Archive of June 2008

An interesting concept towards Amazon Associates Ad programme

I discovered this on a random googling. It is an RSS feed generator for Amazon products which interseeds your ID along with it, so you can be credited when someone goes through buying it. This also saves you from being plagued with adverts, something I will readily admit to blocking out, whether psychologically, or through Adblock Plus.

Unfortunately though, unless it is presented well, it will end up looking like a large advert. This should however give a nice way to streamline, and make prettier what is provided by Amazon. Although what Amazon provide is quite good and widely ranged, it is also more a problem as they are obviously adverts. When the service/script/design or whatever looks like ads people are very good at blocking them out, and for the case of Amazon, which I would assume anyone who reads this uses wouldn't see any harm in clicking through to an item from here, the problem with it though is that if it is actually relevant, doing it manually solves this problem but causes more, it then takes effort.

I'm going to give this a go over the next few days, and see what I can produce, maybe it is time to regenerate the way I show ads on this site by writing my own ad publishing script?

Amazon: Do you have this problem too?

Everytime I go and plan an order from Amazon, it always has to be big. I can't just order the single item and move on, it has to be a crates load of stuff. This time around it is books, my last order contained my iPod and a DVD and the one before that a load of ram and several books.

This time however I am looking at getting about getting 7 books, one of which is a moleskine notebook for which I have wanted one for a rather long time. Other books are those which I have been meaning to get for ages, like Mr Nice, by Howard Marks - the drug dealer.

And then there are two books on programming. The original C book - slated as being the core guide to learning how to programme in C. Then a book on java, for which I feel that I should also start to learn, mostly about the curiosity of the way it is set out and it's recent open sourcing.

I then of course have two bizarre books, one is How To Start Your Own Country, by Erwin Strauss. An American guy who, apart from being a bit out of the box details exactly how one can start their own country. Although I found this a while ago, this is mostly stemming from me watching Danny Wallace's series by the same name.

Picking up a copy of How To Start Your Own country then stemmed me to another book, Micronations by Lonely Planet. Apart from the well known Sealand there are many others, and this book outlines them all.

I am now debating what to knock off my order, as unfortunately this adds up to quite a bit altogether, with the Java and C books taking up most. This starts the hard part of the buying "experience"...

ICANN'T Changes Policy

Today ICANN, the place which "regulates" the internet decided to have a change of face and allow the registration of custom TLD's. This also comes in the light of the recent news of refusing the allocation of .xxx as a TLD. .xxx was intended to split up adult and non-adult content and was praised by many groups and organisations, especially children's charities. And guess why? Because it was a very good idea.

ICANN however rejected it. They've done that three times, the first time around they liked it, then they decided they didn't. It seems that they do not understand the the internet is a free marketplace where anyone can do anything they like. Making specific and regulated TLD's is a bloody good idea to curb this and limit the "channels" to a TLD which is actually related to it.

It's quite easy to make a typo, and with the mass of .com registrations, supposedly now around 76,490,267 you could end up anywhere.

ICANN have however decided that allowing large companies to create however many they can will make life better. ICANN is supposed to be a non-profit. They seem however to be rather concerned with money, especially as, god forbid, people realising that domain names do not actually exist, you don't even get a certificate of ownership. It is apparently going to cost in the region of £50k to buy yourself your own TLD. This should of course limit it to big businesses, this will mean that there will not be so many that it is becoming stupid.

People however cannot be expected to remember them, many people cannot cope with more than just .com existing, and this is suggested by the complete and utter failure of .biz, .info, .name and .int. None of these have hit off, .com and general ccTLD's are the only ones in the mainstream.

Put in perspective, going ahead with this will either be a complete failure, or it will confuse people away from using it. Either way, its a waste of time.

Reorganising the Power to my "Office"

For what can be described as an Office, I have a desk, three computers, a printer and a bundle of networking gear. This was originally all split around sockets on each side of the wall in a general big mess.

So tonight I decided to reorganise the whole lot. I firstly unplugged everything and pushed it to what can somewhat be described as an organised pile, then worked through rethreading every cable and every device which I needed to connect up.

Whilst doing this, I found large amounts of network cable, a mouldy biscuit, and a spare 40GB HDD - this I could have done with a few days ago. Now I have a tidy set of cables, and a pile of unused other ones. I find that overtime I end up with such a mess that such a task has to be done, even if it does end up taking a long time.

I did not just do this to keep my underfoot area clean however, the main reason for doing this was to split the load between two sets of extension leads. The first for the "always on" stuff (like my servers, networking stuff etc) and then for the stuff which is "on demand" and doesn't need to be on 24/7, like my speakers or desklamp.

Doing this has a single big advantage. I can switch off stuff I am not using without having to dig around and switch off individual appliances. This can be thought of as the first step to cutting down how much it costs to run everything that I have. The next step is to monitor how many watts (of which that is what I am charged for using) each device uses at any given moment.

Given the current worldwide price rises, it's quite logical.

Setting up lm-sensors on Debian Etch

I recently completed my somewhat long awaited P4 build first mentioned back here. Unfortunately though it is rather loud and in an attempt to quieten it down I decided that it was a good idea to get some live temperature measurements. Running Debian, this involved lm-monitor, this will at request tell you the current temperature of probed devices at the command line.

To install it under Debian, use:

apt-get install lm-sensors

Although there are other pre-requisites, a default install of Etch will work quite nicely.

Next, you need to load the i2c-dev module. This allows you to access some of the chips on your motherboard which are hooked up to temperature sensors.

modprobe i2c-dev

Now you need to detect the sensors on your system using the wizard in the following command. I just stack to the defaults.

sensors-detect

At the end of this you will be told a list of devices, these need to be loaded too, as an example:

modprobe -a i2c-viapro i2c-isa eeprom w83627hf

By loading the:

sensors

app you will be thrown at with a list of devices, it will also tell you some voltages, however for me the CPU temp, fan sped, and system temperature.

Hard Disk temperature can also be watched, this is slightly easier however as you simply need to install hddtemp and specify the drives.

apt-get install hddtemp

hddtemp /dev/hd? or hddtemp /dev/sd? if your system sees your drives as SCSI, or you have SCSI drives that is...

Produced in aid of: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/327