Installing ING Home'Bank and Belgian eID on Ubuntu

I spend some time today upgrading my laptop from Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) to 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) since 9.04 reached it's end of life earlier this month. Overall this was a very smooth process except for two specific apps that I require: ING Home'Bank and Belgian eID.

In an attempt to help people who also need to install one of these apps on a recent Ubuntu version, here is how I did it:

Home'Bank
ING is phasing out it's Home'Bank security module so the download is ages old and references a bunch of old libraries.

Start by downloading the HomeBank333.deb and simply install it as you would any other .deb. Next thing to do is pin the Home'Bank version in Synaptec to avoid this bug: 380511. To do that, start Synaptec, find the homebank package and select Package>Lock Version.

If you try to run /opt/HomeBank/HBSecurity, it will complain about 3 missing libraries:

1. libtiff.so.3 is missing -- simply sym-link it:
   

   cd /usr/lib
   sudo ln -s libtiff.so.4 libtiff.so.3

2. libexpat.so.0 is missing -- install and sym-link it:
   

   sudo apt-get install libexpat1
   cd /usr/lib
   sudo ln -s /lib/libexpat.so.1 libexpat.so.0

3. libstdc++libc6.2-2.so.3 is missing -- this is an old Dapper Drake package that you can still download and install
   

Once these steps have been completed you should be able to run /opt/HomeBank/HBSecurity and start using Home'Bank.

Belgian eID
This is actually straightforward. A .deb package is provided for recent Ubuntu versions that installs and runs without any problems. The only problem on my machine was that my smart card reader was not being recognized (an Alcor Micro Corp. EMV Certified Smart Card Reader in my case -- do a lsusb in a terminal to find out what type of smart card reader you have). To rectify that, I had to install the libccid package:

sudo apt-get install libccid

Once that is done you can simply follow the install instructions provided in a PDF to configure your Firefox to use the new certificates and you should be up-and-running!

ThreadLocal naming conventions

Since Sonar is now part of our normal build platform on the project I'm currently doing, we're keeping a close eye on the violations it identifies. One rule we violate in a couple of places is the CheckStyle constant naming rule. This rule simply says that the names of all static final variables should be ALL_UPPERCASE_WITH_UNDERSCORES. This is of course a well known Java coding convention. Still, it feels a little unnatural if you apply it to ThreadLocals, which are technically static final variables, but are neither immutable nor do they have a global scope like typical constants. This makes code using ThreadLocals look a bit weird if you use normal Java constant naming, e.g. compare the following:

private static final ThreadLocal<Date> TIME_FRAME = new ThreadLocal<Date>();
...
TIME_FRAME.set(myDate);

private static final ThreadLocal<Date> timeFrame = new ThreadLocal<Date>();
...
timeFrame.set(myDate);

For me using normal variable naming conventions for ThreadLocals seems to better communicate their role and intented usage in the code. Does anybody have an idea what the official Java naming conventions for ThreadLocals are?