I'm getting really pissed off with my savings account company. Why can't someone sit down and build a banking service that doesn't completely suck arse? Here's what you need - a simple but secure online sign-in, an easy way to get money out, no bullshit procedures. I want a bank that would be the sort who are willing to have a conversation with their customers about making their life eaiser, rather than an inflexible and insane "corporate policy" that has no basis in reality. My bank may end up costing me around £134 - which is bloody silly, since that's less money for me to save - which means less for them to invest, which means they can't make as much money. Someone, please, fix the UK banking industry. Come along and build an Amazon. Amazon has completely decimated it's competitors. Now, please, someone do the same thing for banking. 
If, like me, you've been having huge amounts of hassle from the Gillmor Gang, use this RSS feed instead.
For my New England readers, BarCamp is coming to Manchester, New Hampshire. So far, they've got 56 people signed up. This side of the pond, there's an event called MiniBar happening next Friday.
Give us Banking 2.0 
The user owns their data, right? They own their attention and their gestures? Someone must take that philosophy and apply it to banking, credit cards and so on.
It'll be Banking 2.0 when the users own their money, rather than the banks owning the users.
Bob Stumpel: " Surpisingly few 2.0 initiatives in the financial sector. And there's so much to gain! Deploying 2.0 thinking in financial services could be the most disruptive of all."
Postmodern programming
Want to see something amusing? This month London hosts PoMoPro - the first postmodern programming conference. Apparently, code reuse and judicious use of APIs makes you postmodern. I've e-mailed Ophelia about it, of course, since this is about as fashionable a set of nonsense as you can find. I'm sorry, but ever since I found out that the Israeli army are training their soldiers in Deleuze and Guattari, my taste for it has rather dropped away.
The keynote at this conference is being given as a follow-up to a paper by Noble and Biddle called Notes on Postmodern Programming who are from the School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences and the School of Information Management at Victoria University of Wellington, NZ.
The paper is a kind of mixture of the pompously dull style of Deleuze mixed in with abstract romanticism about the role of computer scientists and programmers. Take a gander at some of the stunners that come from the 'postmodern programmer':
Programs have to federate across diverse systems, without any common language, protocol, or necessarily even character set in common.
You don't say!?
The word "software" is reminiscent of undergarments.
Oh my.
You know how Sokal must have felt when all those crazy theorists took physics and mathematics and wrote a load of rubbish about it? This is how I feel when I read this kind of thing:
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to make much sense to say that a Bovine object in a program is an "abstraction" of a real cow in a farm in this way: it doesn¹t make sense to say that the object in the program is "implemented" by a cow in reality, or that the objects in the program are special kinds of cows which do not eat, excrete, or expire.
Yeah, of course it doesn't make sense to say that the Bovine instance is an abstraction of a real cow. The use of these examples when one learns about object-oriented programming is as a metaphor or an analogy - it enables one to learn about the abstract idea of classes and objects by mapping those concepts on to real world things with which people are slightly more familiar. Classes and objects do a number of things - they have methods, public and private variables, instances, events. To say that a cow eats and that a class Cow can be instantiated and able to perform a function like eat() is not to draw any metaphysical or ontological conclusions. Just to be clear, $cow->eat("grass") is not the same as a cow eating grass.
The paper gets really strange in section 7 where it talks about languages and protocols. The Internet, apparently, "speaks many network protocols". Oh? I thought it spoke IP. I'm mistaken, it speaks HTTP, Telnet, POP and IMAP too? Does postmodern programming believe in the idea of a network stack? I mean, if IMAP is just one of many protocols - interchangable with IP, that's going to cause a few difficulties when it comes to building a mail client. Or a router.
Section 7 also describes how there should be "equal acceptance of high and low culture: Visual Basic and Haskell are equally of interest, as there is no reason to applaud the one and disparage the other". Except if you are trying to, oh, parse XML in LOGO or build a Macintosh application with ASP.
Later on in the paper, a comparison is made between Java and C# to Pepsi and Coke - apparently, you don't choose either based on rational reasons but solely on marketing. Wowza. Except, of course, if you are programming something where a compiler or interpreter isn't available for a certain platform. All languages are equal - except if you want to run Visual Basic on a Palm Pilot - or AppleScript on Linux.
So, at the culmination of the postmodern programming experience, we get a beautiful story about the authors' pornography collection and how they Googled and found a prime number library in C, which they compiled and played around with.
Well, congratulations guys. I'm sure the Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications conference must have been thrilled. I'm a dirty reductionist and pragmatist though. Much as this is all a lot of fun, how exactly is postmodern programming going to help me crunch through XML more efficiently so that I can spend more time - erm - downloading MP3s and watching Internet porn?
