Month: October 2002

time to look at pyAmazon

Another one of Mark Pilgrim’s little gems. Creating links for the Amazon affiliate program is tedious since you can’t look up the item from the “build a link” page. You have locate the item, get its ID, then login and create the HTML. What a pain.

I’m thinking that, given a title, pyAmazon can run the query and return the properly formatted link.

And it works.

>>>import amazon
>>>amazon.setLicense('get your own')
>>>pythonBooks = amazon.searchByKeyword('Python')
>>>pythonBooks[0].ProductName
u'Perl How to Program, Introducing CGI and Python (With CD-ROM)'
>>>pythonBooks[0].Asin
u'0130284181'

so now to just write a wrapper for this so I can pass it a title and have it return the ASIN with all the other stuff around it.

Thanks, Mark. Again.

when advertising becomes content

Network Tries to Foil Ad Skipping

Now, a new cable network has elevated the practice beyond the occasional, building such anti-ad-zapping efforts directly into its business model.
Advertisement

The entire schedule of the new network, Fine Living, has been specifically set up to incorporate various forms of advertising that can foil the abilities of personal video recorders like TiVo and ReplayTV. Every show, for example, is available for sponsorship, while advertisers are collaborating in the making of certain one-minute segments that run in the middle of programs.

fuzzy logic

The FuzzyBlog!

There is already NO sense of value for software on this country — at least depending on the market segment. If you are a consumer buying a $500 computer then you don’t value software. And you really don’t even understand how a CD-ROM of office can be worth the same as the computer. It just doesn’t “compute” (sorry for the pun). And the blame for this has to go to Microsoft for bundling strategies, hardware makers for including Office so frequently and with Apple which is destroying the sense of value with all the bundled OS X software. And, you know something, markets change. In high tech we’re big on bashing the RIAA for not getting it and realizing that their industry’s economics have changed. Well, guess what? The software industry’s economics have changed.

Huh? Apple bundling the iApps is destroying the sense of value? I could see that if there were other apps that competed with theirs in all segments, but are there? And if so, are you locked out of using the others?

I see this a different way: a person who spends $500 on a computer might now spend more on software. The computer is worthless without application software, and I doubt consumers are having an issue with that. They may balk at the pricing, and rightly so: they’re paying for meaningless features and enhancements.

He speaks to some of this in points 4 and 5 below:

Given that:

1. So much software comes free with hardware these days
2. Hardware prices are now cheaper than software in a way that people not in the high tech business can’t even begin to understand “you mean that CD of Office-X is 40% of my iBook? What are you freaking nuts?”
3. The advent of free software
4. The simple fact that most software makers don’t do a very good job making stable, quality products
5. software has more features than we need OR can even understand (example — I use a 1999 copy of Acrobat regularly to produce PDF files)

our economics too have forever changed.

But I don’t see that the first three support the argument. Bundling (point 1) is a given: I don’t think it’s fair and as we see more and more access to broadband, perhaps we’ll see less of this or at least it won’t matter so much. The switching cost will go down.

Point 2? Well, run your computer with no applications and see what happens. This is like complaining that the brushes are free, why does the paint cost so much?

Point 3 is only valid for people who are willing to tackle something like Open Office (I’m not one of them) or people who run a lot of Open Source, right down to their OS.

AOL’s role, while it lasts

MediaGuardian.co.uk | New media | Signs of the times

Douglas Rushkoff writes in the Guardian:

[ . . . ] a company like AOL never had a future. AOL was a training ground: an introduction to the internet for people who didn’t know how to deal with FTP. None of us thought it could last, because once the technological barriers to entry for the internet had been lowered, no one would need AOL’s simplistic interface or it’s child-safe, digital content wading pools. People would want to get on the “real” internet, using real browsers and email programs.

I remember the early days of content programming at both TBS and CNN where ideas were shelved because AOL’s customers — a large segment of the market even then — couldn’t use them with AOL’s neutered interface. It got better/easier when they dumped one Spyclass-based browser for IE’s version.

If the union of AOL and TWX is annulled, it will be interesting to see what AOL has to offer. Can they offer a valuable dialup service and a viable content presence without the content TWX provides? The only upside I can think of has been the cost savings to the internet properties: CNN was a big stick to use on vendors when negotiating bandwidth pricing, and AOL/TWX is even more effective.

am i that old?

my first call from a funeral service telemarketer today . . . . . I don’t even have my AARP card yet, and already I’m being solicited for longterm (really long term) real estate purchases.

ah, well, he’s young.

Fierce Highway: Carter to blame for Hussein?

A college undergrad opines:

Is the recent Nobel Laureate Jimmy “Aww Shucks, Looky There Ah’m President” Carter to blame for our recent problems with Saddam Hussien? This editorial from UPI certainly thinks so.

President Carter’s shilly-shallying over Saddam in 1980 led to Western coffers being enriched by a $1,000 billion of Iranian/Iraqi arms purchases and uncounted millions of Iranian and Iraqi dead; fuelling Saddam’s conviction that he could get away with invading Kuwait as he had got away with invading Iran; U.N. sanctions at U.S. insistence that have killed close to a million Iraqi children to avenge Saddam’s capture of Kuwait, though that invasion ended more than a decade ago; and the impending destruction of a civilization where Hammurabi first taught humankind the Rule of Law. And this is the man now honored by a Nobel peace prize. O tempora! O mores!

Huh? Carter was out of office in January 1981, and the Iran/Iraq war continued until 1988, when Carter’s successor was completing 8 years in office. The next occupant of the White House had a Mideast adventure, which seems more of a root cause of the current situation than anything Carter may been done.

In reviewing this this document, I don’t see how the blame for Hussein’s current power can be laid at Carter’s door.

Further reading gives a different side to the story than this suggests.

In its war effort, Iran was supported by Syria and Libya, and received much of its weaponry from North Korea and China, as well as from covert arms transactions from the United States. Iraq enjoyed much wider support, both among Arab and Western nations: the Soviet Union was its largest supplier of arms.

So the US was supporting Iran, the nation which held US hostages for 444 days and humiliated its military, by selling it weaponry on the quiet (proceeds from this went to support insurgency in Nicaragua, investing in two wars for the price of one).

None of this happened on Carter’s watch, and as near as I can tell, his successors did little or nothing to halt the bloodbath (estimates of the dead are around 1.5 million): the US and then USSR got involved when oil shipments were imperiled by the increasing desperate combatants, but the spilled blood was of no interest.

Perhaps this is realpolitik at its purest. Sounds more like encouraging two kids to beat other up so you can take both allowances, instead of just one, and not having to bloody yourself into the bargain.

more on OSAF

Nonprofit to Create Open Source Software

“I haven’t seen any evidence that there’s a hole in the market here,” he said. “But all the rational people have been completely wrong about most of these markets. So the fact that this sounds loony is probably a good thing.”

It must be my time spent as a newspaper copy editor, the best part of which was writing headlines and looking for good “pull” quotes, that makes this fun.