Mmmmmanagers!

I wanted to take a break from my normal updates to point out a problem with the relationship between managers and the programmers that they manage. Currently, the company that I work for sells a service, and has a lot of software that deals with that service. The main focus is to provide that service, and our programming department's focus is to manage that service however needed or as requested by management.

I can deal with that relationship. I understand it. That's just how it works where I am. I found a slide on a website that accurately depicts what's going on in the company that I work for. (I'd post the slide but it's copyrighted.) Basically it had two columns. One side being the programmer's process to do his work, and the other the manager's interaction with the programmer. The programmers side included: 1. Code, 2. Debug, 3. Comment, 4. Think about the project and design it.
And on the Management side: 'Give developers a new assignment before they finish #1'

It's accurate. Very accurate. This causes a HUGE issue to programmers, which then turns in to an issue for management. Incomplete software, poorly thought out processes, no chance to provide test cases and change the software accordingly. These are all issues that can, no, that WILL occur when you push your programming department for something new all the time. Hell, that's if the project is even finished! I have 4 large, IMPORTANT, thought intensive projects that I can never get done because every time I do, another project needs to be done "right now." And when I say important I mean preventing a large financial issue down the road. "But I really want a report on _________. Go make that report! Put a button here. Change that text on this page code monkey!" Sigh.

Software takes time. It's going to take more time than you want it. Managers and programmers alike want to be able to complete a project in the most time efficient way possible. The largest amount of time is spent on your project testing and ensuring your software will work in a real live environment. You can't skimp on that, ever. You can't tell a programmer to be done by a certain date. We all have the same goal, honor that. Programmers have steps in place to get it done and it will get done. Now, go play some golf and come back in a week!

GodGivesYouLemons.com has been somewhat of a bust but still a project I like. Not too many visitors, under 20 a day. I actually sent the link out in an email to a bunch of my friends. I usually never do that. I've had a few other people make posts already but I know all of them. If you search google for "girlfriend was a hooker" I'm the 5th result.

Still redoing gobloggo.com. I'm about two thirds done. Most of the code has been cleaned up and I've restructured a bunch of stuff. Hopefully I can make it through documenting everything, and come up with a rough plugin system. Still haven't decided if I should make it more open or more commercial.

Oh, finally replaced my home server's motherboard! Dual 800mhz is sweet!

New site. Check it out!

After watching too much POWERTHIRST videos, my good friend/coworker Damian bought findanewgod.com and put a real funny pic of one of our good friend/coworkers on it. I then bought http://godgivesyoulemons.com and put another pic of a coworker on it.

Finally, on my birthday, I finished turning it in to this:

http://godgivesyoulemons.com

Alexa Web Information Service support for Glype Proxy

The short & sweet:
If you own a web proxy service using glype and want to stop people from trying to get to adult sites, you'll want this file:

awis_lib.inc.rar

This will work with Glype 0.5.2 and I'm sure 0.5.1. Your mileage may vary with anything lower than that.

Keep reading if you want but how to install it is in the file.

I own a few proxy sites for kids to get around blocks at school or people to use at work etc. But there are two things that I totally don't want on my network: porn (mostly of the child variety) and spam.

I had a pretty decent setup for a while with porn filtering. I'd wake up every day and pour though images, logs or whatever I could find and block them. Some was done automatically and some are done by hand. This required a lot of time and energy that was quickly fading away. The problem with me not having time for this upkeep is the amount of money that I can make on ads suffers because of it. Every time a site is blocked, they are taken back to the home page of the proxy and told not to do that. The home page has all of the ads. Some are for other proxies. They want to go somewhere else? That's fine with me! Click on an ad, get me some change and off my back, and they get a proxy to do what they want. So upkeep on blocking porn is pretty important to me on keeping the revenue up.

I personally know that all of this upkeep is bad and would eventually have to stop. I've been looking around for any type of API service that I could use to automate this thing. I didn't find anything free. But Amazon's API with Alexa works well and is not that expensive. Hopefully the revenue earned by your proxy will cover that cost. ($0.15 per 1k requests, not bad.)

When any url is loaded, the url is sent off to AWIS. They return a bunch of information about any site but we're just after one thing: AdultContent. If that site has adult content, it's blocked. People get an error message and sent back to the homepage. If it's allowed, that's great. They go through and that's the end of that. Now this could be VERY expensive but we're caching the data in a MySQL table. So the second time that website is hit, the script will get the information out of the cache instead of costing you .00015 cents.

To use the script just open it up and read the instructions. You can create an account with Amazon Web Services here: http://aws.amazon.com and then sign up with Alexa Web Information Service (AWIS).

I'm assuming that your first day is going to be the most expensive since nothing is cached. Just bear with it. Eventually the cost will go down. I started on a Saturday and it's cost me 17 cents so far. I'd recommend keeping your eye on it if you're worried about cash.

Enjoy!

A bunch of updates

I'm just going to throw in some random things I've done in the past week:

Found out that alexa's redirect service stopped working. Not sure why yet but I started fixing links all over. (The redirect counts towards your site's traffic and improves your rank with them.) And I can't seem to find anywhere on their site what happened with that so f(orget) them.
Ah, found this blog post. Someone emailed them and it looks like they took that feature out for good. Too bad!
http://www.phazm.com/notes/comments-needed/alexa-redirect-is-broken/

Added some more links from the proxies to myspace layout pages on fastbadger.com. Myspace by far is the most popular site accessed on my proxies. And fastbadger seems to have a better ctr % with fastbadger.

Took out the flash mini rss feed reader that was linked to this blog from the front page of my proxies. No one reads this stuff anyway :)

GoBloggo.com got some much needed attention. Updated the look to be a little "cleaner". It's not totally done but it's a start. I'm still planning on getting all of the code a little more managable and either promoting the hell out of it, or selling it.

I got the "automatic post from amazon to microsoft's product thing" working well technically. I'm seeing some more purchases from amazon. Right now I just need to find a good balance of product groups and getting either more popular products in or unique ones that people are still looking for.

Oh, BIG props to my girlfriend. She got me an AppleTV the day before the "big" update :)
Hopefully the ATV hacking community will be able to crack that open reliably pretty quick.

productupload.live.com

If you recall this post: had-some-issues-with-google-base.html

You'll recall I had some problems with google that ultimatley lead me to loose access to base.google.com. (I still feel bad about it)

So I found that microsoft has made an alternative to google base for products: http://productupload.live.com

First thoughts: It sucks. Each product grouping has to be made in to it's own category on the site. You can't just upload item by item via an api either. It's either you upload a file on the site manually or you ftp it in. I'm going the ftp route. When you post a file it's supposed to take up to 36 hours to "process." I've had files that have taken OVER A FREAKING MONTH! I've emailed their support numerous times. I do get a prompt and polite answer, but it's never a helpful answer.

The results are good though. By posting Amazon products to it I've certainly seen an increase in sales. I have it all scripted out. They give an rss feed with the catalogs you create. If you make one using the node id, then the name of the xml file it will ftp up later you can run the script without configuring anything but your ftp u/p. It's pretty nice. Except for the waiting part of course.

New proxy!

Since I'm probably never going to get around to redoing quizcreate I turned it in to another proxy service. Enjoy!

http://www.quizcreate.com