I’m not sure why I keep doing this to myself, but Eclipse 3.0 M2 looks promissing. More and more IDEA features are brought onboard. Including it appears several that IDEA doesnt have.

This quickdiff looks similar but maybe even better(???) than IDEAs Auroras equivalent.

One of my favorite refactoring tools in IDEA is extract method. It looks like theyve got one over IDEA here with the new “duplicate code fragment” finder. That is pretty useful.

Now, I assume I still have to figure out a bunch of stuff to install a xml editor?? Well anyway, its downloading as I type.

As VP of Technology here I made the decision early on that everyone will be using open source software. All of our desktops run Gentoo linux using KDE.

Our recommended IDE is Eclipse. Mainly the other developer Ramsés is a big fan. I decided to try it for a while, but I’m afraid I’m not quite convinced yet. It’s just too confusing for me. I will make another concerted effort later on. My problem is that it is too difficult to do simple things like getting syntax highlighting on XML etc.

I’m still not sure I understand the whole Project metafor they use. It seems to be a mix of IBM’s VisualAge with real filesystem codes. But I’m not quite sure. Most of the Java stuff was pretty good though I have to say. That part of it appears excellent. The CVS integration was also pretty cool.

However I’m back on IntelliJ IDEA (for which I bought my own license a while back, so I havent completely broken the promise yet). I decided to try IntelliJs beta Aurora releases and have been using #859 for a few days and am relatively impressed with many of the new features. The stability of it isnt exactly what I am used to with IntelliJ. The pre 3.0 betas were mostly stable.

I’m not really interested in Aspects or GUI development so that doesnt excite me. However I am doing mainly Test based programming and I like the new JUnit integration. The little lightbulb feature is also much improved (it was always good). One new little subtle thing in typical IDEA fashion that theyve added is the kind of realtime visual diff like kind of feature. It marks all the areas that you’ve changed in your code with a minty green bar on both the left side and on the right overview bar.

Dominic has a post with a few links to payment systems sites.

One of them from IBM’s DeveloperWorks is Show me the Money which is a great introduction to the to how current payment systems work. It covers some of the newer methods but is still very credit card centric.

Credit Cards have shown to be an easy way for people to make payments over the internet. It is particularly popular in the US and Europe. However it has many fundemental flaws which many people have covered before. First of all there is NO security with credit card payments.

When people say that they have secure payments, it really is a lie. They have a secure connection (even that is up for argument). What happens after you’ve entered the number is really pure magic to the end user but pure horror to anyone with a slight knowledge of security.

Many people have tried to introduce alternatives to Credit Cards. Search google for digicash for an excellent example.

The excuse has been that consumers dont want to use other systems than Credit Cards has become nothing more than an oft repeated self fullfilling profecy. The real issue is that the banks know that they will loose out if they loose control of the payments industry. The banking world can adapt if they have to, they just dont want to.

It is common knowledge that DigiCash went down because they kept trying to pursuade integration with banks. They were waiting and waiting and waiting until they finally died (I think they died twice by now???). What would have happened for example if they would have followed PayPal’s example and focused on the needs of the end users and merchants as opposed to the needs of the financial institutions.

Payment processing systems (or clearing systems) currently consist of large industry controlled networks (VISA, M/C, SWIFT) who look out for their member institutions interests. They have insecure systems that use decades old technology.

The security of payments are built up on legalistic “risk management” practices where member banks have to “vet” their clients risk worthyness. A good example of this is that to become a credit card merchant or even obtain a visa debit card you need a credit check. This credit check ensures that if there is a problem within their system technically you are good for the money. In other words they need to verify your ability to pay if something goes wrong with their network.

Example 1. Merchant Account holder receives payments from stolen credit cards. How is this possible? Because the credit card system is fundamentally insecure. So the owner of the card complains (and rightly so). What happens is that the merchants bank will immediately debit the funds from the merchants account and charge a chargeback fee to the merchant. Which is interesting as the whole problem was due to lack of proper authentication in the network in the first place.

Example 2. Debit card holder Bob goes travelling to another country. He thinks he has $250 in his account but isnt sure. So he pays for something in a shop but isnt quite good at calculating, so he goes to an ATM to verify his account balance. As he is abroad he (most likely) cant check his account balance, so he thinks, lets take out $200 cash to be sure. The atm networks arent synchronized with the credit card networks. Some of them might use store and forward processing of transactions. The end result anyway was that when he comes home he has a letter from the bank saying that he is overdrawn $25, because the thing he bought in the shop actually cost $40 more than he thought. Thus he gets charged overdraft fees for trusting the currency of the information provided by his bank.

The key to all of these things is to forget about the banks for the time being. There are individual banks who are future thinking, but most major US or European once arent.

The moral of all of this is that new secure payment systems have been possible for years. Financial Institutions and their networks have intentionally been stalling them. So the key to create an new working payment system. Create one with your own rules such as PayPal did.

So, this is my first post in quite some time. It is really embarrassing how there are great holes in my blog.

So several news items. I had been doing a fair amount of security consulting in Panama and elsewhere but have now had to reduce this down to focus on my new job as VP of Technology for a new startup in Panama called VERAX Inc. Our core service will be verified payments (I cant say too much on that at the moment yet), but I promise it will be interesting.

From a technology stand point we will rely heavily on the NeuClear architecture that I have been building over the last year or so. This is Java based and uses XML, RSA Digital Signatures and is designed to create application specific transaction processing capabilities between untrusted parties. We are doing fairly well and have our first couple of big clients lined up so we are all very excited.

On a personal front I was married on the 4th of July to my long time girlfriend Leticia. It was just a quiet civil ceremony in the notaries down stairs from my offices.

For our honeymoon we went to Isla Contadora which is the Panamanian version of St. Barts. Absolutely beautiful. Beats the Virgin Islands and the leeward islands in the Caribbean in sheer beauty and solitude. They were filming the next US Survivor series there. The crew had rented the only large resort on the island, so there were only a handful of other tourists.