China Airlines - PR at it's best
Posted by Ian Holsman
mainly a reminder for myself, but others may have a laugh
um.. how does this work?
Posted by Ian Holsman
According to Paid Content Disney just bought clubpenguin for $350M + another $350 possible earnout.
so.. what I don’t understand is how the maths works here.
The site has 700,000 members each paying $6/month. If you do the raw estimates disney has just paid $1,000 per account.
lets say clubpenguin REALLY takes off, and say becomes as big as the world largest (WoW) which I think has 8million subscribers.. It would still mean $100/account.
shit.. I need to stop coding for the man and start learning flash and cute graphics, before some bean counter comes with a pin and bursts this bubble
Spammer's latest trick: PDF spam
Posted by Ian Holsman
In the latest escalation of the spam war, the spammers have switched gears and are using PDF files containing their rubbish.
I’m guessing SpamAssassin will have PDF scanning capabilities within a week if it doesn’t already.
Life imitating dilbert
Posted by Ian Holsman
It’s a sad state of affairs when you can start identifying with the PHB from the dilbert cartoons.
read this book online from amazon
Posted by Ian Holsman
So I decided to give the read the book online feature a try from amazon. for people who don’t know what it is, it allows you to pay a bit more and have a electronic version on their site.
It’s a bit pricy imho ($6 to view a $25 book), but I gave it a try.
do you think I can navigate back to the place where I can actually read it?
talk about hopeless. I eventually found the link on the front door. “your media library” hidden under gifts&lists.
absolutely useless UI experience. no way I will ever have realized that my electronic book was in a “media library”.
so.. for some reason when I actually look at the site i get a blank screen instead of a book.
amazon if your listening your “media” site sucks. i’ve spent over 10 minutes trying to figure out how to read a book using it and i’m stumped.
Teenage Affluenza
Posted by Ian Holsman
nice clip showing how charities are using “web2.0” to spread their message.
The clip was produced by Stir, and it looks like no advertising dweebs were harmed.
ohloh.net -- my review
Posted by Ian Holsman
At $WORK we are starting to look at open source in a serious way (no surprises there) and someone pointed me to ohloh and asked me what I thought.
so I thought I would share it with the world.
naturally when I wanted to review it, it was failing (you need a cute 500 page guys) but it’s working now.
first..
the project cost thing is bullshit. absolute crap. TCO is where you should be looking at for numbers. and the cost to build has nothing to do with how much you would pay for a commercial equivalent (as the cost to build is spread of multiple clients).
but worse than that, it sends the wrong message on how people should be approaching a OSS project. It treats it like a standard off the shelf thing you purchase and pay yearly maintenance fees on.
Ideally you should be thinking of devoting some of your development time and QA to improve the product and make it better fit your needs (and contribute that back)..
to add some marketing BS words in.. when you approach open source you are starting a relationship, not a transaction. although you pay nothing for using the code, there is a assumed cost in that you will be giving back to it.
second.
code commits != health of a project.
when I evaluate a OSS project 4 more useful metrics I use are:
- response time to questions on the mailing list
- activity on the list (how many posts, how deep are the threads, how many unique individuals answer the questions, and are they in different companies)
- bug rate. how often are bugs opened and closed in their bugzilla/jira thing. This would give a more accurate idea on how stable the code base is.
- how toxic the community is. I hate working with assholes.
so ohloh if your listening.. if you could add these metrics, and drop the cost thing it would be great. I love the idea of your site, and think it has good value.
oh.. you are planning on open sourcing the code you use to run the site aren’t you? :-)
I should start a misadventures in travel blog
Posted by Ian Holsman
Banglore airport is a experience all on it’s own.
I’ve never experienced such a balagan/mess, and I’ve been to several 3rd world countries which could run rings around this airport.
first. you have a soldier at the front gate before you enter the airport who checks for tickets. This mean you have a crowd/mob in front of the airport (no lines) all pushing and shoving and porters trying to hussle you for money while you wait.
Naturally he doesn’t know about e-tickets just paper ones. He eventually pointed me to a list where I could self-check if my name is on the list.
Next you get to the check in gate, while in line a guy asks for my details (time #2) while I’m waiting.
I arrive at the desk, have my details checked again (3), only to be told that my ticket wasn’t correct. Apparently my travel agent only ‘reserved’ the ticket, and hadn’t purchased it. (Tip: try to get a paper ticket when flying to Bangalore, much easier).
With 1 hour until the flight leaves I wasn’t in the best of moods, and while the clerk was pleasant enough re-buying the ticket took about 30minutes, as it was all manual.
BTW.. I wasn’t the only one with a dud ticket either, a US elderly couple also had their flight canceled and had to rebuy it. They were even grumpier than I was.
ok.. finally, with ticket in hand I proceeded up the stairs, showed my details (#4) to someone and proceeded to wait to get frisked.
frisker man checked details again (#5), and I proceed to line up for the plane who is already boarding.
boarding pass gets checked another 3 times and I finally sit on the plane. needing a drink.
Flight was great, Bangalore was great (except the traffic), and I enjoyed everything but the airport.
life in bangalore
Posted by Ian Holsman
ok.. so I haven’t really ventured out in the streets yet, but I’ve been here for a day, so that qualifies me as an expert.
- Traffic. It is chaotic. but it moves. faster than rush hour over the bay bridge. Two interesting facts. the Bangalorians seem proud of their traffic, nearly everyone I talk to here mentions how bad the traffic is, and how it is due to the high growth. They wear it with honor
- Traffic x2. They don’t use turn indicators here, they use their horns. All day long all I heard was those stupid horns honking.
- They work long hours. most were in work at 9, and were still there @7:30. this isn’t a startup, this is a corporate.
- Of the engineers I have spoken to, they have no interest in moving overseas. They like living and working in Bangalore. In fact the office is headed up by people returning from the USA.
- all the women appear to be wearing traditional Indian dress, while the men dress in western clothes.
- the drivers (you do NOT want to drive here) all have agreements with local shops. and there is definitely a local/non local price disparity. (I’m thinking 10x, but it may be more)
It can happen to anyone
Posted by Ian Holsman
ok..
so color my stupid and embarrassed.
I just got phished via IM.
a friend pointed me to a link to which I thought was a internal beta site, and stupidly I put my password in.
2 seconds later my IM account disconnected.
luckily they didn’t change my password, and I don’t have many people using that IM service.
what I did find interesting about the phishing site itself is that it was using obfuscated javascript to hide where they were sending my password to.