Bend in the Weather (Entries tagged as email)

When customer profiling and targeted advertising goes wrong

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 10:10:00 +1000

Don't get me wrong... I love a bargain as much as the next guy or girl.

What I don't like however is when a computer system is implemented with little regard and isn't actively checked by a human.
It's one way to make your company look like a jack-ass.

Sorry Woolworths - you've landed yourself in such a category.

Most Australian supermarket shoppers are aware of the fuel discounts offered by Coles and Woolworths, which can slice anything from $0.03 - $0.20 per litre of the cost of your fuel. Something that's always welcome by motorists.

It's the only reason I have an everyday rewards card. Fuel discounts add up over time, even more so for myself, as I drive with LPG the majority of the time, so $0.20 off per litre on LPG is quite substantial.

During the months of April and May Woolies decided that for 8 weeks straight I would like to buy wine. I'm not talking 1 bottle either. Most 'deals' require a purchase of 6 or more bottles in a given purchase.

A sample of the Email contents is included below:

To be honest, I love a good drop of red. Probably more so than the average punter. (We normally have a few dozen on hand in the house). At the end of March I had let our stocks go down over a period of time so had restocked. This seems to have triggered their rewards system to pester me for the next 8 weeks straight. No fuel offers (which was the main selling point of the card), nor any other offer... just grog.

At 6 bottles minimum per Email over 8 weeks, anyone reading my Email from Woolworths, would think I'm an alcoholic!

The crazy thing... It backfired.
I didn't buy any wine during that period. (As I had just restocked my levels.) This form of marketing happens 'after the fact', and as such it fails. If I have already made a bulk purchase, why would I wish to repeat it shortly after, and every week for a period of 8 weeks?

Woolworths reward system needs looking at. (As does Coles for that matter). It would be more beneficial to flag such bulk purchases of your customers, then look at sending it out 'specials' say every 3,6 or 12 months... you're likely to have a bigger uptake. I can't see my car dealership sending out a "buy a brand new car" Emails if I had just taken delivery of a new vehicle.

Certainly for everyday staples, it would be nice to have these filter through regularly. However don't see these, like 25% off either Meat, Fruit or Vegies for a week. It seems to be items like Coca-Cola, Alcohol and other non-essentials. I'm not surprised though... the supermarkets know we need staples.. and are trying to increase our trolley sizes by teasing us into buying these non-basic item.

Certainly I do hope that Woolworths and Coles both learn that their average shopper has the intelligence above that of a broken trolley wheel, as the current marketing strategies to date are quite insulting.

Internet Usage Monitoring - conky style!

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 03:18:00 +1100

In Australia Internet users are limited to the amount they may download. Each Internet Service plan normally involves a speed and download limit. Failing to keep an eye on this and exceed your limit normally effects the user in question either by:

Paying exorbitant excess fees that can be as much as $150/GB!
Being 'throttled' by your ISP, in effect turning your lovely xDSL/Cable connection into something slower than dial-up.

As you can image, most people wish to avoid these. As a result ISPs provide a usage meter normally on their site, however you have to remember to view it, which unless you're diligent in doing so, you can still run over your quota.

Previously I've relied on the fabulous Firefox extension NetUsage, however this meant you had to have a browser open. This isn't always the case, and I found it frustrating to have to load a browser just to check my usage. (I could just login to the ISP's usage meter if I had a browser open).

I've seen others produce mrtg graphs and even Cacti graphs to display their usage; however they too also rely on having a browser open.

Ideally, I want to have my usage available, when I wanted, and without loading a browser.

I use conky on my desktop to display a range of information. It seemed a logical step would be to integrate a meter into my conky setup.

As you can see from the graph in the picture to the left, it displays a raw percentage of what has been used, as well as a visual bar graph. Below that is the raw data, showing exactly how much I've downloaded (~11.5GB), what my ISP believes my quota to be (55GB in this case), and when this billing period ends (the 13^th of every month).

I can now view my current Internet usage at a glance, without the need to load any additional program.

So how did I achieve it? Like many ISPs, my ISP provides an interface to the raw data. This is used by 3^rd party utilities like NetUsage and others to parse and generate the information. Internode (my ISP) has such an interface.

A quick and dirty script and I was able to spit out the graph in a format conky liked. Whilst this works directly with Internode, similiar ISPs have such interfaces and you will be able to hack the script to suit your own environment.

Below is the simple bash shell script used to generate the data:
#!/bin/bash # Get usage information from Internode's web page. # Setup to run once every half hour. # # Set the username and password Username=INTERNODE_USERNAME Password=INTERNODE_PASSWORD # Grab the details Temp=`wget -q -O - --post-data "username=${Username}&password=${Password}" --user-agent="Conky ISP Quota Grabber 0.1" https://customer-webtools-api.internode.on.net/cgi-bin/padsl-usage` # Generate the percent used. echo $Temp|gawk '{print $1/$2*100}'> /tmp/node-graph.txt Percent=`cat /tmp/node-graph.txt` echo $(printf %.0f $Percent) > /tmp/node-percent.txt # Break up the values into their respective parts Values=($Temp) echo "Used: $(printf %.0f ${Values[0]})MB Quota: ${Values[1]}MB Period Ends: ${Values[2]}" > /tmp/node-text.txt # Time to leave. exit

Sure it's not the most secure script (It stores your username/password in plain text). For me, the script sits on my desktop machine... and is protected by file permissions. The password I use for my ISP I also don't consider highly sensative. (It's important to note that most people throw around their password in clear-text across the Internet when picking up their mail with POP3! ). It does however do the job.

The above shell script I run every 30 minutes from cron.

It is then up to your ~/.conkyrc file to display the results. Here is the snippet of the appropriate code for the ~/.conkyrc file that will do that for you:

${color orange}INTERNET USAGE ${hr 2}$color ${execi 900 cat /tmp/node-percent.txt}% ${execibar 900 cat /tmp/node-graph.txt} ${execi 900 cat /tmp/node-text.txt}

There you have it, a simple ISP usage meter sitting right on your desktop.
It's not the most elegant or complicated program, however it serves it's purpose extremely well. YMMV.

The Linux Foundation speaks for no-one.

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 04:14:00 +1000

I was appalled after reading the rather rash statements made by Jim Zemlin the Executive director of the Linux Foundation.

His rather bizarre statements against Sun (who is also a silver member of the Foundation) must have left many execs in Santa Clara scratching their heads and wanting some answers.
What's worse is the story originally ran in InfoWorld, then was picked up by the New York Times. Other notable online sites also ran with it, including Slashdot and LWN to mention just two.

Lets look at some of the statements the Exec Director of the Foundation made:

"The future is Linux and Microsoft Windows, it is not Unix or Solaris."

Solaris has almost no new deployments and is a legacy operating environment offered by a company with financial difficulties. Original equipment manufacturers also do not see a bright future for Solaris. This was paraphrased and not a direct quote.

Sun, he declared, should just move over to Linux.

"It's certainly true that Unix is on the decline." - Discussing IBM AIX and HP-UX

"The only people I hear talk about DTrace [Solaris's technology for assessing program and OS behaviours] and ZFS [the Zettabyte File System] as competitive features [are] Sun Microsystems sales representatives. It's not something I believe is impacting the market in any way."

"...With capabilities such as ZFS and DTrace, Sun is trying to compete based on minor features", Zemlin says. "That's literally like noticing the view from a third-story building as it burns to the ground."

Zemlin, on Sun's open-source Solaris as "too little, too late." He also goes on to claim that there is no real open source community around OpenSolaris, arguing that Sun still controls development

Open Solaris is no more than an attempt to expand the Solaris user base to drive customers to commercial Sun technology.

Seriously where does the guy get off?

Looking at his profile on the Linux Foundation it doesn't instil a level of confidence.
A former Exec at Free Standards Group (who with the OSDL merged to become the Linux Foundation). He was also VP of Marketing of Colavent Technologies (basically a crowd that sold commercial Apache support amongst other things). In 2000 he was a board member of Corio an ASP, that had an IPO then was sold off in chunks. IBM retains the http://www.corio.com/ URL.

So, from my reading he's got quite a bit of marketing/exec background for web-based application servers.... beyond that, I don't see any real technical prowless. He's a marketing suit that appears to shoot from the hip.

Let's review some of his "quick-draws":

The future is Linux and Windows?

WTF?! Did you take crack before taking the interview?

Sure as the exec. director of The Linux Foundation we expect you to come out and say "Linux is the future" - but to throw Microsoft in the mix -- you have to be kidding me.

Look at general stall that Microsoft has had with Vista. They have forced OEMs to install it, and even some of the larger ones now have kicked back and offer corporations and high-end consumer devices the option of Windows XP instead.

No major deployments of Solaris... and disliked by the OEMS.

That must be news to both IBM and Dell, who offer OpenSolaris on their x86 series servers.

As for a company in 'financial trouble' this is an extract of the letter to shareholders attached to their latest Annual Report /10-K filing to the SEC (Read it online here).

I've included a screenshot the opening paragraph of the letter:

That doesn't sound like a company in 'financial trouble' to me.

You can see this on their Consolidated Statements Of Operations

The decline of Unix (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX).

It's interesting to note that all of these make hardware as well as an operating system. These systems normally scale much larger than that of a traditional Linux server (excluding clusters). Take a look at Sun's M9000, IBM's p5 595 and HP's HP-9000 Superdome Server. These computers can replace dozens of Intel based servers and thus are not something companies run out and buy dozens of. (well normally!) Interestingly... both HP and IBM are also Platinum Members of the Linux Foundation. With a Platinum membership of $500,000USD each. How's that for biting the hand that feeds you (literally in Zemlin's case).

The I/O throughput and disk-subsystems available for these machines normally far outstrip that of anything under Intel/Linux range.

ZFS, Sun Zones/Containers and DTrace.

Seriously you jest Mr Zemlin?

Linux virtualization is still a mish-mash under heavy development. (take Xen, KVM, LVS and even Sun's VirtualBox)... I wouldn't class as enterprise ready. Hell, even VMWare that started in Linux roots, has moved over onto their own kernel. Zones and Containers under Solaris are much neater and better suited to an enterprise environment.

As for ZFS -- Linux has no mainstream file-system that competes. The size of volumes and the ease of use leaves ext3 behind. Even the upcoming ext4 has no real claims over ZFS. For large scale filesystems, ZFS has it over native Linux filesystems.

DTrace - ask any administrator of 100's of Linux servers if they think DTrace is a minor thing? Sure Systemtap is nice, but the comparison of Systemtap to DTrace still shows some deficiencies. Being able to trace safely on production systems is a requirement for something that can be used in the real world. Add to it the ability to trace user-space programs and DTrace does indeed have some features many SysAdmins discuss and would love to see under Linux.

Sun's open source Solaris 'too little-too late'. No community, still controlled by Sun.

Wow... I wonder if he would make the same statement if Microsoft released their OS as open-source? Open-Solaris is a community site, though Sun still controls it. There is nothing wrong with that. It's their baby, and they can do with it what they like.

Sun is still a large OSS backer.... remember products like MySQL, Innotek/VirtualBox, and hey, they even OpenSourced Java.

Sun have shareholders to consider, and they need to make a return on their investments / R&D. I don't really have anything bad to say about the CDDL. It makes sense for them... and hey something is better than nothing. What I find hilarious is that many Linux advocates will bag the CDDL, but love Mozilla. Wake up people... the CDDL is based on the MPL! The CDDL is also recognised as a license under the OSI.

Open Solaris attempts to drive customers to commercial Sun technology

Actually most of the people I've come across it are already using the commercial Solaris or wish to learn Solaris. OpenSolaris is a nice way they can install it at home and come familiar with the environment outside of work at their own pace. It makes sense that they can utilise the same operating system in their work-place and in the comforts of their own home.

For me, I'm a fan of Linux. I love the breadth of software available to me, the rich and colourful community around it. I have grown up watching Linux (I first compiled up an 0.54 kernel on a lowly 286). My servers and desktops/laptops all run Linux.

Having said that, I learnt *NIX on SunOS and later Solaris. It has it's place, even in today's world.
I agree, the low-end UNIX servers are often replaced by Linux servers, yet there is nothing really in the Linux space that competes with the high-end UNIX environments.

A lot of what we see in Linux has it's roots in commercial UNIX. (Hell, who has networked file systems in their environment that doesn't use Sun's NFS?)

So take some advice from a Linux admin at the coal face. Linux co-exists well in a heterogeneous environment, sharing the space with commercial UNIXes and even those annoying Windows servers.

If you need to beat up a 'Server OS' next time Zemlin, try attacking Microsoft (Hint: they are not a member of the Linux Foundation).

Linux servers have probably dented more Windows server sales then that of commercial UNIX. Samba has played a large role in that.

Exchange is probably the last bastion of Microsoft dominance. With the amount of Exchange 'replacements' now on the go that run under Linux (ie: PostPath, Zafara, OpenGroupWare, Scalix and Open-Xchange to name just a small fraction of those available. ) It's likely more inroads into the proprietary walls of Microsoft are now showing cracks in many corporations. Many IT managers are struggling to justify the outrageous price they get slugged for Microsoft Exchange, and these cheaper and feature-rich alternatives are often fractions of the cost if not free.

So next time you attempt to speak for the 'Linux Community' Jim Zemlin, try actually speaking to some Linux administrators that live in the Fortune 500 world. We aren't all hippies yelling 'free OS love'. In fact we happily co-exist with commercial *NIX and sometimes even Windows servers (much to our disgust).

Leave your "Us vs Them" mentality at your door, it's not a view held by a large proportion of the Linux community. Indeed many Linux administrators actually also administer other commercial *NIX machines in their day-to-day jobs. There are more similarities between the commercial *NIX flavours and Linux than not.

We do realise it's part of the Foundation's role to 'promote Linux', but keep the mud-slinging and crap out of it. Let Linux stand on it's own technical merits and not at the detriment of dragging another 'cousin' down in the process. We see enough of this style of 'marketing' from Microsoft that we don't need to stoop to the same levels.

_{Disclaimer:

• I work commercially as a Linux System Administrator at a Fortune-500 company.

• I have however administered a large range of *NIX based operating systems over the years... including Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Tru64, and IRIX just to mention a few of the more 'known' variants.

• My home desktop and all my servers run Linux. Many that know me think I'm a one-eyed Linux zealot!

• I have no affiliations with Sun Microsystems at all.

• The views and opinions expressed by some members of The Linux Foundation are not mine.}

The time of converging electronic devices is upon us.

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:41:00 +1000

It was time to upgrade my phone. Not that my old phone didn't work, in fact I actually loved my Sony Ericsson K750i, however the battery wasn't holding the charge and in this disposable world we live in it seemed crazy buying a new battery. It was purely a case of the plan I was on allowed for a new phone. So what the heck, it had served me well... but it was time to look at this 3G stuff. Sure, video calls didn't really impress me (and seemed more a gimmick then functional -- it's a call after all!)

I wanted a better camera on my phone. 2MP cut it a few years ago, but it just wasn't cutting it now. I really wanted a decent 5MP camera in my phone. It saves me lugging around another electronic device.

I own an iPod mini but find I am always forgetting it.. so a reasonable music player is also handy.
A decent browser and Email client is always handy.

We looked through all the available phones, and I was keen not to get an iPhone.

I finally settled on a Nokia N95 8GB. I was a little disappointed that the phone had no expandable memory, but hey, at 8GB I'm not filling that any time soon! (I really don't store that many songs in my phone!)

Man, how phones have progressed. To be honest, the complexity of the beast actually had me freak out a little. The K750i was pretty easy to work out, but this thing had buttons sprouting out all over the place. I guess what didn't help was that it was also my first 'slide phone'.

The first month I did the usual things, making calls, SMS and taking the odd photo or two on it.. I hadn't used a Symbian based phone for quite a while, so it took a bit of time getting used to. Over the last month I've experimented a bit more and found out it's not too bad at all. Even better is that Symbian will be released under OpenSource. Nokia also has an OpenSource website, as well as there is a bunch of OSS software you can install on your Symbian based phone.

I didn't have a GPS - and one thing I had also been toying with for a while. It is handy for long trips or somewhere you've never visited before, but I really couldn't justify it... it seemed more 'toy' then functional. Those people I had seen with a GPS seemed more frustrated then helped. Granted, these were early models but I'd seen too many people being send down non-existent roads or dead ends -- or told to do U-turns on freeways!

The Nokia N95 8GB comes with Nokia Maps. To be honest, I'd never used a GPS before so it was all greek to me. After playing around with it for a while I learnt that it wasn't too bad. Nokia kindly gave us 6-months free Navigation (basically the voice saying turn right/turn left, etc). It actually works quite well. The GPS in the Nokia N95 8GB is actually quite fast... I was surprised how quick it was able to re-route me once it realised I had missed it's 'chosen route'. I've seen dedicated GPS devises screw that up big time.

The one sticking point for me... is the cost of navigation after 6 months. Nokia want you to pay $124AUD/yr for the feature. They can shove that. I spend enough on the damn phone. Seriously, if you can give me the maps free.. .I can't see why I have to pay for the damn voice.

As a result I'm now looking around at other options (I'll continue using their Maps until I'm required to pay).
I've come across two reasonable candidates: Nav4All and amAze. I'll be testing them both out shortly to see how they stack up in Australia... and in rural parts of Victoria at that!

Ideally I would love to be able to use some thing like OpenStreetMap...which just makes sense and gives me the feeling of sharing and caring.

I'm interested in hearing from anyone that has used some of the free GPS phone software and how is rates.

Overall, I'm happy with my purchase. The built in SIP client and 802.11 b/g support is fantastic. The included web-browser is reasonable, though there are better ones around. (which have found their way to my phone). I see there is even an SSH client -- so that may also make it's way, handy when you need to do a quick 'fix' on a server and not near a computer.

Ideally I was hanging around for an OpenMoko phone, but the lack of 3G really soured that expectation. I needed a phone now and not somewhere in the distant future. Having said that.... I'll see what the future holds, I may just pickup one once the features I'm seeing in this phone make their way into the OpenMoko phone.

Beefing up ClamAV to detect and filter out scam, phishing and malware Emails

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Thu, 08 May 2008 02:49:00 +1000

Many people use ClamAV with their Email server to filter out viruses. This is indeed a good idea!^(tm)

However, by default it doesn't pick up Scam, Phishing or even Malware Emails.

You can add some unofficial 3^rd party databases to beef up the amount of 'bad' data that ClamAV can detect.

•SaneSecurity produce a ClamAV database that holds such information.
•SecuriteInfo also creates a ClamAV database that contains information on Malware.
•MBL also produce lists in various formats, one of these is in ClamAV signature database format.

You can even automate the process easily by using a script to grab these lists at regular intervals (once per day is recommended). Throw it in cron to run once daily, and you're set.

You'll see something like this in your maillogs:

2008-05-08 01:41:14 1JtllZ-0002Ok-5x H=61-228-171-106.dynamic.hinet.net [61.228.171.106] F= rejected after DATA: This message contains a virus or other harmful content (Html.Spam.Gen2942.Sanesecurity.08040202.zip)

Whilst clamd reports it like:

Thu May 8 01:41:14 2008 -> /var/spool/exim/scan/1JtllZ-0002Ok-5x/1JtllZ-0002Ok-5x.eml: Html.Spam.Gen2942.Sanesecurity.08040202.zip FOUND

You'll be surprised at just how much it picks up, outside that of your usual spam/virus scanning and even greylisting processing.