can put it in your email account as an attachment. You can put it on your web server too. But hey… what I do is way cooler 8)  . I ‘drop it like it’s hot’ :D .

I use this cool tool Dropbox to sync my GTD/ToDo list. I put all my GTD/Todo stuff in to one directory called GTD and just created a symlink from Dropbox directory to GTD. tada. that’s all. [for now I have all the GTD tools I mentioned before]. Heres how to create the symlink.

$ ln -s -T /path/to/GTD/directory ~/Dropbox/GTD  [Read man page of ln or check here.]

(You can still put GTD tools in Dropbox directory itself. But you know I’m mad :) )

Now I can use my todo list when I’m offline, Dropbox will sync it for me with the dropbox on web when I’m online. So that I can use my todo manager from anywhere through Dropbox web interface. (for that you have to untick “Hide editing features when viewed over HTTP” option in advanced options).

Though I haven’t actually tried yet, Dropbox can sync through multiple computers too :) and it means you can have your todo list on Your Desktop computer, laptop or office computer, so easily sinced . And also I can share my files with friends trogh Dropbox, todo list can be shared too ;) .

Hope you make your life more manged with thses tools. Here goes the ‘cherry on top’, “Make your GTDTiddlyWiki your hompage”.

PS: If you wonder what GTD stands for, it’s Get Things Done :) .