the ADMIN pages

Another good article in today's Wall Street Journal.

The same Silicon Valley that outsourced thousands of IT jobs to India is bringing them back. Increasing salaries of skilled computer programmers are negating the value of keeping the jobs in India. An example from the article states salaries in India started at a mere quarter of what American programmers with similar experience would be paid, but the salaries demanded by skilled workers in India have now increased to 75% of a comparable American salary. This increase, combined with the time difference drawback, has caused companies to stop saving money by outsourcing high-level computer jobs.

The CEO of Intel was quoted as saying the wage inflation rate for engineers in India is four times that of America, and other estimates put it as much as 50%. America, by comparison, runs about a 3% wage inflation rate for the software industry.

This shift puts a new twist on the globalization debate. A 2005 study estimated that only 25% of India's computer engineers had the "language proficiency, cultural fit, and practical skills" to work for U.S. employers. Therefore, the highly skilled workers, supplemented by the half-million engineering graduates from India annually, have to keep up with the influx of U.S. software companies looking for their services. At the levels U.S. companies have been turning to outsourcing, answering this high level of demand was just improbable.

I'm a staunch libertarian at heart, but a (future) IT professional above all else, so I deviate slightly from the pro-outsourcing view of my political party. I'd like to think that a certain level of job security exists for those in my profession, so news like this gives me hope for the future (when I actually enter the job market).

Article: Tam, Pu-Wing, and Jackie Range. "Some in Silicon Valley Begin to Sour on India." Wall Street Journal 03 July 2007: A1, A15.

An article in the Wall Street Journal today discussed the increasing prevalence of "widgets" in marketing. More and more mainstream companies are turning to the small, embeddable, interactive tools as advertising media for their products. The article mentioned the web site for the upcoming film The Golden Compass, which allows users to create their own "daemon" (an animal spirit from the film/book) and post it on their blog or social networking profile.

As with all advertising, it isn't a sure thing. The film Hoot apparently had a downloadable owl that would float around a user's desktop (sounds pretty annoying to me), but the film was a box office failure.

Social networking sites that run traditional banner ads on users' profiles are understandably concerned with the onset of widgets, because they are out of the advertising loop. Traditional banner ads pay to the web site, but the advertisers behind widgets pay to the widget's designer. (The designer, therefore, must make the widget creative enough to appeal to users and make them want to put it on their profile.) From MySpace's ToS:

MySpace.com reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to reject, refuse to post or remove any posting... [such as] commercial endeavors except those that are specifically endorsed or approved by MySpace.com

In layman's terms, MySpace can remove widgets from your profile on their site.

The idea behind widgets, while not necessarily new (affiliate codes and embeddable HTML have been around as long as the web itself), associates with the much-hated buzzword "Web 2.0". The social aspect often allows for personalization, and end-users must choose to place the widget along with the assumedly related content on their profile. These end-users dislike banner ads for the same reason: they can't choose the content of such forced ads.

A couple friends of mine are involved in a "top-secret" venture at the moment, making widgets for use on social networking sites such as MySpace. They're working with an industry veteran, who has started successful online businesses in the past, selling them for millions. His former ventures were in the online auction industry, but he's a businessman and long-time Internet user above all else. They're in the process of securing VC funding, and are programming using ActionScript and Flash for their widget designs. It's still in the early stages of development, so I can't give a link or name.

I myself designed a set of widgets (again, still "beta") for counting down various school-related events. There's no ad revenue involved, just a link back to the homepage. This particular one counts the days until I return to school:

Article: Steel, Emily. "Young Surfers Spurn Banner Ads, Embrace 'Widgets'." Wall Street Journal 02 July 2007: B3. (sorry, no URL-- the Journal's web site is a paid subscription service)

Looks like at least one other person uses ColoPronto.

I was contacted recently by someone who found my recent ColoPronto post and who also had their box down recently.

ColoPronto's reason for him: a DDoS attack on the same subnet. So a bad NIC cable for me, and a DDoS attack for him? At the same time?

He put it best:

I’m pretty sure that their method of dealing with the DDoS was to run around and unplug machines until it went away.

Either they lied to me, or they really did do that, and yanked too hard or didn't plug mine back in. Either way, not good.

We had a nice chat about Linux/FreeBSD, mail servers and DNS, colocation, and even some personal/school stuff (he's fresh out of college working as a white hat hacker for an IT firm).

He also informed me about ColoPronto's KVM over IP that they can hook up for me should I need it, and about their default cap of 3 mbit for security reasons (versus the advertised 100 mbit).

Great conversation.

ColoPronto: I'm callin' you out. Cut the crap.

I'm a huge fan of MyPoints.com. I've gotten tons of gift cards from them, all for clicking links in my e-mail, fulfulling the occasional offer, and shopping online (mostly large tech purchases at Tiger Direct). But the other day when I was hoping to get a referral link to put here on the blog, I used a throw-away e-mail that redirects to my catch-all account.

mypointsref@**mydomain**.com

The way their referral system works, I need to enter a name and e-mail in my account panel to send a referral. I was hoping to snag the link from that e-mail to put here. Long story short, for each referral you need to explicitly specifiy the e-mail and name, so a link for the blog is out of the question (as an e-mail to their slow-to-respond support team clarified for me).

But now they're sending me e-mail offers to the address I specified in the referral box.

I never signed up for an account, I never specified "send my referral lots of spam," I just wanted to test their system to see if I could get a static link (something like http://www.mypoints.com/referral.php?id=KevinWalter or whatever) for my blog. But it appears sending a referral invitation automatically creates an account for the person. Either this is the worst case of bad coding I have seen, or they intentionally like to send spam.

Just a side note: I've never gotten any spam from them on my real account, because I use another throw-away catch-all address for that, and in true John C. Dvorak fashion, "I GET NO SPAM [on that account]!"

My server with ColoPronto was down again today, from roughly 4:30 am to just after 8:00 am.

This is getting to be really bad for them. I set up this server as a highly stable, high availability server to manage my e-mail and host a few personal sites. To think I actually thought about moving this site over!

Okay, as I was about to publish this they responded to my support ticket. Bad NIC cable. Hopefully that's the truth, I'd really like to think so. Sounds plausible, and I gotta give them credit for a quick response to my ticket (another first, I might add). I'll be tracking my uptime these first few months very closely.

UPDATE: (August 25, 2006 @ 1:42 pm) I've removed the striked-out "sucking" from the title. For the first time since I signed up with these guys, they returned my phone call today! Keep this up, and I might actually turn out to have a good experience. Fast hardware replacement, actually replying in a timely manner... these guys are kinda moving back on up.