I thought I would write about error messages but it is not a long enough topic for a whole column, so, in the latter part of this column, I will also write about biometric identification.

Error messages are the information that you are given, unusually on a screen, when you enter some data that is wrong. For example, if you put in the incorrect pin number for a bank card, the error message is ‘Incorrect pin’. You can tell the nationality of whoever wrote a program that requires a pin by the error message: if the error message is ‘Wrong pin’, the author is normally from the US. If the message is ‘Pin incorrect!!!’, it is probably a German. If ‘Regret, entry not correct’, it is a Brit.

One can guess how this variation in error messages may reflect other nationalities. For example, ‘Sorry, mate, wrong’ (Australian), ‘Eish, brother, not right’ (South African), ‘Pin incollect’ (Japanese – okay, I made this one up).

Back in the day, when computers first started, there were no error messages. The back-in-the-day spreadsheet was a program, Lotus 123. It had no error messages at all. If you tried to enter something that was not correct, nothing happened. These days, Excel (replaced 123) gives us: “The formula you typed contains an error. For information about fixing common errors, click Help. To get assistance in entering a function, click OK, then click Function in the Insert menu. If you are not trying to enter a formula, avoid using an equal sign (=) or minus sign (–), or precede it with a single quotation mark (‘).”

If you try doing this, you will find that there is no ‘Function’ in the Insert menu and, in fact, there is not even an Insert menu. The downside of having no error message, as was the case with Lotus 123, was that it happened that sometimes we were using keyboards that had some keys indented for other countries. Thus, for example, the UK keyboard has differences from the US IBM Enhanced keyboard, some of which are as outlined below.

The Alt key to the right of the space bar is replaced by an AltGr key. The # symbol is replaced by the £ symbol and @ and “ are swapped. The \ key is moved to the left of the Z key.

Thus, if you entered a formula that had # or @ or “, then the formula would be wrong. It would look correct. This resulted in engineers screaming with frustration. However, like Monty Python and the dodgy phrase book where the Hungarian-English translation of “I want to buy matches” in Hungarian is rendered “My movercraft is full of eels”, the engineering staff soon learned to type formulas which looked weird but were, in fact, correct.

Now, biometric identification. Government, the banks, the retailers are all very dead keen on biometric identification. The two types are fingerprint recognition and iris (as in the eye) pattern identification. The propaganda is that it will make recognition of a person simple and swift and ID cards will be a thing of the past. The hidden agenda is that it will allow individuals to be constantly tracked, which is of enormous value to banks, the South African Revenue Service and the retailers. All this makes me fall about laughing. For some reason, the authorities think that fingerprints cannot be forged (but you can buy fingerprint forging kits) or that a person will not put contact lenses in to change their eyes. How easy it will become to get money out of an ATM using a false fingerprint! Biometric identification is fine for a population that is happy to be thus identified, but it will be a huge boost to criminals. I say ditch the idea.