Yeah, I was about to mention that. It looks like having name, sort code and account number (which together with bank ID form IBAN) allows one to play with given account in some nasty ways. I think, however, that this is a result of poor security standards in those banks. Having moved from .pl to .ie some time ago, I was quite shocked to see how primitive and backwater Irish banks are. Oh well.

I believe that school should run you through...
* A bit about assembly. You're going to learn how CPU is built, right?
* C. To make you think about algorithms once you know how things run.
* Lisp. To make you understand functional programming.
* Java/Python. Probably the latter, to show you OO approach.

Apart from that, learn on your own whatever seems to be the current fad. You'll be changing the languages you write in anyway, but with some basics it should be easy.
Knowing the libraries and "ecosystem" of specific languages, well, that's totally different story. Can't give you an advice here, as I'm not a developer :)

Needed features in random order:
* Scalability - few k machines is minimum. This probably means smart, decentralized collection and aggregation of data.
* Flexible whitebox monitoring - for given class of devices, I should be able to configure how to fetch this device's data (http, smnp, ssh+command, rpc, you-name-it) and how to interpret it ("read the status page there, get this and that value").
* Flexible blackbox monitoring - for given class of devices, I should be able to configure a set of actions that should be performed on it (fetch a page, ssh into, ping) and how results of that action should be interpreted (ok/nok, time to complete, etc.).
* Easy way to tag (source/machine/network segment) and aggregate (max/min/mean/stddev/%ile/sum) of the monitoring data.
* Some language to easily calculate derivative values from the data above.
* Interface for defining graphs, using collected data.
* ...and a system for annotating the above. Raw data is neat, annotated data is even better.
* Alerting subsystem, which should allow for defining different destinations, together with escalation rules. And custom alerts - using the .
* (nice to have) HTTP server with a simple HTML templating, to allow for easy creation of arbitrary dashboards.
* (if you have the above) predefined templates for most of common things. Both detailed ("everything about device X") and general ("if the background of the page is green, you're fine! If it's not, here you'll find a concise list of what's broken").
* hooks/libraries to use collected data "outside" of the system

I realize that's a lot, but boy, such system would be very useful and flexible.

One of the funny bits in the book for me, is how they fly around from city to city to talk/meet with people, and fix things up. And at the same time they have a worldwide computer network... :)

...slashdot was a tech news service, not a tabloid. Changing profile?

This site comes useful.