Since I am planning on taking some time off to try a web start up, I have enrolled in only one course for the comming term, Accounting Theory. I can buy my book via the University Bookstore for $85.30 (or $96.62 after shipping. Or, I can order the book from amazon.com for $79.95, free shipping.
Everything that I know as a business student tells me that the University Bookstore is ripping us off big time.
Reasoning:
- Predictable Sales
The University and the Bookstore are closely related if not actually the same overall firm. The bookstore is fully aware of which courses the University is offering this term, how many sessions of each course, number of seats available, enrollment etc. - Low Risk
Students need textbooks, it doesn't matter how crappy they are. If the professor walks to the front of the room and says you need book X, you need book X, or you can pay $500 and take the course again next term - Good Margins
Since I am now looking to get my own book deal, I have been talking with several established authors (non-fiction, generally technical books). The publisher generally sells the book to a major retailer at ~%50 of the cover price.
There is absolutly no reason for the bookstore to be selling books any higher than the marked price, and even at that value they should be able to contribute a substantial amount of funds to the University as profit. If the bookstore is unable to run at a profit while selling books at or below cover price, it should be outsourced, because it is doing something wrong.
I picked up eBay Hacks & Google Hacks yesterday, in preperation for a future project, anyways onto the book review.
When I picked up this book I was expecting a rather dry going exploration of how to use some of eBay's less used features, targeted at experianced eBay users (or Power Users if you will). I was plesently surprised
. I really think book would be apropriate for eBay newbies interested in learning more about eBay, as well as the more experianced users looking to fill in any gaps in their knowledge. It was also far from a dry covering, with enough personal anecdotes on the part of the author to grant everything relevence. The book also served as a good introduction to eBay culture, which is probably just as important to understand as anything else. Covering topics like returning items, writing to sell, sniping etc. These topics would be especially usefull for new users.
My only complaint with the book would be the '100 Hacks' claim, several of the hacks could have easily been combined into one, either reducing the total count from the attractive 100 count, or leaving room for a deeper covering of the API, or other more technical concepts.
Overall, if you are planning on starting to use eBay in any serious manner I would definetly recomend this book. It's a quick read, so if you're not planning on using any of the code examples, or just want the eBay culture introduction, your local library might have a copy in stock
.Details:
Cost: $24.95
Type: Paperback
Length: 331 pages, 100 hacks
Buy From Amazon: eBay Hacks (and pay less than I did for the book)
I think the following three little statements sum up my opinions of customer support pretty well, all from Ctrl+alt+Del (click for larger copy)
I posted a little while ago about the tv crew filming in front of the Nigerian embassy whilest a guard yelled at them. The TV crew stood by their statement that you didn't need permission to film buildings.
Well, this story from the Houston Chronicle goes into how Houston amongst many other cities do have laws against filming or photographing public transit
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/2735245
Along those lines, I am currently sitting in the Brooklyn Public Library. My backpack was searched upon entry, and I can see four video cameras from where I am sitting without turning my head. Yesterday I had cause to travel into the the business district of downtown Manhatten (Wall St. area), and they take security pretty seriously down there. Police checkpoints of greater physical security than the Canada-U.S. border. With barricades that raise and lower out of the ground, closed streets, and huge concrete planters that turn what was once a wide 4 lane road into a narrow one lane winding path, with police with big guns standing by presumably to shoot out tires.
Well, I hit up Shannon's blog, and she recomended taking a look at Crtl+Alt+Del so I did. This comic reminds me all too much of many, many, many conversations Laura & I have shared.
I was also reading Ok-Cancel, and they also recently posted a comic that hit a little too close to home. Reminded me a little too much of the Intranet project that was going on while I was with Alied Domecq.
Consider if you will, the websites for the two major political parties in the US.
The Republicans and The Democrats respectivly. I hit up both their websites today after reading an article at Salon.com about the upcoming convention here in NYC. Now then, onto the similarities. The one thing that really struck me as strange is, both websites prominantly feature pictures of John Kerry (a democrat), in fact the Republican page has four times more pictures of John Kerry on their website than the Democratic page! I really find it odd that when viewing the pages at 1280x1024 the democratic page ONLY shows pictures of John Kerry without scrolling. The Democratic website has NO pictures of George Bush or his running mate, while the Republican page shows no pictures of it's own canidates untill you scroll down. I also find it kind of funny that of the two pictures the republicans chose to put on the front page of george bush, in one of them he looks kinda funny. I really think this has to say something negative about the Republicans. They are more intrested (considering only their websites) in attacking John Kerry than in promoting their own canidates...
It was actually pretty good, I actually spent a lot of time laughing.
A couple days ago we (at eDonkey) started sending out notification emails, letting our users know that we had finally (after more than three years) released version 1.0. The email went out to users who entered their email address into the program when they isntalled, into a wizard that would have looked a lot like this one:
. There are a couple things I would like to stress about that wizard and all previous incarnations of it. Firstly, its optional, you don't need to enter anything. Secondly, its OPT-IN not opt-out. You need to conciously enter in your email address in order to get anything. Not just check a box, definetly not just forget to uncheck a box, you actually need to enter in your email address. Finally, it appears only to people installing our software, its not some webform begging to be abused. Now then, we have been collecting email addresses for quite a while, and haven't actually used the list before, so some people might have signed up and forgotten about it. We received a message today via our webhost from SpamCop letting us know that we had received a complaint about our email. Our webhost gave us 48hrs to respond (or else...?), the SpamCop email itself included no time limit. The spamcop website states:
Mailing List Administrators
In order to avoid spamming, mailing lists must implement a secure opt-in procedure. Many so-called "opt-in" lists are nothing of the sort. Beware anyone who wants to sell you lists. You will be disappointed.
I cannot stress strongly enough the need for secure opt-in. Many web-sites now feature "click-through" confirmation, or checkboxes which must be unchecked. However the initial sign up is accomplished, whether on a web site, or by email - the final confirmation phase must include a random code which is emailed to the intended recipient. If that code is not returned by the user, you must not add the address to your list. If you do not follow this procedure, you will inevitably spam somebody, whether or not that is your intent.
If you implement this type of secure opt-in, and one of your subscribers has still reported your mailing as spam, please gather all the data on the incident and report it.
If you do not have a working opt-in process, you should clean your list by reconfirming all subscribers using a secure opt-in procedure as described above. The most important part of this confirmation is that if a subscriber takes no action, then that subscriber is de-listed. What gives some website the right to dictate how everyone else manages their lists? I beleive the actions we have taken are sufficient. At this point, the number of emails sent to someone falsely added to the list would be the same if we used their suggested 'secure' opt-in procedure, and what we are using now. One email. Under their suggested 'secure' opt-in procedure users not responding to the message would be removed from the list. However studies have shown that each additional click required to do something raises the drop out rate for legitimate users, as such, requiring more code on our part, and more clicks on the part of the users, would serve only to cull our list of legitimate users.
Well I was watching the UPN 'News' and they were covering the whole Nigerian Scam thing (someone emails you claiming to be someone important from Nigera, who needs your help to get access to money that is rightfully theirs, they just need you to put up $100K or so to help get it). Anyways, they were trying to film the Nigerian embasy for background footage for the story. Someone from the embasy didn't want this and was holding his hand over the lens, the reporter was yelling at him 'We don't need permission to photograph buildings in New York!'.
Onto the funny part, there was a news story in the New York Times just over a month ago reporting just the opposite:
Two Iranian Guards at U.N. Expelled for Filming New York Sites
By WARREN HOGE (NYT) words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 7 , Column 1
DISPLAYING FIRST 50 OF WORDS - The United States has expelled two security guards at Iran's United Nations mission after they were seen filming and photographing New York landmark buildings and parts of the city's transportation system, American officials said ... ''They were asked to leave because we were very concerned about their activities, which weren't...
Sorry I couldn't post more of the story, I can't figgure out how to get more of the story out of the website.
Well Laura and I were watching 'The Days' and I see a commercial for 'In the jury room'. The short version is, you get to watch the jury deliberation during some capitol crime case.
This is a slap in the face of justice and sets a horrible precident. Think of the consequences if a jury deliberating on some sort of an organised crime case, the issues scale in both directions.
Last night I felt like playing a game, perhapps some SimCity (it's been a long long time since I have played anything in that series) or (for reasons unknown) something like Railroad Tycoon. No real rhyme or reason, I just felt like playing them. It was maybee 9:00pm, the need struck me, so why not. I surfed around for a bit trying to find somewhere I could pay whatever and download it then and there, I found a cheap boxed copy at
Amazon but thats about it, no downloaded version.
This is where something P2Pish could really come in handy. People are already sharing ISOs and EXEs or whatever, come up with some way for me to download it via P2P (perhapps with some mirror or legitimate linking service provided) let me pay my $10 and boom, I have a legitimate copy, a real CD key, and I'm off to the races.
Unfortunatly a world where that is possible doesn't exist, so I just worked on some PHP stuff.
Even though phpBB has a built in backup function, I really find using MySQL is a much easier way to go. I always have trouble finding the code for this (well, not really trouble, I just look it up every time).
shell> mysqldump --opt db_name > backup-file.sql
You can read the dump file back into the server with:
shell> mysql db_name < backup-file.sql
Thats directly from the mysql documentation here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/mysqldump.html Small adendum though, I usually run with mysqldump --opt DATABASE -u USERNAME -p > back.sql.
So while I am walking away from work I overhear "Yeah well she isn't really into the butt-sex" which was nice and classy.
I had an idea a while ago that I think would be kinda funny, if it wasn't illegal. You send out a squad of guys to walk around the city with directional mikes, and get them to follow people for a while recording conversations, stick it on a website, and let users rate stuff. Sure theres a billion boring conversations out there, but theres also gotta be a thousand funny ones!
Well I have my new dedicated box now, located at Server Matrix, so in the interest of actually getting some security going I set up Tripwire last night. It took a bit more effort than I expected, the install that came with RHE seg fault'ed when you tried to init the database. I downloaded an updated RPM and was off to the races.
I am still working on configuring all the little ins and outs, the default RPM comes equipped to monitor a complete RH install, this isn't one of those so I get a lot of missing directory warnings. Oh well.
Next step, Firewall rules
