epc’s posterous

After playing for a bit with posterous I’ve decided to move http://epcostello.com/ over to Wordpress.com for awhile.
Posterous, for me, is a bit too simplistic. I know that’s a selling point, and I’m not knocking it, it’s just not what I want for a site right now.
I did like that I could add my Google Analytics id, but otherwise the inability to change the layout of the site at all, to add ads for example, or a twitter feed, or, well, anything pushed me away.

 Wordpress.com has more flexibility (though it too does not allow ads as far as I can tell, nor the Google Analytics thing, though I have not dived too far into it).

 Note that I’ve been writing personal journals on web sites since approximately 1995 (though I would never claim to have been “blogging” since then, only since 2001 or so). The one frustration I’ve had over the years is while running my own site (see http://epcostello.net) gives the most flexibility, it’s also a pain especially with the advent of the Sino-Russo comment spam freaks.

 So, I’ll play with wordpress for a bit and see what happens (note: wordpress.com, I am all too well beware of running my own wordpress installation).

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Just block the fuckers already, ok?  Route all traffic from Russia, abkhazwhateverthefuckistan, etc to the bit bucket.

Ok, thanks, bye.

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Years, and I mean, years ago, I signed up with the HMV Australia web site as an affiliate.  I’d found HMV to be a great source of music, and given the (then) near 50% discount on the AUD-USD exchange rate, it was cheaper to buy CDs from Australia and have them shipped to the US, than to buy the same CDs from Amazon (this was before Amazon Prime).

Now, time passed, I think I earned a whopping AUD$2.00 in affiliate earnings from HMV (I think they cut a check at AUD$100 so, I never even got paid).  HMV either shut down or shut down its website, turning over the program to Sanity.

Now, I never bothered to sign up for the Sanity.com.au affiliate site, my HMV account apparently got migrated over.  With the exception of the initial cutover, I never heard anything from Sanity about the program, earnings, links, promotions, etc.

Until this morning when I received this delightful missive:

Dear 973,

We are currently cleaning our affiliate database and have noticed that
you have not made any affiliate sales in the last 6 months. Therefore we
are no longer offering you an affiliate service and will be removing you
from our affiliate database.

As per the affiliate agreement you will immediately cease to use and
remove all links from your website to our website and will cease to use
and remove all trademarks, logos and other content or material provided
by or on behalf of us to you. Additionally, you will cease to represent
that you are in any way associated, endorsed by or affiliated with us. 

You are able to re-apply as an affiliate at any time, should you feel
that changes to your site will enhance your application.We wish you well
with your site in the future. 


Yours sincerely,


Sanity.com.au

“Dear 973” — they apparently lost my name in the exchange from HMV.

As far as I can tell, I haven’t made any affiliate sales in the last five years, let alone the last six months.

And the thing is, it doesn’t cost Sanity anything for me to provide the affiliate links. It’s what, a couple of rows in a database somewhere in Pennant Hills or wherever their datacentre is. The cost, if there is any at all, is in keeping up the relationship with me, which they’ve decided to terminate.

There’s no point in my digging through my site to figure out which links are out there (they probably link to HMV still). Sanity probably spent more time decided which affiliates to cut off than in contacting stale affiliates to push promotions, sales, etc.

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Ok, it’s not quite true but this morning when I turned on the TV to get my dose of fantasy financial advice from CNBC I was greeted by a disappointing message from our Tivo.

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Welcome BarCampNYC 4 attendees.

I’ve helped sponsor the NYC BarCamp for the last couple of years, either through my LLC or personally.  It’s part of my little personal campaign to help the NYC technical community.

I’m also active in NextNY Digital (an incredibly diverse, effective networking group masquerading as a Google Group and a wiki).  If you’re not involved in NextNY — why not?

I can be reached on twitter as @epc — I follow back people who are interesting to me.  

I can be reached through email as contact@epcostello.com.

All I ask is if you learned something interesting at BarCampNYC please share it …blog it, tweet it, whatever your fancy is.

Thanks!  Enjoy the weekend!

Attention Sales People: my sponsorship of BarCampNYC 4 does not mean I’m interested in your services.  In fact, when you call asking for the "Senior Most Purchasing Executive" in what has to obviously be a one–man independent consultancy you make my day, just before I hang up on you.  No offense but do some research before trying hard sales tactics while cold–calling sponsors of BarCampNYC. 

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This is an attempt to reboot my personal blogging routine.  We’ll see how it goes.

I have been maintaining some sort of personal site online since 1995, initially at http://www.ibm.com/~epc, followed by some now–long–dead Earthlink site, followed by http://epcostello.net/.

I blogged about technology for some time at http://artific.com/202, but that ran off the rails as I realized I was building up the reputation of the LLC I do business under (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not my personal brand) and the personal cost of maintaining the site (read: killing off spam attacks on comments and trackbacks) was killing any pleasure of actually writing.

On my personal site I’ve written or posted over 1500 entries ranging from long discourses about career burnout, history of IBM’s presence on the Internet, pictures of my dogs, etc.  Now, while my dogs are incredibly cute, they do not enhance my reputation as a technology consultant.  Nor does apparent whining about my time at IBM.

So…this reboot.  It’s presently hosted on posterous but I reserve the right to fling it off to some other service at my whim.  In fact I’m just going to go ahead and commandeer my tumblr site and echo posts to there as well.

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Ed Costello was IBM’s original “webmaster”. He created the applications used to run IBM’s corporate web site, www.ibm.com and pioneered various processes and procedures to run a corporate web presence.

With over 15 years’ experience designing, developing, deploying and debugging web technologies, he has a unique perspective on web systems, operations, and problems.

He focuses on web site operations — how to make running a web site routine, even in the face of extraordinary events and activities.

He sucks at design and has no interest or desire in redesigning your web site.

He excels at reviewing sites across a matrix of perspectives:

• Is the content produced by the site’s applications optimized for performance?
• Are there any security exposures on the site?
• Are there ways to optimize the site’s design to maximize technical performance with minimal side–effects on the design?
• What are the routines the site’s support team follows? Can they handle routine events? Can they handle extraordinary events? Can they handle the expected growth of the site or organization?

Ed Costello is available on a limited basis to advise and consult companies and organizations about their web site operations, performance, and strategies. He is also available to advise or mentor technology managers, CTOs and CIOs in the New York City metropolitan area. Rates are negotiable on an hourly, monthly or retention basis.

Consulting is performed through Artific Consulting LLC, a New York State (US) Limited Liability Company.

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Written in reply to “Where Should The Data Reside?” on Centernetworks:

There was some great discussion about this at the recent “Glue” conference but no clearcut answers.

At a technical level there’s a couple of problems: it’s trivial to syndicate the data, but non-trivial to synchronize actions on the data. If the feed is an Atom feed there’s a notion of stubs to reflect that a given bit of content has been unpublished, but this concept doesn’t exist in RSS which is what most sites use for data exchange.

There’s also no notion of what I’m going to call “contractual use of data”. There’s no way to obligate a subscribing party to either update a given element of data (maybe I published something in error and I want to push out the correction) or remove it (for whatever reason).

An author/publisher I know had a hell of a time getting bad data out of “the system” for a book he wrote. Initially (years ago) he’d talked to O’Reilly about getting it published. For whatever reason that didn’t go through. For reasons even O’Reilly admits were in error, the book appeared in a database update of upcoming titles. For the next several years the title showed up as an O’Reilly title complete with erroneous ISBN even though the author and O’Reilly quickly cleaned up the original bad data source. It flowed out to Amazon, then other sites and even to this day resurfaces years later.

The problem with establishing some sort of contractual obligation on data flow is …isn’t that DRM? And it is in a way I guess, but not in the sense of preventing copies or use but in requiring some sense of fidelity to the original data.

Atom tried to achieve a first cut at this both with the stub idea for deletions as well as the requirement of a unique identifier for each chunk of content — the idea being that even if you republish my blog post from my personal site over here on CN, the original id is maintained, but in practice no one does this and the tools don’t really support or enforce it.

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In reply to 300 Things I’d Like To See From Twitter Before A TV Show:

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For the past several years I’ve strung together multiple drives off a Mac to serve as a repository of all of our digital crap (music, movies, photos, miscellaneous other stuff).  Maybe five years ago I started using a RAID setup relying on the Mac's built-in software RAID setup.  

I've alternated between three pairs of RAID arrays (one for music, one for "other" and one for movies) and my current two pair set up (music + video on one, "projects" on the other).  

As I was walking out the door (figuratively) to go on vacation this morning, one of the slices failed on the music + movies array. There's 600Gb of mostly music (and yes, RIAA, mostly legal) and some movies.  While the other slice was functioning, I didn't want to leave and come back to having lost the whole smash.

So, I'm first copying off all of the data to a spare 1Tb drive, and then rebuilding the array.

And here's the thing, I have no idea what will happen.

This one time? At band camp? Sorry… but this one time I rebuilt a slice and the system chugged along and I discovered much to my chagrin that I had an empty 200Mb RAID setup, the software having delicately erased everything before rebuilding the array.  I'd prefer that not to happen, but there's so little transparency as to what will happen that I'm resorting to copying everything multiple times before trying the rebuild.

There's got to be an easier way.

I know of the Drobo but haven't had time to look into it.  My preference is for something that just handles this shit.  Tell me when I need to slap another drive in, that's fine, but I don't want to lose anything, and I don't want to have to think about it anymore.

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