January 2013 Archives

"In software engineering, an anti-pattern (or antipattern) is a pattern used in social or business operations or software engineering that may be commonly used but is ineffective and/or counterproductive in practice." -- Wikipedia

I've been a CommSec customer for ~12 years now. For the most part they are a decent broker -- reasonable brokerage and a service that largely Just Works. A recent change led to the discovery of some peculiarities of their operations that led to this post.

The story begins in 2001 when I signed up for CommSec and they offered (and still offer) a discounted brokerage rate for clients who also opened a Direct Investment Account (CDIA). This was a transaction account offering ATM access + interest rates somewhere between the typical transaction account (zero interest) and a savings account (high interest).

All was good until 2008 when they started advertising a new CommSec Cash Management product comprised of two new accounts -- the CommSec Cash Account (CCA) and the CommSec Investment Account (CIA). I had a brief look at these products but they offered nothing of value except more hassle - instead of one account I would have two!

In 2009 CommSec advised that they were discontinuing the CDIA and to continue receiving the preferred Internet brokerage rate I'd have to sign up for a CCA + CIA. Great, whatever. I signed up like a good little lamby, no dramas except now I had two more sets of BSB & Account Numbers to manage.

Shortly after I went into a CommBank branch to bank a dividend cheque (this was 2009, and actually in 2013 there are still companies that send out cheques). I was told that as the new CCA is a CommSec product CommBank branches don't handle any of their transactions. That's really great as a CommSec customer -- I've been forced off an old product onto a new, lesser product.

Anti-pattern #1 - force your customers onto new, shittier products

Of course, the bank accounts were never an appealing part of CommSec's service, I only got one because it gave me better brokerage rates.

On to 13th December 2012, I received this email:

DAFUQ YO! I seriously double checked the date to make sure it wasn't a repost from 2001.

So let me get this straight. In 2009 CommSec forced all of their existing CDIA holders onto their new CCA+CIA package. Just 4 years later they force those customers back onto a "new" CDIA which is exactly the firetruckin' same as the product in 2009. DAFUQ YO!

CommSec Product Management

But that isn't Anti-pattern #2, no-ho-ho!

Anti-pattern #2 - force your clients to change BSB & Account numbers not once, but twice, in 4 years.

I don't pretend to understand how BSB numbers work but the one thing I do know as ordinary Joe Consumer is that whole banks have been traded without a single one of their customers needing to change account details. Hey CommBank -- you guys even did it with BankWest, how about doing the same magic for your loyal CommSec customers?

Changing BSB & Account numbers is annoying because as a public company shareholder you then need to update those details with various share registrars... which leads us to anti-pattern #3 and #4.

Armed with my new CDIA details I went to Computershare and in a single online form submission I updated my payment details for ~12 holdings. That's awesome and how it should be done.

Anti-pattern #3 is brought to you by Link Market Services.

Translation:

We kinda don't trust our website. We think it's less secure than you hand writing a signature onto some dead wood pulp and sending it to us via the post because we trust all of those intermediaries much more than we do our own website security

Anti-pattern #3 - tell your clients that you don't trust your own website security enough to let them transact online

Last but not least, we return to CommSec for Anti-pattern #4.

I thought that if CommSec is going to force all of their customers to change account details the least they could do is update their own systems to use the new account details. That was too much to ask.

I have a Margin Loan with CommSec which needs to be linked to a transaction account for topups/withdrawals. It is currently linked to my non-existent CCA and should be linked to my new CDIA. It's not.

I emailed CommSec to ask if/when this change would/should occur and received the following:

Thank you for your enquiry regarding our new CDIA account. My name is Louise, and your service specialist.


Yes, we will most certainly have linked your new CDIA to your Margin Loan for future settlements

I hope this information has been helpful. If you have any further questions, please reply to this email and I will be happy to further assist.

DAFUQ YO. Do you think I am emailing you for my entertainment? It's clearly not the case and if you'd taken the 5 seconds to look at my account you would know that.

Anti-pattern #4 - employ customer service representatives who prefer not to operate on facts

Telstra T-Box, Serviio and DTS

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The Telstra T-Box has a "My Media" function which allows playback of video files either via the connected USB port, or over the network via DLNA.

I've just setup Serviio (a DLNA media server) on my FreeBSD machine - a HP Microserver N36L which does not have a powerful CPU by any stretch of the imagination. There's no way it would handle on-the-fly video transcoding which Serviio supports.

Fortunately the T-Box supports a wide variety of video & audio codecs so transcoding is not necessary for the vast majority of common codecs in use today.

However the T-Box will not decode DTS audio -- it passes DTS straight through to its optical audio output. Thus if you have your T-Box plugged into a TV that doesn't have an optical audio in you get no sound on any media files using DTS or AC3.

Serviio profiles to the rescue!

I added this profile to my profiles.xml:

<Profile id="T-Box" name="T-Box" extendsProfileId="1">
  <Transcoding>
    <Video targetContainer="mpegts" targetACodec="mp3" aBitrate="384">
      <Matches container="*" aCodec="dca" />
    </Video>
  </Transcoding>
</Profile>

Which says "If the file has dca (DTS) audio then transcode the audio to MP3". And because the <Video> has no targetVCodec attribute the video stream is passed through untouched meaning my HP Microserver's lack of CPU is not an issue.

For everything else the extendsProfileId attribute tells it to inherit from the default Serviio profile which does not transcode anything so the end result is that only DTS audio is transcoded to MP3, everything else is passed through to the T-Box untouched.

Yeah, I have to admit typing "fabric of trust" made me throw up a little as well. Excuse me.

Questions that I frequently get from friends, and particularly from my parents are "where would you go for X?" or "how do I know I can trust Y?".

The "where" or "Y" may be a real bricks & mortar shop or organisation, or a website, or even software. There's so much scammy and low quality crap out there it's hard to tell what's trustworthy.

Let's take a real world example that most will think is ridiculous

You're oot and aboot and see a Commonwealth Bank branch (for overseas readers Commonwealth Bank is the largest bank in Australia, actually one of the top 10 banks in the world by market cap).

How do you know it's a real Commonwealth Bank branch?

You might look at it's facade. The signage, painting etc all looks high quality and "right" -- the polished, professional exterior, interior, and decor you expect of a bank. The staff are all professionally dressed.

You might expect that if it wasn't a real branch that someone would have noticed. Between the council applications, joe public, and the real Commonwealth Bank surely someone would notice if a fraudster decided to open a fake Commonwealth Bank branch.

At the very least, you should be able to contact the Commonwealth Bank to confirm if this is indeed a real branch location. Which leads to the question - how do you get in touch with the real Commonwealth Bank? Do you consult the White Pages? Why is the White Pages trustworthy?

Maybe you know a little bit about business and you decide to contact ASIC (overseas readers: the Australian Securities and Investments Commission), and find the Commonwealth's Bank registered place of business.

Hang on - how do you know you should trust ASIC?

At some point you reach a root level of trust. Your parents (likely) taught you to trust some level of Government which deems that ASIC is the source of truth on registered businesses in Australia.

What I'm getting at is that the foundations of what we believe to be real or true fundamentally comes down to the people that we know & trust. They form the root of our trust network.

Mum sent me to school and implicitly told me to trust that what the teachers were teaching is the truth. I met others at school and over a long period of time establish trust in a select few and over the years they become my advisors on everything from dentists to restaurants and everything in between.

Facebook Graph Search is about making that simpler, as well as exposing knowledge that may otherwise be hidden.

It makes it possible to discover knowledge that your friends have without having to ask everyone (not that I'm against conversation but there is a practical limit to how many people you can meaningfully converse with).

I'm on the waiting list for the Graph Search beta but I hope that it will offer quick, straightforward answers to questions such as "which dentists do my dentist friends recommend?". This may seem like a stupid question but many of my dentist friends have specialised and no longer practice everyday procedures like checkups & fillings but I know I want to go to the dentists that they go to.

Similarly with bike shops. I want to know which bike shops my cycling friends go to, or shop at [online].

Sure I could ask them one by one but if Graph Seach makes it possible to find out with a few taps on the keyboard that sure saves a lot of time.

The ultimate question of course is the tradies one. Every time we've needed a plumber we go through this ridiculous series of phone calls to find a friend or friend-of-a-friend who has most recently hired a plumber AND found s/he did a good job. It's one of those services we only need every few years and plumbers are often busy, have moved/retired etc.

For me this is the canonical example of the importance of one's trust network. There are umpteen sites online with reviews and ratings but nothing beats a recommendation from someone you trust (or someone they trust).



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About this Archive

This page is an archive of entries from January 2013 listed from newest to oldest.

December 2012 is the previous archive.

March 2013 is the next archive.

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