Hashemian Blog Web Tools, Financial Markets, Technology Sunday, May 04, 2008 Amazon Bezos Kindle Letter  Amazon.com has been displaying a letter from its founder/CEO Jeff Besoz on its homepage touting Kindle. In case you don’t know, Kindle is Amazon's ebook gadget. After users buy the book-sized device, they can download and read various books and publications from amazon for a fee. Apparently Amazon underestimated demand on initial release, but now it has caught up and that's what Bozos' homepage letter is trying to convey. What's interesting about this letter is that it is entirely a PNG image, not HTML text and tags as one might expect. An image map is used to activate a few hyperlinks in the letter. I can't figure out why this letter needed to be an image. At first I though that perhaps its content is being protected from search engines, but then I noticed that the entire letter content was stuffed into the alt parameter of the <img> tag, something search engines can easily read. The images is served from the host "g-ecx.images-amazon.com." Interestingly entering this URL in the browser redirects the page to "www.imdb.com", an Amazon company. Surely most people wouldn’t even notice the format and the ones who do will have a who-cares reaction. In my case I like to understand why things are done in a certain way. I've seen amateurish sites constructing Web pages from images. Amazon is a technology powerhouse. There had to be a reason this homepage letter was not in standard HTML, but that reason escapes me. Someone must know. amazon,web,kindle,jeff besoz,html Labels: amazon <Amazon Bezos Kindle Letter> // posted by rh 0 comments Thursday, May 01, 2008 Google Image Labeler  Here comes Google with yet another Beta version of a product. Only this one is like a game with a fun twist and could get quite addictive. The object of the program is to use human intelligence to label images. As powerful and ubiquitous as computers have become, there are still many tasks that us humans are still more skilled at. In this case, identifying a photo or an image (especially a blurry or a vague one) is a task best left to the human brain. Amazon has capitalized on the same concept with its Mechanical Turk site. In that site people create tasks, called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) and invite others to respond. They could be research quizzes, surveys, categorizing web sites, or writing articles. Responders are paid for successfully finishing the tasks and Amazon keeps a commission. In Google Image Labeler, Google harnesses its vast visitor pool to assign labels to images. Two people are paired at random for each round and for 2 minutes are shown random images in sequence. Participants are tasked with coming up with as many labels as they can for each image. One side doesn't see the other side's suggestions. If one of the labels match, the participants are given a score and they move on to the next image. Or they can skip the image. What's in it for the participants? A journey into the psyches of 2 randomly connected people for 2 minutes at a time, and accumulating scores, perhaps for bragging rights. And for Google? A cost-free experiment to more accurately identify the images in its vast database. Since participants don't know each other and time is short, they are motivated to quickly suggest the most appropriate labels based on their visceral reactions. If you get a chance, give Google Image Labeler a shot. Just be warned that it could get addictive. I had to stop myself after a few rounds, lest I waste hours in oblivion. Speaking of Google, the stock climbed another 19 points or 3.25% percent today to $593. Since its low of $413 on March 10 (barely 7 weeks ago), it has risen nearly 37%. Could've, should've, would've. google,amazon,images,human intelligence,mechanical turk,psychology Labels: amazon, google, web <Google Image Labeler> // posted by rh 0 comments Wednesday, March 26, 2008 eBay Bids Commission Junction and ValueClick Well  It was bound to happen. A few days ago I (and surely many other eBay affiliates) received an email from eBay announcing the unveiling of their very own affiliate site (dubbed eBay Partner Network) and their April 1st departure from Commission Junction, a ValueClick company. May 1st is the final cut-off date for the affiliates to complete the migration. That means many sites like this one will be busy porting their application over to the new eBay platform. That is specially true of sites (again, like this one) that leverage eBay Developer API's to search and display relevant eBay items on their pages. While I'm sure this is sad news for Commission Junction and ValueClick, I wonder what took eBay so long. This is a company with vast resources and talent and hardly in need of a middle-man company to handle their affiliate transactions. While eBay has been lurching, companies like Google and Amazon have gone on to produce numerous services geared towards affiliates and developers and have reaped the rewards. As for the affiliates both offer solid in-house products in the forms of Adsesne (Google) and Amazon Associates. Perhaps eBay's stalling is indicative of some internal synergy problems coupled with some recent high profile departures. Thankfully for eBay, their core auction business seems to have remained intact and it would provide a solid platform to launch some of these new initiatives. We'll see if eBay can finally catch up with the rest of the titans. Meanwhile many of us will be busy migrating our little affiliate sections to this new platform. More info on affiliates.ebay.com. ebay,amazon,google,adsense,affiliate programs,commission junction Labels: adsense, amazon, ebay, google <eBay Bids Commission Junction and ValueClick Well> // posted by rh 1 comments Thursday, January 10, 2008 The Demise of IT? So What.  Here we go again with Nick Carr spraying his anti-IT bile around. This time it's in the form of a new book, arguing that IT departments and software developers will be extinct soon. Why does he matter? Because he's a so-called pundit, a Harvard-educated writer, who in 2003 wrote a scathing article in Harvard Business Review titled, "IT Doesn't Matter". It ruffled a few feathers back then, just as the industry was pulling itself out of the imploded tech fiasco. So he's back again, trumpeting his negativism about the software and the IT industry in general. Read a viewpoint here. I don't understand what Mr. Carr's point is? I mean besides creating controversy and pushing a few books in the process. He argues that IT and the software industry will go down the same road as the electric generation business went a century ago. Back then many factories had their own generators. Then the utility companies became efficient enough and the economies of scale replaced self-generation with buying service from a large utility company. First of all, is that a good thing? Today we are at the mercy of the monopolistic utility companies. They charge whatever they want, they ignore consumer pleas when their meters are faulty and they take their time restoring power when it goes out. So is this in the cards for the companies' IT infrastructure? Google or Amazon taking the helm and treat us as they please? Secondly, how much foresight does it take to predict big shifts in the IT industry? Every industry goes through changes, not just IT. So the PC might be dead in 20 years, big deal. Cars and clothes and MRI machines won't be the same either. Given long enough time, even Earth will look different than it does today. It's easy to prognosticate about the future. No one really knows how things will shake out 20 years from now. There are a million possibilities and we all know the future will be different than the present. If Mr. Carr had predicted the rise of Google, Amazon, and Facebook 20 years ago, I might have been impressed. But just looking at a slice of time today and extrapolating it into the future, a 9-year old could do it, and he'll probably be just as wrong as Mr. Carr is. Disclaimer: My opinions are based on material available in the media and Mr. Carr's Web site. I have not read nor am I planning to read his book. But if you want to buy it, be my guest. information technology,nick carr,software development,google,amazon Labels: amazon, google, technology <The Demise of IT? So What.> // posted by rh 0 comments Tuesday, August 14, 2007 Internet Network Storage  We've got hard drives in our desktops and laptops. Then there are NAS (Network Attached Storage) and SAN (Storage Area Network) that we use at work. There are USB thumb/flash drives, SD and microSD memory cards that we use at home. And there are the myriad access protocols, whether local or network, such as SCSI, IDE, SATA, RAID, SMB, CIFS, NFS, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, etc. Storage seems to be everywhere and it’s dirt cheap, at around 20 cents a GB these days, and always dropping. The one area that's still being developed is hosted storage. Remote storage is a tricky matter. Unlike local or even LAN storage, there are a number of things that can go wrong, chiefly circuit outages and bandwidth limitations. Imagine clicking on a drive letter and having to wait 5 minutes for the content to show. You get the picture. Still there is no denying that the trend is pointing to remote storage. I know, this whole thin computing thing got a little ahead of itself, but I still think Sun's slogan still holds true, the network is the computer, or more appropriately, it will be the computer. Rumors of Gdrive, Google's hosted storage have been circling for a couple of years now. While Gdrive rumors continue to persist, Google has begun to offer additional storage for some of its existing services like Gmail and Picasa. The additional storage comes in several sizes with annual fees, like $250/year for 100 GB. Gdrive might indeed be in the offing. The front-runner in remote storage is Amazon.com who has had a hosted storage service for a couple of years now. Known as S3, it can be used to store anything and the interface schemes are the familiar SO (Service Oriented) protocols such as REST and SOAP. The cost is measured by capacity and bandwidth in 1 GB increments. $0.15/GB for storage, $0.10/GB for upload, and $0.18/GB for download. These are good starts, but don't quite aspire to be simple drive letters on one's PC. The question now is when will the king of desktops, Microsoft, come up with such a service and tie it up to Windows? Monopoly concerns aside, one has to believe they are working on something. It could prove to be a lucrative venture. It's a win for consumers too. Imagine never having to worry about crashed drives, backups, running out of room, or being able to use your drive from anywhere. It may be closer to reality than we think. network storage,shared drive,nas,san,network drive,gdrive,google,gmail,picasa,amazon,s3 Labels: amazon, gmail, google <Internet Network Storage> // posted by rh 1 comments Tuesday, May 29, 2007 Amazon's Look Inside  One of the niceties of shopping for books on Amazon is the "Look Inside" feature. It tries to mimic browsers' experience in a physical bookstore by showing them a few selected pages from a book or a limited number of pages based on a search phrase. It's probably a violation of rules, but one could even print out these pages to reference them later. As I said, this option is designed to approximate the shopping experience at a physical bookstore, but it's not quite the same. Most physical stores resemble libraries these days. You can select a few books, grab a comfortable armchair and read to your heart's content. Not so with Amazon preview. After showing you a few pages, you get a popup informing you that the freeloading interval is over, basically informing you that if you want to read more, buy the book. What's perplexing is this portion of the message: The page you have requested is not available for viewing. For security purposes, we are not able to provide further information about why the page is unavailable. Huh? What? Security purposes? I can't figure out what he devil they mean by this. I wasn't trying to access information on Pentagon's top security database. I guess a clause like that frees them from ever having to answer a question about the preview feature. Couldn't they just say: "Sorry, the browse limit has been reached?" amazon,books,look inside,book browsing Labels: amazon <Amazon's Look Inside> // posted by rh 0 comments Wednesday, April 11, 2007 DRM (Digital Rights Management) and Amazon Unbox, Part 3  Up to this point I had downloaded a Star Trek WMV file from Amazon Unbox to one PC. Having experienced performance issues, I had copied it to another PC and learned that the WMV film was protected by Microsoft's Windows Media DRM (Digital Rights Managements). Finally I had dismantled the first PC and had built a more powerful PC to play the WMV file on. But when I installed the Unbox software and tried to import the film, I ran into errors. It seemed like Unbox was reluctant to grant a DRM license key. At this point I was ready to consider this experience a small loss ($1.99) and move on, but curiosity got the better of me and I surfed to Unbox's site to see if I had a recourse. That's when I discovered that the downloaded film came with two license only. I guess that's the copyright regiment that Unbox was enforcing to prevent users from copying the file to unlimited devices and acquiring licenses for them. It would have been nice if Amazon had at least mentioned that point at the time of purchase. Armed with that knowledge I decided to uninstall Unbox from the other PC and in doing so Unbox must have revoked the license on that box leaving the film with one usable license. I was finally able to successfully obtain a license for the file and watch the movie on the new PC without encountering any issues. Since the original PC was now discarded, I assume the first DRM license was lost forever. Perhaps if I had contacted Amazon and explained the situation, they might have reinstated that original license, but having finally been able to watch the episode in its entirety, getting the extra license was a moot point. I also don’t know if there is limit on the number of times a license can be surrendered and re-acquired. Based on my experience I have decided that DRM is just not worth the hassle. There are too many restrictions, at least with the Unbox implementation. You pay a decent sum to purchase a movie (I saw some for about $15), you have to use the 1-Click button, Amazon gift certificates are not accepted, then you have to install a software you may not want, then you wait for the download, and you can only get two licenses for it, and you need decent computer power to decrypt and play the movie smoothly. You can't even burn it to a DVD to watch it on your TV. A colleague explained that if my TV had an S-Video interface, I could hook it up to the PC's S-Video port, start the movie on the PC and watch it on my TV. Fine, but why not just purchase a used DVD for less money and avoid all the hassle? There might have still been other restrictions too. During the course of my research I ran into a number of posts that lamented the Unbox's licensing terms, such as the fact that Amazon can revoke a license for any reason without recourse. People were also wary of Unbox's software license agreement which essentially strips user's right to privacy and can freely wander around a PC and collect all sorts of information and relay data back to Amazon's servers. It reminded many of the Sony music CD DRM fiasco from a few years back. In that case the CD's installed a rootkit spyware on users' PC's which was nearly impossible to remove without damaging the operating system itself. I haven't read the Unbox's agreement yet, so I can't comment on that with authority. I don't believe that Unbox's DRM implementation is as egregious as that of Sony's. The version I downloaded allows users to deactivate the service and the startup program and the downloaded movies play fine. The Unbox program however does need to run in order to purchase, download, and acquire a license. All in all, I wasn't impressed with Amazon Unbox. I suppose the service does have its uses if you wanted to purchase a movie or a show on a whim, but there are alternatives that are cheaper and less onerous. By the way, the episode of Star Trek I downloaded was "The Enemy Within". It's one of the earlier episodes of the original series in which a transformer malfunction creates two Kirks with opposite personalities. One gentle and indecisive, and the other mean and aggressive. Ironically, Unbox might be Amazon's mean incarnation. DRM (Digital Rights Management) and Amazon Unbox, Part 1 DRM (Digital Rights Management) and Amazon Unbox, Part 2 amazon,amazon unbox,windows media player,drm,digital rights,star trek,s-video,windows media drm Labels: amazon, drm, star trek <DRM (Digital Rights Management) and Amazon Unbox, Part 3> // posted by rh 0 comments Tuesday, April 10, 2007 DRM (Digital Rights Management) and Amazon Unbox, Part 2  I have to admit when it comes to DRM (Digital Rights Management) my knowledge is pretty dismal. I always knew that it was meant to prevent piracy but not being a fanatic of music and movies, DRM was never in my priority list of things to learn. But when I tried to run the Star Trek WMV file I had downloaded from Amazon Unbox on the new PC using Windows Media Player, I was greeted with a dialog box informing me that I needed a license to play the file. When I clicked on a link to obtain the license, the dialog box simply opened the Amazon Unbox home page and then just left me hanging. Since now I knew that Unbox movies were DRM protected, I decided to learn some more about what DRM exactly is and how it works. A quick check with Wikipedia revealed that DRM is really an umbrella term referring to various technologies to protect copyrights. In this case Unbox was using the Microsoft flavor. That means the movie is encrypted at source only to be unlocked by a separate key that is referred to as the license. The key is basically a file comprising various restrictions such as the number of permitted viewings, duration of validity, and other data. It is stored separately from the movie file under the user's profile and if everything is in order, Windows Media Player applies it to the movie (or music) file to decrypt and play. Another notable feature of the DRM key is that it can be tied to the machine that it is downloaded to. That makes the movie viewable only on the exact machine that it was configured for, preventing users from simply copying the file to another PC (as I had done) and playing the movie there. I'm not sure what parameters are used to construct this exclusivity restriction, but I assume a number of items such as the BIOS, CPU, and the network card are polled to create a unique identifier. Now I knew I had to obtain a new license to watch the Star Trek episode on this new PC and that meant installing the Unbox on the new machine. After downloading and installing the software, I imported the WMV file into the Unbox program and I had the file unlocked. The film was playing smoother now with fewer jitters but since this PC didn't have any speakers and the monitor quality was poor, I decided to use remote desktop from the original PC and watch the film that way. No luck, remote desktop just doesn't have the repaint power to handle a movie and I was back at the same position as before with lots of interruptions and jumps. I knew it was time to replace that original PC with a more modern machine. I had been wanting to do this for some time anyways. I had just the PC and now was as good a time as any to upgrade. So I dismantled the old PC, scavenged as many parts as I could and tossed out its shell. I always dread upgrading PC's. Being somewhat picky about configuring the new machine exactly as I want, it takes me days to get a new box to a level I am comfortable with. But in this case once I had the new PC running at a tolerable level, I decided to give the film a try. Having gone through the experience before, I copied the WMV file to the new PC, installed the Unbox program and attempted to import the file to acquire a new license for it. But that's when I hit yet another surprise. I'll conclude the saga in part 3. DRM (Digital Rights Management) and Amazon Unbox, Part 1 DRM (Digital Rights Management) and Amazon Unbox, Part 3 amazon,amazon unbox,drm,digital rights,drm license,windows media player,wmv files,encryption Labels: amazon, drm, programming <DRM (Digital Rights Management) and Amazon Unbox, Part 2> // posted by rh 0 comments Sunday, April 08, 2007 DRM (Digital Rights Management) and Amazon Unbox, Part 1  I have been running the Amazon Unbox ad banner atop my site's pages for a while now, but never used the service until recently. Unbox is the name of Amazon's TV and movie download service that went online a few months ago. So in the spirit of using what I advertise, I decided to take the plunge and give Unbox a try. Not that I'm much of a TV or movie buff, but why advertise something I don’t use myself? I suppose the first thing I should have done was reading the system requirements, but true to my personality I promptly skipped that part and started downloading the Unbox application from Amazon's website. The download and installation went pretty smoothly and soon I had the Amazon logo showing up in the system tray. Next came choosing a title to download, but before doing that I wanted to try a free clip just to see if everything was in order. I scoured Amazon's Web site and then resorted to a number of Google searches, but came up empty-handed. How could this be? I had just installed a program and didn't even know if it was going to work. All Amazon had to do was to provide a short, measly, home-made clip for users to test the program. I guess their plan is to force users to pay for a download just to kick the tires, revenue right out of the gate. I'm really not that versed in the motion picture field, but the movie prices I saw (in the $15 area) didn't seem so appealing, I'll stick with our Netflix subscription, thank you. Finally I chose an episode of the original Star Trek series for $1.99, cheap enough for a test, but then came two unpleasant surprises. First, the only way to buy the title was with the 1-Click button. Apparently Amazon is going all out for the impulse and buyer's remorse on this one. Second, I had a small amount of money in my gift certificate account, enough to cover this purchase. But unlike the usual purchases where Amazon pulls money out of the gift certificate balance, they went right for the credit card I had on file and hit me with the charge. Annoyed, I wrote an email to their customer service. The next day I received a reply confirming that gift certificate balances can not be applied to Unbox purchases. Why? Other than greed, I couldn't come up with a reason for this absurdity. After the purchase step was finished, I awaited for my next surprise. I opened the Unbox program and noticed that the nearly 900 meg file was finally being downloaded. As the progress bar passed around the 20% mark, I was given the green light to start the episode and that's when I got my next surprise. Admittedly this one was my own fault. The PC I was using didn't have enough muscle power to play the file. It was playing alright, but very choppy with numerous sound and image interruptions. I thought perhaps things will get better after the file is completely downloaded. No such luck, the episode was unwatchable. So I decided to search the Internet and learn about what exactly Unbox was downloading. I eventually found out that Unbox had downloaded a WMV (Windows Media Movie) file to my hard drive and that was the file the Unbox program was trying to play. After locating the WMV file in "My Videos" folder, I decided to bypass the Unbox program and play it directly using Windows Medial Player and I had the same bad results. After fruitlessly fiddling with the Windows Media Player's options for some time, I finally decided that the hardware was just not capable of handling this file. To test my theory I copied the WMV file to a faster PC on my home network. The PC is more powerful than the original but has a small display and no speakers, just the PC speaker. Still good enough to check out the playback quality. I fired up Windows Media Player and opened the WMV file. That's when the next surprise hit me in the face, in the form of DRM (Digital Rights Management). Was I able to resolve the issues and finally watch that Star Trek episode? I'm sure you're at the edge of your seat, begging to find out. I'll continue the Amazon Unbox saga in part 2 of this story. DRM (Digital Rights Management) and Amazon Unbox, Part 2 DRM (Digital Rights Management) and Amazon Unbox, Part 3 amazon,amazon unbox,unbox,drm,digital rights,windows media player,wmv,star trek Labels: amazon, drm, star trek <DRM (Digital Rights Management) and Amazon Unbox, Part 1> // posted by rh 0 comments

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