A safe place to rant
It’s amazing how a new entrant into a market sector touts it’s freshness and new ideas and best ways of doing things while dodging the mistakes of the so called dinosaurs.
Fast forward few years, if the dude hasn’t died (mortality of startups is so high it makes Somalia a relatively decent country), it then starts to tout itself as having experience.
Rant maker, since 1978.
Woolly mammoth shaking a fluffy tail.
Once upon a time each phone brand had its own charger type. But common sense prevailed, hastened by the European Union, and everyone agreed on USB starting first with mini then micro connector. For more on this story you can read here, here and here.
Apple has been a notable exception, but it has gazillion phones out there using only one type of connector.
But it seems the day the rain of common sense fell the laptop manufacturers had umbrellas. Different charger types, even along same product brand? It’s hell. It doesn’t make sense. It is stupid.
There is nothing technical about this after all almost all laptops in the world are made by just 5 companies – Quanta, Compal, Wistron, Inventec and Asus. The last has since established its own brand. I use its excellent Asus RTN66R VPN Router in my lair.
There has been numerous talks and proposals to have all laptops share a common charger. A standard has been pushed aggressively by IEC but still a pipe dream. Wake me up when it happens.
Good night fellas.
Ok, I’m an armchair futurist but I’m not ashamed of that at all. How could one be ashamed of the progress Microsoft has with HoloLens? That sh*t simply blows the mind away!
Yeah, my mind got blown with the scary realities of VR and I haven’t been able to find the pieces since.
In a nutshell, HoloLens turns the VR world upside down by overlaying holograms on the everyday objects around us. It is easier to understand by starting here and then watching a live demo here.
This may be more useful for the everyday people like you and me while Oculus Rift is suited for core gamers. The possibilities are endless though – education, business, entertainment, porn, etc.
You don’t know what I’m ranting about? Leave, you don’t belong here!
I’m currently driving a large automation project and while prepping my team for the technical presentation, I decided to pepper the stuff with some nice buzzwords, something I can use to impress my colleagues. I opened my hat and tossed in some SaaS and SOA.
But a benign spirit warned me not to make a fool of myself and I patiently obeyed; so I looked things up. It seems my mum’s fervently praying for me upstairs. RIP mama!
In a layman’s term SaaS means Software as a Service which means software system not within your network or installed on your PC or phone or any other random computing device. But wait, what of my Gmail and Yahoo email?
Oh, that’s SaaS! You kidding me!
Welcome to planet IT. I used to tell people that IT is a fraud. We come up with a random name to give an old thing and voila, it is as sexy as a lipstick on an 80 year old grandma. Tomorrow we are going to call the sun Self-Sustaining Electromagnetic Wave Generator.
And SOA? It means Service Oriented Architecture. It is a means of getting a remote software system to do some bit of work without itself being a complete usable software. I mean isn’t that DCOM and RPC of yore? Well, something like that but not exactly like that. To be proper SOA it must be independent of any vendor, product or technology. These days most SOA are web service based.
With SOA, a system or platform or software is built out of other reusable components. For example, you could call a Web service that sends email or gives you the exchange rate of a currency at a specific time. It could be used in app A and another unrelated app B.
A SaaS can be built out of an SOA.
Since my integration isn’t going to be hosted outside of the office, I simply chased SaaS out of my presentation and respected myself.
By the way, my descriptions may not be accurate or goofy at best but then, isn’t that what I call fluff?
We are always on the move, not because we don’t have anything to do but that’s the reality of our lives in Lagos. We are usually busy, stuck in traffic and when our pretty backsides are stuck in traffic for hours, we end up loving our fondleslabs.
So while in that horrendous traffic, we want to get some things done such as reading the latest gist on Linda Ikeji or transferring money to a pesky cousin. Banking is what we all take seriously because that’s where your liquid livelihood is probably warehoused. We just wanna be able to hit our bank anytime and every time, any day and every day.
If banks understand this (they are supposed to be smart guys, ehn?) then I suppose they should have mobile first strategy. Ok, that’s consultants’ speak (heaven knows I hate that bunch!). The taste of the pudding is in the eating (whosoever came up with that proverb is a wobia!) so I expect that banks should have websites tuned for mobile phones. After all if I need to pay Silifa or find out some random thing about my bank and I’m stuck on Third Mainland Bridge traffic just around Oworo, it’s my unfortunate phone, battery and data permitting, that I will turn to.
So on an unfortunate Saturday while waiting for my friend to come around, I decided to visit banks’ websites with my phone and see how they scale up.
Here we go people:
| Bank | Mobile Friendly | Secure Website |
| Access Bank | Yes | Yes |
| Citibank | Yes | No |
| Diamond Bank (*Acquired by Access Bank) | Yes | No |
| Ecobank Nigeria | No | No |
| Fidelity Bank Plc | Yes | Yes |
| First Bank of Nigeria | Yes | No |
| First City Monument Bank | No | Yes |
| Guaranty Trust Bank | Yes | No |
| Heritage Bank Limited | Yes | No |
| Keystone Bank Limited | Yes | No |
| Skye Bank | No | Yes |
| Stanbic IBTC Bank | Yes | No |
| Standard Chartered Bank | Yes | Yes |
| Sterling Bank | Yes | No |
| Union Bank of Nigeria | Yes | No |
| United Bank for Africa | No | No |
| Unity Bank Plc | Yes | No |
| Wema Bank | Yes | No |
| Zenith Bank | Yes | Yes |
How did I test?
What’s the secure website about?
It is increasingly common for websites to now default to using just HTTPS for all traffic. It is seen as a sign of understanding the times. However it doesn’t mean that internet banking traffic has been compromised (all banks use HTTPS for their internet banking).