TaxiSys

(App, Yugoslavia)

An app Brlja and I wrote sort of together - i.e. I wrote it and he had the customer. Some time in 1998, with assistance of Bata, at whose place we did most of the development when in Novi - the customer was a cab drivers' union (i.e. company - they are all unions of independent car owners) and the app was supposed to register rides and find the streets in the list (for which I did my usual catal6 trickery, on steroids this time).

Bata did the sound registration, because it was very important to have logs of everything, minute to minute, as the cab unions were known to sprout secret deals between some drivers and operators, so the usage of specific words when asking for an available vehicle was actually a code for "long ride" or "wants to go to bad part of town", so the driver in the cahoots with the operator would know whether to report himself closer than he really was, or to just ignore the call. They'd share the spoils - so after several of such schemes were busted, they came up with a protocol that only certain phrases may be used and nothing else. In case of any wrongdoing or just suspicion, the recording would be brought up and anyone who used wrong words would be fined, or even kicked out. He recorded simple .wav files, at some lower setting (still huge), and saved every minute, immediately creating a new file for the next minute.

This level of mistrust should not surprise - we've heard that in some cab unions they had accumulated more years in prison than in school...

There was a hardcoded phone number in GenerAll, where it would crossmatch a checksum taken from customer's generalia (name, address) with the saved value (all set in defg.prg) and if it didn't match it would still continue to work, it would just refuse to save into any table with more than a thousand records. Instead, it would issue an alert.prg with a message to call that phone number - which belonged to Avai. And the only time that option kicked in was on an instance of this app. We figured the app got somehow copied to a neighborly company, so we offered suport etc. I figured Brlja would know how to run gendefg, so I didn't suspect him. I should have.


Mentions: 27-XI-1997., 26-XII-1997., 20-VII-1998., 15-III-2013., alert.prg, Avai, catal6, defg.prg, GenerAll, Goran Staković (Brlja), Novi Sad, Stanimir Kršić (Bata), in serbian