Hashemian Blog

The ANWR Oil Debate

2008-07-07T00:09:00.001-04:00

Lately I've seen a number of Web sites and emails exhorting Americans to press their government to explore for oil in a parcel of land in ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the northeast corner of Alaska.

The ANWR debate is nothing new and it was a hot topic back in the 1970's oil crisis. Proponents argue that this location may hold vast deposits of oil which could bring relief to the current shortages of oil and thus tame the high prices in the US and the rest of the world. Opponents include the natives and environmentalists who fear that such exploration and subsequent drilling could endanger this natural setting robbing it and its inhabitants (humans and animals) of its ecological diversity and wealth.

I am not sure which side of the debate holds the better argument. Personally I don't like to see natural settings overrun by industrial concerns, i.e. the oil companies. What I do know is that Exxon-Mobil's earnings topped $40 billion in 2007 and surely they will easily exceed that figure this year. As people learn of these outlandish profits by the big oil while their savings are being squeezed, there is bound to be some backlash. That has manifested itself in the form of calls for special taxes on oil companies.

Couple that with the inevitable emergence of fuel economics and alternative energy and it's not hard to guess that oil companies are worried about their prospects. To me, these pro- oil exploration campaigns are not about alleviating oil shortages, but more about distracting the public from the abuses of the oil companies. Many go even further to shift the spotlight away from the big oil and cast it on the liberals, democrats, or Arabs in a shameless effort to create public sympathy and support for the oil companies. One wonders who the real authors are.

Oil companies already have millions of acres of land they can start exploring, but that's not enough. ANWR may hold large reserves of oil, but this campaign smells more like a land-grab and less like a sincere effort to help calm the oil crunch. Blaring their propaganda machine in times of panic and despair is always a good way to assure power and profits.

Review history and see how dictators and tyrants have come to power. Their reigns have almost always preceded by periods of unrest and panic when people are at their most vulnerable and can be easily deceived by empty promises and blustering rants. Once they tap into the herd mentality, they are assured of their golden positions. I want a way out of this oil mess too, but not enough to sell out this country to oil thugs. They're beyond rich enough already.

oil,anwr,alaska,oil companies,exxon

RSS/ATOM SyndicationFeed in .NET 3.5 Framework

2008-06-29T21:20:00.003-04:00

Among some of the new classes introduced in Version 3.5 of the .NET Framework Class Library (FCL) were the syndication-related classes. While other technologies such as LINQ, extension methods and lambda expressions have been grabbing most of the attention the new syndication classes also deserve a nod. Part of the System.ServiceModel.Syndication namespace the classes offer a variety of methods to easily generate or consume syndication feeds in RSS 2.0 or ATOM 1.0 formats.

It's not that reading or writing feeds were exceedingly difficult before. FCL comes with a number of XML classes that facilitate working with XML data which all syndication feeds emanate from. No doubt there are plenty of sample code out there that made the task as easy as copy, paste and tweak. But now FCL comes with its own native classes to handle feeds, with advanced settings, intellisense, and potential of extension.

To demonstrate ease of use, here's a sample code that pulls in a sample feed from Google, and scrapes and saves the content of each link to a file:

var wc = new WebClient();
using (var rss = XmlReader.Create(
       "http://finance.google.com/finance?morenews=10&q=NASDAQ:INTC&output=rss")) {
  var feed = SyndicationFeed.Load(rss);
  foreach (var x in feed.Items) {
    var uri = x.Links.Last().Uri;
    wc.DownloadFile(uri, @"c:\rss\" + Regex.Replace(uri.LocalPath, @"^.*/", ""));
  }
}

That was easy, eh? Just remember to add System.ServiceModel.Web.dll as a reference to your project. Happy syndicating.

rss,atom,microsoft,net,asp.net,xml

DNS Mystery, NameServers, IP addresses

2008-06-18T00:18:00.003-04:00

Today I was trying to reach 1&1's home page, but the browser kept failing to pull up the site. Mysteriously I was able to reach 1&1's home page when I changed my DNS servers to those of OpenDNS.org. Feeling curious I decided to investigate the matter in depth. My default DNS server was reporting the IP address of www.1and1.com to be 217.160.232.1. While that address belongs to 1&1, it's really one of their routers or gateways and not a Web server. No wonder I was unable to access the site. the working IP address reported by OpenDNS.org and a number of other DNS servers was 217.160.226.203. That is indeed the correct IP address for www.1and1.com. So why was I seeing different results from different DNS servers?

As you may know the job of translating a host name to an IP address falls on a program known as the resolver which queries its designated DNS server for the answer. If the DNS server can not produce the translation (from its cache or authority zone), it issues what it's know as a recursive query to the DNS network on the Internet. The host name is broken to its fragments and each fragment from right to left is queried successively. The results generally consists of hosts known as NameServers, which get the query one step closer to the final result. The final NameServers produce the IP address translation. However, if any of the NameServers along the way can produce the translation, the query stops and the IP address is sent back to the resolver.

Using the Unix/Linux dig command I followed the name resolution for www.1and1.com one step at a time. Results are shown here and shortened for brevity.

This command displays the root servers:

# dig
;; ANSWER SECTION:
.                       451081  IN      NS      M.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.                       451081  IN      NS      A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.                       451081  IN      NS      B.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.                       451081  IN      NS      C.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.

This command queries one of the root servers and produces NameServers for "com." TLD (Top Level Domain):

# dig +norec @A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET www.1and1.com
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
com.                    172800  IN      NS      K.GTLD-SERVERS.NET.
com.                    172800  IN      NS      L.GTLD-SERVERS.NET.
com.                    172800  IN      NS      M.GTLD-SERVERS.NET.
com.                    172800  IN      NS      A.GTLD-SERVERS.NET.

This command queries one of the "com." NameServers:

# dig +norec @A.GTLD-SERVERS.NET www.1and1.com
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.1and1.com.          172800  IN      A       217.160.232.1
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
1and1.com.              172800  IN      NS      ns27.1and1.com.
1and1.com.              172800  IN      NS      ns28.1and1.com.

Generally the previous command shouldn't produce and IP address, instead the authority section would prompt a final query to one of the 1and1.com NameServers (which by the way have the correct IP translation.) Instead somehow an IP address is produced at this level and the query ends with this inaccurate IP translation. I've tried the same query with the homepage URL's of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and a few other sites and none return an IP address at this level.

It remains to be seen if this erroneous translation would eventually spread around, causing 1&1's homepage to become widely inaccessible. Anyone knows how that IP translation ended up in of the "com." NameServers? Am I making wrong assumptions here? Feel free to let me know.

dns,nameservers,domain names,ip addresses,internet

The Inverted CD Yields

2008-06-02T23:59:00.004-04:00

I was checking ING DIRECT's CD (Certificates of Deposit) rates today and wondered how long will they continue to be inverted. A 6-month CD currently has an APY of 3.3%, while that of a 4-year CD stands at 2.5%.

What I would really like to see is a normal curve, where the longer the CD term, the higher its yield. Bank yields generally follow the economy and when you see this type of anomaly, one interpretation is that there's more uncertainty with the short-term economic outlook than that of the long-term. Another way to put it, there is more perceived risk in the short-term and hence the investment rewards are higher.

So what is the person with a long-term goal to do? My approach is not lock in my money for such a long time when shorter rates pay nearly a full percentage more. That can amount to quite a bit of interest. Sure, there's always the risk of buyer's remorse if the rates headed lower, but to me eschewing the long-term, low-yield CD is a calculated risk.

I would opt for a short-term, higher-yielding CD and keep rolling it over until the longer-term CD rates become more favorable. In fact, it may make sense to completely bypass CD's for a savings account with a decent rate. ING DIRECT's savings account currently has a 3% APY, and the funds remain completely liquid with no early withdrawal penalties. If and when CD rates become more enticing, one can quickly kick some money from the savings account into a CD.

savings accounts,banks,cd,apy,apr,yields,interest rates

Phoenix's Mars Landing

2008-05-24T23:04:00.003-04:00

I bet the team in charge of the Phoenix spacecraft is not going to enjoy a restful night as they prepare to land this hunk of metal near Mars's north pole tomorrow. I'll probably sleep fine, but I'm hoping for good news tomorrow.

This landing is specially poignant, since the last craft (Mars Polar Lander) that attempted a powered landing using retro rockets went MIA on Mars over 8 years ago. The rovers sent up since then have all utilized successful airbag landings, but Phoenix is going for the traditional soft landing and that means edgy nerves while awaiting a successful touchdown signal nearly 9 ½ months after its launch.

Unlike the rovers, Phoenix is a stationary craft, designed to survey the area for water and primordial matter. Depending on its discoveries, it could pave the way for future missions, culminating in manned exploration of the red planet.

For me this is an incredible triumph of science and engineering, specially since I'm still amazed at seeing 500-ton airplanes getting airborne and traveling vast distances. The fact that a tiny craft can be controlled from 35 million miles away is nothing short of miraculous.

Here is the Phoenix blogs updating the events surrounding this mission. Good luck, guys.

space,mars,nasa

Sales, Politics, and Religion

2008-05-23T23:09:00.001-04:00

For a brief period in my career I was encouraged to try my hand at sales. I was ok at it and made decent commissions but in the end I knew that sales wasn't my calling and I returned to my passion, technology, mainly programming. That brief stint taught me one lesson in salesmanship. When on a sales call, steer away from passionate topics, specially when you don't know which way the prospect is leaning. References to religion and politics should be avoided in favor of more neutral topics, unless the product is geared towards a certain persuasion.

Today I was shown an online demo of a Web product. The salesman had worked hard to secure a slice of my time to showcase his product. The part I found curious was the demo Web pages I was being shown. They included news articles about the Pope's Visit with Bush, Christianity, and the Church. Now I have no problem with these topics when used in the context of product demonstration, but I wondered if the salesperson knew about my liberal, religion-free mindset, would he have still picked these topics for his product demo.

The salesman never lead the conversation towards politics or religion, and we kept the conversation on-topic, centered around the features of the product and the cost of implementation. But I could imagine that another liberal person might have reacted negatively to all this and written the whole thing off.

The point is that avoiding emotionally charged topics such as religion and politics, however indirect, is a prudent policy when making a sales pitch to someone you don't know. This salesman may experience much higher success if he picks safer, more neutral examples for his demonstrations. For example, I'm not interested in team sports, but I doubt anyone would have a negative reaction to samples depicting baseball bats . Why take a chance on distracting or alienating your prospects when your goal is to secure their business?

sales,politics,religion,pope

Particle Accelerator and Black Holes

2008-05-21T22:31:00.003-04:00

I'm no scientist, but I do have a keen interest in science. That's why I was fascinated with the The Large Hadron Collider experiment that's about to be commenced at CERN in Switzerland. The basic idea is to replicate (or try to) the conditions moments after the alleged Big Bang by creating a high-energy collision of sub-atomic particles in a gargantuan tunnel and see what happens next, as in, if that results in any matter being created.

The reason I use the word "alleged" with Big Bang is that the phenomenon is really a theory. No one knows exactly how the world came to be and obviously that has been a dead-locked debate between creationists and evolutionists.

But before this cosmic experiment can reach its full momentum, there are a couple of earthly hurdles for CERN to clear in the form of lawsuits. Apparently a few scientists are worried that this experiment could create a man-made Black Hole which could envelope Earth and extinguish life as we know it. So they are trying to put a stop to the experiment to save mankind. Perhaps CERN should play the song "It's the End of the World as We Know It" by R.E.M. as they fire up the instruments. Or how about "Black Hole Sun" by Soundgarden?

Most of the scientific community dismisses such claims as baseless, but one wonders about the what-if factor. I suppose there's a slight probability that a cataclysm could occur as a result of the collision which may engulf our planet. If that comes to pass, I hope it's quick and painless. I'd hate to wake up one day and see a black hole encroaching on my yard, sucking in everything in its path as it expands. At current gas prices, I might think twice about jumping in my car and speeding away.

cern,black holes,big bang,quantum theory,physics rem

Seatbelts and Risks

2008-05-13T22:17:00.003-04:00

Since my last seatbelt ticket I have given the seatbelt law some thoughts. While in my mind this is an oppressive rule, there is one other side of this law that I hadn't considered before. I have always argued against mandatory seatbelts due to infringement on personal freedom. I don't disagree that they can help save lives and minimize bodily harm. And yes, there is the potential for curbing additional societal cost (police, medical, etc.), but that could lead to the slippery slope of banning many activities since there's always some level of risk and potential financial loss associated with them.

My position is that as long as the risk is generally on the risk-taker, personal freedom should trump protection of self by coercion. In extending that argument to seatbelts, I had neglected to consider another side of this issue and that is the possibility of severe financial and emotional risk to others.

The new perspective popped into my head while driving to work the other day. Suppose that due to my negligence I cause an accident. And suppose the other driver wasn't wearing his seatbelt and as a result he is gravely injured or he dies. Since the accident was my fault I would be faced with a large financial liability, not to mention the emotional guilt I would suffer for causing injury or death to another individual. If only he was wearing his seatbelt, he might have walked away from the accident with superficial wounds. I would still be liable for property damage and medical treatment, but the scope of damages would be much smaller and my emotional stress would be nowhere near that of the first scenario.

So it can be argued that by not wearing my seatbelt I'm creating additional risk not only for myself but more importantly for other drivers as well. Looking at this argument from a non-selfish point of view I have now begun to realize that if I am the cause of an accident I hope that the other driver was buckled up. But even if the fault was with the other driver and he wasn't buckled up, I might still suffer the trauma of having been involved in a fatal collision. Judging on that, perhaps the seatbelt law isn't as oppressive as I had initially thought. Of course this argument can again enter a slippery slope and extend far beyond wearing seatbelts, but that's a subject for another time.

btw, which is the correct spelling, seatbelt or seat belt, or both? If had to guess I'd go with the latter (Wikipedia also has the latter), but I have also seen the former used frequently.

seatbelts,traffic laws,accidents,lawsuits

Seatbelt Ticket, Again

2008-05-08T23:17:00.002-04:00

And so the law caught up with me again for the third time, barely 9 months after my last seatbelt ticket. This time I was caught in my own little hometown while driving to work. I was alert enough to see the cop standing by the side of the road looking into cars. I scrambled to grab the belt but it kept slipping out of my hand and by the time I had a good grip, I was spotted and got pointed out of the traffic. Game over.

As I waited for the cop while he was checking my license and registration, I thought the only thing I hated more than wearing the seatbelt was to pay the fine. I could mount no defense. I had clearly broken the law and the officer was just doing his job. Other than that, I consider myself a law-abiding driver. I drive defensively, observe all traffic rules, and I don’t chatter on a cell phone. I don't even have a cell phone. The policeman's gruff manner had changed by the time he returned. He actually apologized for taking long to check my papers (I had handed him an expired registration) and gave me a $37 ticket. Not too painful, considering the fact that my last one was over $100.

I suppose being a town resident had something to do with softening him up. The police department is requesting a sizeable budget from the town for upgrades and there's a lot of grumbling from the taxpayers who are fed up with high taxes. The referendum is coming up soon and there's no need to harass the already irritated residents.

As I continued my commute with the seatbelt fastened I kept fighting the contraption to get some breathing room. I felt like a shackled prisoner in my car, trapped and pinned down to my seat. Several times I was distracted from the road while I kept yanking on the belt to loosen the death grip. Clearly this wasn't going to work.

Obviously fighting this law through civil disobedience was going to cost me a lot of money and a bad record. The apparent solution was in the form of a small keychain store card. I pulled the belt far enough to keep it loose about me and then jammed the card through the slit on the top hook. That put enough pressure on the belt preventing it from being recoiled by the spring. After adjusting the length several times, I think I finally achieved a good balance between looseness and a buckled seatbelt.

I'm not sure if what I've done is illegal or constitutes tampering, worthy of a fine. while I have slightly inhibited the natural operation of the seatbelt, I haven’t made any changes to the mechanism itself. I consider it more of a superficial adjustment, but I suppose it has somewhat reduced the belt's safety factor. For now this allows me to be a more alert driver, while hopefully dodging another ticket.

By the way, I don't recommend anyone doing this. Drive safely and wear your seatbelts.

seatbelts,law,seatbelt law,traffic,police,traffic laws

Yahoo's Fate After Microsoft

2008-05-04T22:59:00.001-04:00

While many are preparing for a dark day for Yahoo's share when the market opens on Monday, I don't think the shares will get battered too roughly, although there will be volatility. Microsoft's withdrawing of its offer isn't good news to many, but speculation on what Yahoo may have up its sleeve might keep the stock from slipping too far.

It's possible that Yahoo overplayed its hand, but it's also possible that Yahoo may have had other plans, yet to be revealed. The plans could involve Google, or private equity, or even something far-fetched like Oracle. And in the end, nothing says they can't get back to negotiating with Microsoft. Only this time, they would probably keep it quiet, until a final deal is stuck.

Yahoo,microsoft,google,oracle,finance

Amazon Bezos Kindle Letter

2008-05-04T22:22:00.004-04:00

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

Google Image Labeler

2008-05-01T23:38:00.004-04:00

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

Google Toolbar 5 Beta

2008-04-29T19:15:00.001-04:00

Google toolbar is out with a new version 5 in beta. While I find myself using Firefox more often than before everyday, I’m still on Internet Explorer the majority of the time, perhaps due to force of habit, or the fact that some sites display better on IE. I have refused to upgrade IE 7 however. Version 6 runs just fine for me.

Ironically, what keeps IE a viable browser for me is Google toolbar. There are plenty of useful and time-saving utilities in the toolbar from quick access to Google search to spell checking, to auto-filling forms.

The new toolbar is similar to the last version, but there is one feature that I stumbled on by accident that really made this version worth the upgrade. The toolbar hooks itself into the search function (Edit-Find…Ctrl+F) of IE and displays a Firefox-style search bar at the bottom of the page with similar functionality as that of Firefox. The web page document is searched and the first match is highlighted as the search term is being typed. It's a giant improvement over IE's stodgy pop-up search box.

I'm not sure if the Beta version is available for Firefox yet, but if you want to try the toolbar out on IE, pick it up here: http://toolbar.google.com/T5/

google,google toolbar,internet explorer,Firefox,ie

Religious Contextual Ads

2008-04-24T22:07:00.003-04:00

Sometimes contextual ads can reveal interesting facts about a site and its visitors. For some time I have noticed that Google Adsense has been displaying a certain banner for a site targeting Muslims seeking marriage partners.

Personally I don't mind religious ads on my site. It's all about business. I consider myself an agnostic (as in, I can not with certainty prove or disprove the existence of god or the validity of any religion,) but I have a liberal view towards faith. People should be free to choose whatever creed works for them as long as they don't force it on others.

I don't know what algorithm Google employs in targeting Adsense ads, but I must assume they strive to maximize click-through rates. It's possible that many of my site's visitors are Muslims (or Moslems, as Persians pronounce it), or perhaps my middle-eastern last name, Hashemian, triggers these banners. My bet is on the latter. To the algorithm, I'm just an unknown visitor from the U.S. who happens to be visiting the site.

At any rate, there must be some religious profiling at work here. I haven't seen any Christian or Jewish or Hindu-oriented ads on my site. Certainly I haven't seen anything for matching Agnostics or Atheists.

If the site helps two Muslims find each other and become a couple, that's cool with me. But if the marriage produces a male child (or female, for that matter,) I only hope they resist the temptation to have their child genitally mutilated, or in euphemistic term, circumcised.

islam,agnosticism,atheism,marriage,dating,circumcision,persia,iran,adsense

Yahoo Beats, Microsoft Next

2008-04-22T22:53:00.002-04:00

As I had expected, Yahoo reported good earnings, but nothing spectacular. The stock has received a slight dent in after-hours, most likely the effect of selling into the good news. Chances are, barring any big news, it'll stay relatively flat tomorrow.

The question still is whether Yahoo can maintain the earnings going forward. I believe most people don't have much faith in that. One quarter is hardly an indication of a trend.

The bigger question, however, is the status of Microsoft's offer. A better indication might arrive on Thursday when Microsoft reports its own quarterly earnings. Even with Vista's slow uptake, my feeling is that it will show healthy earnings. Microsoft has a long history of under-promising and over-delivering on earnings. The weak dollar will probably help its bottom-line considerably as well. Many U.S. companies have gotten a boost from the weak dollar, offsetting their weaker domestic intake with higher overseas revenues.

While many believe that Microsoft's acquisition of Yahoo is inevitable, there is still plenty of twists and turns left in this saga, including piercing the defenses of some heavy-weights such as Google, News Corp., and Time Warner, who would want to see this takeover derailed.

microsoft,yahoo,google,earnings,weak dollar,vista

Yahoo's Earnings

2008-04-21T23:21:00.003-04:00

Yahoo is slated to report its earning tomorrow after the market close. If it can pull off what Google did last week, the stock should rise to about $35.

Then again, that was Google and there was plenty of pent-up demand from buyers. The stock had been pounded so bad that there was nowhere for it to go but up. The good earnings news only gave it the additional momentum it needed to explode way up. Yahoo's stock probably won't see a 20% rise on Wednesday no matter how good its earnings.

Given Yahoo's snobby attitude towards Microsoft's advances, one has to surmise that it's feeling pretty comfortable with its earnings. A good report will validate its position in resisting Microsoft and holding out for a higher offer while giving it much bigger bargaining power. On the flip side, if the earnings are dowdy, little doubt will remain that Microsoft would prevail in its takeover efforts.

It's ironic, but I'm sure Google is rooting for Yahoo to report stellar earnings and fend off Microsoft. I've already seen Yahoo ads on Google's network and Yahoo is probably getting a good deal on these.

If early indications have any value, my bet is on Yahoo reporting decent earnings. If nothing, that would be another signal of strength in the Internet market. Of course, if I were so sure, I would have picked up a few call options myself, which I haven't. The May 08, $30 call strikes saw plenty of activity today. No doubt, more of the same tomorrow. Then again a lot of it could be from traders protecting short stock positions.

stocks,options,yahoo,google,microsoft,earnings

Bank Service Agreement

2008-04-15T23:00:00.001-04:00

Every time I receive a new service agreement from a bank or a credit card company I know they've devised a new way to profit from the consumers.

Remember when many credit card companies shortened the payment cycles (grace periods) from a full month to three weeks or less. That was their ingenious way to snare more consumers into their penalty list, charge them extra interest, and jack up their interest rates.

Or another time when they changed their dispute policies by curtailing consumers' right to lawsuits, replacing it with arbitration. No doubt their hand-picked arbitrators would always side with the banks, forcing consumers into unjust settlements.

Here's another Service Agreement I received recently addressing online payments:

We may delay or cancel a request to transfer or charge money back to the Pay From or other account at our discretion including if the payment:
Looks suspicious or fraudulent
Appears to have incorrect amount or recipient information
Seems to duplicate another payment

Of course this is spun to appear as if the bank is attempting to protect its clients against fraud. But what it's really saying is that the bank has given itself arbitrary and broad powers to do as it pleases, including charging fees, if it the transaction doesn't seem right, based on its own vague definition. Look at the verbs used: "Looks", "Appears", "Seems". What kind of rules are these? I mean why even bother with a service agreement? They should just replace all that with a terse statement like: "We will charge you whenever, however, and whatever amount we feel like. Have a nice day."

service agreements,banks,credit cards,online banking

Political Contextual Advertising

2008-04-06T13:37:00.010-04:00

When a site like this one makes the decision to put up advertising from ad networks such as Google Adsense, it loses some capacity to make a quick first impression.

Years ago when the fears of Indian outsourcing was at its peak and people in the U.S. were terrified of job losses, a company put up a Web site in defense of the American workers. When the company decided to monetize the site via Adsense, it was horrified to find out that most of the ads were touting outsourcing to countries such as India and Philippines. In other words the contextual ads were conveying a message opposite of the site's intended one and some users faced with those ads probably regarded the site as pro-outsourcing.

The image to the right is exactly about the same issue. Here is an ad by John McCain that has been coming up on this site for a few days now. It's quite possible that visitors to this site, upon seeing the ad, infer that this site is about politics or it's even pro-Republican.

Yes, I am interested in politics, no, I'm not pro-Republican (certainly not in its neo-con incarnation), and right now I don't really have a strong opinion about McCain or any other potential candidates. I do consider most politicians as greedy hypocrites and I may indulge in a rare pro-liberal banter in my blog, but this site as a whole is politically neutral. Anyone from any camp is welcome here, yet I wonder how many visitors, seeing this ad, would actually make that distinction.

mccain,politics,republicans,democrats,politicians,adsense

Tax Spam Season

2008-04-03T23:22:00.004-04:00

You know the income tax filing deadline (April 15th) is nearing when tax-prep companies rev up their spam engines.

This one from H&R Block is offering half-off their regular prices. Obviously trying to push through a few more sales before the filing season is over and they are back in the lull period. I'm sure I'll get a few more of these unbeatable deals right up to April 15th.

Thanks, but no thanks guys. This year I used TaxAct and it had a great price right from the start, free.

*Note: My endorsement of TaxAct is completely unsolicited. I just liked the product and the fact that it cost nothing.

income tax,taxes,taxcut,taxact,irs

Citibank Online Banking?

2008-04-01T23:35:00.003-04:00

If it was an April fool's joke, surely many people didn't find it amusing. While the stock market was rocketing up today, Citibank's online banking site was down and out, stranding thousands of their customers.

We're not talking about a short outage, this was an all day near blackout. What astounds me is that there was no admission and no warnings on the site indicating the problem. It was as if everything was running smoothly. Could it be that the people in charge didn't even know about the problem for hours, or perhaps they were too arrogant or too cowardly to admit the issue and warn their customers? Meanwhile many people who have come to rely on Citibank's online banking, no less at the encouragement of the bank itself, were shut out without any means of conducting their businesses.

I can understand that computers and Web sites go on the fritz sometimes. That's what redundancy and failover is for. Short of poor planning, Citibank could have at least had the decency to notify its customers of the outage and suggest alternatives. Instead it decided to bury its head in the sand and not even promptly respond to customer inquiries.

Online banking should no longer be considered a luxury, it's a necessity to many people. This is not a site about the latest escapades of Paris Hilton or Britney Spears. It's an integral part of many people's daily lives. With all the problems that's facing financial institutions these days, this is a sure way for a bank to send its customers rushing for the exit doors.

citibank,online banking

Prospectus Paper Waste

2008-03-31T22:27:00.002-04:00

Like many people I have a 401(k) account through my employer, invested in a few mutual funds. I can appreciate that by law mutual fund companies have to send their clients their prospectuses (prospecti?) whenever there is a change in their investment strategies, but I was getting tired of receiving these booklets in the mail.

I would just give them a cursory look and then toss them in the trash. I assume many people do the same. I doubt even a small number of people would actually read these from cover to cover and then promptly file them with their important documents.

So when the retirement management company gave us the option to receive these documents via email, I jumped at the chance. Alas, I'm still getting these tree-killers, like a large one arriving today via mail weighing in at 70 pages. Makes me wonder why I even bothered signing up for the electronic format.

Now I know these companies are erring on the side of caution. With so much fraud and mismanagement swirling around the financial institutions, they reckon it's better to be safe than sorry. So they just keep mailing the stuff, hoping to avoid a small chance of someone accusing them of hiding material facts.

That's all fine and good, but in this day and age of green living and electronic transactions, shouldn't they at least try to respect the wishes of those of us who opted in for email and adapt their systems? If they're incapable or unwilling to join the digital revolution, they can hire a bunch of Nigerian spammers to handle the task. The Nigerian scammers figured out years ago how to conduct their businesses via email and apparently they are very successful at it.

Even the U.S. government, the paragon of technical backwardness, has been going digital with programs such as e-Filing income taxes. It's about time mutual fund companies learned how to save those documents in PDF and attach them to email.

mutual funds,email,pdf,taxes,spam,nigerian scams

eBay Bids Commission Junction and ValueClick Well

2008-03-26T23:44:00.002-04:00

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

Google, Blogger in German?

2008-03-19T23:30:00.004-04:00

Here's a head-scratcher for tonight. When I got home one of my kids was trying show me something on blogger.com and suddenly everything was in Deutsch, as in German. At first I though that it was a mix-up. Some programmer at Google (which owns Blogger) had screwed up and suddenly everything had gone Teutonic. Now we have a German-speaking household, so then I assumed that the kids had changed some setting to German language and Google was happily obliging.

Hoping to unravel the mystery, I logged in to my own account on the XP machine and headed to google.com. no luck, it kept switching over to google.de. What was happening here? I checked the regional settings on the XP machine and everything was as expected, en-US. Then I headed to the whoami page to see if my IE browser was specifying a wrong "Accept-Language" header (i.e. de-DE) prompting Google to redirect to its German site based on the CultureInfo. Nope, that wasn't the problem either. Then I launched Firefox and surfed onto google.com. Same behavior, I landed on Google's German site again.

Somehow Google was convinced that I was German and it was trying to help me, more like coerce me, to their German site. Is it possible that they had an algorithm tracking web sites visited from my house and deciding that the "most appropriate" site for us was their German version? I can't say for sure, but apparently Google had decided that we should use their German site.

A quick fix was to click on the English link on Google's homepage. That deposited a cookie in the browser indicating that I was interested in the standard google.com site and it fixed the immediate problem, but not entirely. Blogger was (and still is) coming up in German and deleting cookies, as I often do, would bring things back to the annoying redirect. Was Google erroneously identifying my IP address as one from Germany?

Feeling frustrated, I searched the newsgroups for an answer and I found this thread that confirmed my suspicion. One of the posters who was experiencing the same problem had written to Google and had received this response:

Google has recently started using IP-address detection to help our users find our foreign destination sites. Unfortunately, our IP-address detection is not perfect and you are being inappropriately redirected. We are working on the problem. In the interim, you can regain your old Google.com experience by simply clicking on the 'Google.com [English]' link in the footer of the page. By clicking on this, Google will note that you have opted out of the foreign domain site and you will no longer experience redirects.

So it was an IP address mis-identification after all. This is the most ridiculous scheme I have heard of, and to have it come out of Google, it is almost inconceivable. No doubt the folks at Google are padding themselves on their backs for their ingenuity. Meanwhile they apparently have disregarded the basic rules of IP addresses on the Internet and the proper way of serving visitors.

First off, please don't help me along when I haven't asked for it. That is so Microsoft to try to be helpful in all the wrong places. If I want the German site, I'll ask for it myself.

Second, the correct way of determining a user's preferred CultureInfo is checking the browser header. The browser will tell you what language the user is likely interested in.

Third, the IP address is an unreliable way of determining the user's preferred language. The user could be an American connecting his laptop from his hotel room in Germany. Or a Parisian employee of an American company using a corporate proxy server in the U.S.

Fourth, if you must persist in this IP detection insanity, at least make sure your databases are not flawed. I'm connected over an AT&T DSL circuit in Connecticut, yet Google apparently believes I'm in Germany or Lichtenstein.

And finally don't give the visitor some half-baked solution of clicking on a link, when it doesn't help with your other sites and reverts to the original problem when cookies are deleted. Not to mention that it wouldn't even work if the user has opted to block cookies.

For a company that prides itself in its technical prowess and its service, Google sure astounded me with this one. Or, is this just a ploy to throw some traffic to their foreign sites?

Google,German,ip addresses,internet,web browsers,Firefox,cultureinfo

Spitzer and Morality

2008-03-16T21:57:00.000-04:00

When I first heard of Spitzer's scandal, my first thought was, "you live by the sword, you die by the sword." But as deserving as Spitzer's fate was, his legacy as an Attorney General and as a Governor was probably a positive one. On balance he did more good for the people of New York than the final damage done by his hubris and his sanctimonious posturing.

I see nothing wrong with prostitution. In fact I'm all for legalizing the profession. But in the end, the biggest lesson in Spitzer's downfall is the pervasive hypocrisy among the men of power. He certainly isn't alone in that respect. The next time you listen to some fiery speech about morality, truth, and justice keep in mind that the person on the soapbox is probably the last person to heed his own advice.

That politician, priest, rabbi, or imam advocating the best qualities of man, quite possibly embodies the worst qualities of mankind. Be it molesting young boys, stealing public money, or exhorting young men to commit murder in the name of god, most are pathetic self-serving narcissists out to enrich themselves.

These cults of personalities may come with different sizes, names and agendas, but most are part of the same sleazy fraternity. Have our moral compasses gone so awry that we need their phony guidance? Listen to your own sense of right and wrong and toss their lectures and speeches on a trash heap. You'll do just fine without their drivel. It's the old "do as I say, not as I do."

morality,spitzer,priests,rabbis,imams,politicians,hypocrisy,prostitution

The Credit Crunch

2008-03-12T22:24:00.003-04:00

The other day I received an email from ING DIRECT regarding their financial status. It would seem that with the credit crunch and the global financial troubles, banks have to reassure their customers that they are solvent and in a good financial shape.

ING DIRECT is a subsidiary of ING Group, a giant Dutch financial institution, that offers online banking services to the US customers. They offer various types of accounts such as savings, checking, and CD's, as well as mortgages and investment services at competitive rates.

The portion of the email that drew my attention stated that:

The fact that ING DIRECT was not adversely affected is a testament to our operating philosophy that, as Americans, we should only buy houses we can afford. That way we can keep them for years to come. We believe a mortgage is a contract that both parties should execute in good faith and expect to see through to its conclusion.

How true that statement is. But alas, the advice is a bit late for many who sank exorbitant amounts of money into real estate or some creative derivative of it, only to face the tragedy of bankruptcy and financial ruins when things turned sour. One way or another the turmoil will pass and we will all vow not to make the same mistake again. The trouble is that long before we're out of this mess, another bubble will form and will eventually snare the a bunch of giddy investors who have long forgotten the lessons learned from the current fiasco. We will never learn.

credit crunch,mortgage,savings accounts,checking accounts,ing direct,ing group,cdo,cds