All my keys are belong to the ghorement.

[sajith]

Indian Railways' entry for thedailywtf: I am not permitted to press even the famous "any" key.

Exhibit two: trying irctc login. Well. What was the point of https, saar?

Exhibit three: okay, you manage to log in. It's night curfew in irctc.co.in.

All I wanted was to check a train time and route. The site will drop connection everytime I try to do just about anything. Eventually it's 11:30pm, and you know decent citizens do not use the web after 11:30pm.

But who on earth designs all this consistently hideous stuff? Even if you are willing to forsake form over function, what about function?

Then there's this State Bank of India account I've been trying to use for a while. The private sector bank accounts I have generally works, but, you know, they're ever willing to take away all your money the moment you slack a bit. Fines, penalties, usage charges, interests, special offers based on your card "performance," what not.

I just don't know which side to take.

Comments

[smilebringer.livejournal.com]

Oh man, don't get me started on irctc. I am currently awaiting a refund of around 3K after an epic half-day campaign of repeated attempts culminated in the site dying horribly on me *after* happily accepting payment. Twice.

Oh, and don't be too optimistic if you are not using Internet Explorer(that's a program used to see websites and stuff, not pretty, but sort of necessary sometimes, like going to the dentist's).

Try their mobile application if you have GPRS on your mobile connection. I've heard ecstatic claims of it working. People dancing in the streets, booze flowing like water, stuff like that. Check it out(the link escapes me at the moment, but it can't be very well concealed, use the Google), and yeah, ymmv.

[sajith.livejournal.com]

Air Deccan has done that to me. It took about 40 days and several hours of phone calls for a refund. And yeah, it wasn't Internet Exploder. Problem wasn't with using any browser though - they took the money before issuing PNR.

[appughar.livejournal.com]

Surprisingly, I always thought IRCC works clean in-spite of the sarkari incomprehensible policies like aforementioned night curfew. I really had to fight tooth and nails (two times in a row) with Air Deccan to get my money back. But I personally never have suffered a bad experience (in this aspect) with IRCC. Maybe I should consider a change of opinion.

ps: I always consider Railway booking system to be one of the better working success stories of the public sector. 15 years ago, you virtually had to bribe a whole lot of people and pull lots of right strings to get a ticket. At-least to a certain extent the electronic booking system made the system fool proof.

[sajith.livejournal.com]

Hmm yes, having something like this is better than having nothing at all. But, but, you know, they could improve it a lot with minimal effort.

IRCTC Ticketing

[(Anonymous)]

IRCTC is only a face of Online ticket booking linked to PRS(Passenger Reservation System) of Indian Railways.After 11:30 to 04:00 all batch processing actiivties happens, which involves flushing old PNR , crating new files for next 90th day advanced reservation file and purging activities also.

E-Commerce is an initiative of IRCTC, but PRS belongs to Indian Railways(all counter bookings). What is annoying to u is IRCTC web hsoting, not PRS, because PRS is like electricity of railways,we can not live without it-- Software Enggr/PRS.

Re: IRCTC Ticketing

[sajith.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Thanks for stopping by and explaining.

Batch processing at IRCTC, or PRS? Why does it take 4:30 hours every day?

Re: IRCTC Ticketing

[cognoscenti85.livejournal.com]

Ok, now things are clearer.

Batch processing at IRCTC, or PRS?

PRS, I guess. They are hosted in old mainframe systems. That is why this "batch processing of jobs" and stuff.

This was told as an example of "Middleware" during a training session. A middleware between the IRCTC website and the old, mainframe based PRS making things easy cuz they could continue with the same backend :) But they did not tell me about this batch processing.

In fact, before I came across this comment from the PRS guy, I was thinking that those who maintain the site are having just another "government job" and they are having off in the night, hence.

Re: IRCTC Ticketing

[sajith.livejournal.com]

So it's the mainframe that has a government job. Just how old is this system?

[iam-vivek.livejournal.com]

Seems like you are in Fedora

[sajith.livejournal.com]

No, Debian. Those screenshots are of Epiphany web browser.