Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Solution) is a great way to store (and optionally share) large amounts of data. It’s cheap, fast, and reliable. If you’re a casual user, you may not know that you do much more than just store and sever data of HTTP, as long as you use an advanced application such as Bucket Explorer (or read through the S3 documentation and code it yourself.) Here’s a list of 9 features you may not have known about.

1. Torrent Tracking and Seeding: Amazon S3 can server as an ultra-reliable torrent tracker; share/seed the files from your local PC and let S3 act as the tracker. Or let S3 handle both the seeding and the tracking. Here are the details on how to do it.
2. Enable / Disable directory browsing: If you are sharing files of HTTP, you may or may not want people to be able to list the contents of a bucket (folder.) If you want the bucket contents to be listed when someone enters the bucket name (http://s3.amazonaws.com/bucket_name/), then edit the Access Control List and give the Everyone group the access level of Read (and do likewise with the contents of the bucket.) If you don’t want the bucket contents list-able but do want to share the file within it, disable Read access for the Everyone group for the bucket itself, and then enable Read access for the individual files within the bucket.
3. Prevent the contents of a bucket from being indexed by a search engine: If you don’t want the contents of a bucket to be indexed by Google and company, place a file named Robots.txt in the bucket and share it with Everyone. (This trick works for any webserver.) The file needs to contain the following two entries to prevent indexing:
   • User-agent: *
   • Disallow: /
4. Use your own domain name: You can use your own domain name (http://s3.carltonbale.com) instead of the default Amazon URL (http://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.carltonbale.com/). You just need to edit your DNS settings. Here are the details on how to do it. Bucket Explorer has an option to “Use bucket name as virtual host” to make sharing files in this manner even easier.
5. Temporarily share a file using an auto-expire link: You many want to allow someone to download a file but prevent them from sharing the link and having 100’s of people download it as well. With S3, it’s possible to create a link that expires after a defined period of time expires. The easiest way to do this using Bucket Explorer. First, make sure that the file has permission set so that it is not readable by everyone, since temporary access is what you’re going after in the first place. Then select the file, right-click, and select Generate Web URL. Select Signed URL and specify the expiration date. Then send the URL to the person with which you are sharing the file
6. • 
7. Share your bucket with a someone - whether they’re an S3 user or not. The Third-party bucket features allows you to share the contents of a bucket. In Bucket Explorer, right-click on the bucket and select “Update bucket’s access control list…” and set the permissions and add the other persons email address. See this documentation page for more details.
   • 
8. Upload any file extension as an HTML file (to redirect to another location.) Say you have a picture shared on your account and it is being leeched by multiple, external sites. Instead of just deleting the picture, you can create a web page to replace it that directs people to your site. If you picture name was picture.jpg, create the HTML file and save it as it on your local computer. Then change the file name to be picture.jpg. Now if you just upload this file normally to S3, it will be treated as a jpg image and will not download properly. But you can use BucketExplorer to upload it as an HTML file, which specifically tells S3 to treat it as a HTML file and not a jpg file. Here is an example of picture that I converted to a HTML redirect: http://carltonbale.com.s3.amazonaws.com/distance_chart.png
   • 
9. Store your media on Amazon S3 while running your WordPress blog on a different server. If you’re like me, your web host has overly limited storage space restriction. If you have a bunch of small pictures or just a few large videos, it can quickly consume your available disk space. To combat this, you can use the Amazon S3 plugin for WordPress. Instead of uploading files to your web server, it instead uploads them to your Amazon S3 account and automatically links to them, all within the WordPress admin interface.
10. Compare local and remote file versions using MD5 check sums. Wondering if version of a file on your local computer is the same as the one stored in your S3 account? Perform a MD5 check sum and see if the results match. On you local computer, you can use a program such as HkSFV to calculate the MD5 sum. To see the MD5 sum of the file on S3, right-click on it and select Properties within Bucket Explorer. If the sums match, the files are identical.
    • 

Bonus Feature - logging: You can enable logging of all activity within a bucket through Bucket Explorer. Right-click on the bucket and select “bucket logging”. You can create log files in the bucket being logged or in a separate bucket.

Those are all of the “hidden” features I’ve found, but I’m sure there are more. Please let me know of any features I’ve missed.

I've tried several different Amazon S3 file managers and had settled on the free S3 Firefox Organizer. But then I tried Bucket Explorer. Not only did it do everything I needed it to do, it introduced to me new features I didn't know Amazon S3 supported. If you're like me, you love free and open source software. Bucket Explorer, once out of beta, will be a commercial program. I'm not sure what the final price will be, but assuming it costs less than $40, it is a program worth purchasing. Here's why I'm recommending it.

Bucket Explorer is a Java-based GUI for managing, uploading to, and downloading from buckets on Amazon S3. It is not designed to backup local computers (Jungle Disk and S3 Backup do this); it's designed for those sharing and managing web content. So if you plan to use Amazon S3 as a Content Distribution Network, Bucket Explorer is targeted at you. For those not familiar with Amazon S3, the attraction is inexpensive and unlimited storage, inexpensive and unlimited download bandwidth, and ultra-high reliability.

Because it is written in Java, it runs on Windows, Linux, and (currently in private beta) Macintosh. I'm generally skeptical of Java application stability, but I've been using it for a few weeks and it has been 100% reliable. It includes the basic features you'd expect, such as bucket creation and access control list modification (for public sharing of files.)

What impressed me most about Bucket Explorer is support for advanced features, such as:

• Enable logging for buckets and store logs in a different bucket
• Retrieve the public URL of files
• Temporarily share private files publicly with a link that auto-expires after a specified time
• Create virtual folders within buckets

The more I used Bucket Explorer, the more I learned about the capabilities of Amazon S3. I did identify a few addition features I'd like to see. Here is a summary of my suggestions:

• Refresh local file listing (without switching to one directory and back to the original)
• Ability to rename local files (currently have to do this in Windows Explorer)
• Have the option to auto re-connect to the last bucket on startup (instead of re-entering it each time)
• When right-clicking a file, have the option to copy the torrent address to the clipboard (just like you can with the Public URL)
• I have my own domain pointing to an S3 bucket; it would be nice if these buckets could be flagged to return the custom domain URL instead of the default Amazon URL. Not sure if this "use different URL info" might be a setting stored on the local PC or a config file stored in the bucket itself. Either way, it would be a useful feature to have if you plan on using the custom domain name.

I sent these suggestions to the developers. I wasn't sure if they'd acknowlege my suggestions or not, but I almost immediately received an e-mail back from them:

THANKS for the feedback. Its the feedback from users which keeps us motivated to work on the product. All of your suggestions are excellent. We collected all the feedback provided till August 30th, and we are trying to release one version with that feedback by end of this month or latest by Monday / Tuesday. Once that release is out for public beta, we will start working on all the change requests that we got in the month of September.

With this type of response, the future of Bucket Explorer appears to be very promising. To see it in use, you can go to their site and view the demo. If you use Amazon S3 for sharing content, I think you'll want to give it a try. According to a forum post, if you provide them with design/feature feedback during the beta period, you'll receive a free copy of the initial release.

I happened upon the site WebSiteOptimization.com and started testing the performance of my site. I was astounded by how long it would take to load the front page of my site over a 14.4 kbps modem connection. True, not many people use a modem connection anymore, but still, 130 seconds is a long time to wait! Now this the time required to load every last image, not the the time required before the page starts to render and become readable, but still there is room for improvement. So I started playing around with performance settings and quickly made some substantial gains.

First of all, I enabled the WordPress CSS-Compress plug-in, which compressed the CSS file and all of the images referenced within it, which reduced the number of HTTP requests. Secondly, I enabled GZIP compression (through the Options -> Reading -> "WordPress should compress articles (gzip) if browsers ask for them" option.) I noticed that the new Contact Form plugin, which I hadn't even implemented on any page, was also causing a bunch of HTTP requests, so I deactivated it. I made some substantial improvements; I noticed pages loading substantially faster on my cable connection and was very pleased. A test showed 14.4 kbps download times were reduced from 130 seconds to 40 seconds!

But then I realized why I hadn't enabled Gzip compression previously: some of my WordPress plug-ins won't work with Gzip compression enabled. According to Denis de Bernardy:

The gzip is enabled before the output buffers are actually processed, so using it prevents plugins that use output buffers (external links, admin menu, ad spaces, etc.) to work properly. The gzip option in itself should never be active anyway. Apache can do this by default, and in the cases where it does you can end up with double-gzip'ed content.

So I worked to enable compression within Apache by modifying my .htaccess file, but that just brought my site down. Mod_gzip and mod_deflate aren't supported and I'm on a shared server, so I don't have full control. So I made the call, and axed the plug-ins that weren't working, namely the plug-in that identifies external links and another that places an administrative menu bar across the top of my site (for me only.) I really like those plugins, but they are not worth the performance hit. Until I find a way to enable Apache (server-controlled) compression, I'm going to go without them.

Total HTTP Requests: 30 | after: 11

Download Times*
Connection Rate Download Times (before | after)
14.4K 130.70 seconds | after: 40.22 seconds
28.8K 68.35 seconds | after: 21.51 seconds
33.6K 59.44 seconds | after: 18.84 seconds
56K 38.07 seconds | after: 12.42 seconds
ISDN 128K 15.82 seconds | after: 5.75 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 6.85 seconds | after: 3.06 seconds
*Note that these download times are based on the full connection rate for ISDN and T1 connections. Modem connections (56Kbps or less) are corrected by a packet loss factor of 0.7. All download times include delays due to round-trip latency with an average of 0.2 seconds per object. With 30 total objects for this page, that computes to a total lag time due to latency of 6 seconds. Note also that this download time calculation does not take into account delays due to XHTML parsing and rendering.

A few months ago, I noticed I was approaching my bandwidth limits on my hosting account. Switching hosting providers is a pain, so I decided to move some high-bandwidth graphics to Amazon S3, where the bandwidth is cheap and unlimited. All was well until I realized that Google was returning search results pointing to my bucket on s3.amazonaws.com instead of carltonbale.com. Luckily, AmazonAWS has a work-around. You can use your own domain name in an Amazon S3 bucket. Here are the instructions on how to do it, from beginning to end.

Introductory Steps for new Amazon S3 Users:

1. First of all, obviously, you need your own domain name and your own Amazon S3 account
2. Secondly, you need a way to create/manage Amazon S3 buckets, so you'll need to install a client on your PC.
   • I recommend using Bucket Explorer, which is a full-featured and easy-to-use client that runs on Windows and Linux; (a Mac version is in private beta and should be available Oct 2007). A free, less-featured alternative is the S3 Organizer add-on for the Mozilla Firefox web browser.
   • Install your application of choice and either:
     • Open Bucket Explorer -or-
     • Open Firefox and go to Tools menu -> S3 organizer, and click the Manage Accounts button
   • Enter your AmazonAWS Access Key and Secret Key
     • These are available by going to http://aws.amazon.com, mousing-over the "Your Web Services Account" in the upper right-hand corner, and selecting "AWS Access Identifiers"
     • 

How to Alias your Subdomain to an Amazon S3 Bucket:

1. Identify the exact domain name you want to forward to Amazon S3. S3 is not a web server, so I would not recommend forwarding your entire domain there, but rather a sub-domain. The sub-domain I'm going to use is the actual one I setup: s3.carltonbale.com
2. Create a new "bucket" (a.k.a. folder) by clicking the "create folder/bucket" icon. Name the bucket exactly what your sub-domain name is.
   • Example bucket name: s3.carltonbale.com
   • Note: you must use a unique bucket name; you won't be able to create bucket if the name is already being used by someone else.
3. Now comes the tricky part: modifying your DNS server settings. The procedures on how to do this vary by host and software system, but are the general steps:
   • Logon to your web host control panel and select "Manage DNS Server Settings" or similar
   • Create a new CNAME entry for your domain. For my example of s3.carltonbale.com, the entry was:
     • Name: s3
     • Type: CNAME
     • Value: s3.amazonaws.com.
     • (If you are an European users, use s3-external-3.amazonaws.com. instead)
   • And yes, the dot at the end of "s3.amazonaws.com." is correct, at least for me. Look at your other entries to figure out what your should enter.
4. Now comes the hardest part: waiting. It took about 2 hours for my subdomain to be recognized by AmazonAWS.
5. Open the subdomain name in your browser. You should now be able to access your files through any of 3 urls:
   1. subdomain.domain.com (which is also the bucket name)
   2. your_bucket_name.s3.amazonaws.com
   3. s3.amazonaws.com/your_bucket_name

Final Steps

1. You'll need to set permissions on your bucket and the files within using your favorite bucket management tool. I recommend setting the bucket permission to "full control by owner" only and setting the permissions of the files within the bucket to "full control by owner, read access for everyone". This will prevent people from being able to browse/list the files in your bucket.
2. If you don't want Google (or Google Images) to index the files in your subdomain, create a file named robots.txt containing the following and copy it into your bucket:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

That's it, my start-to-finish guide on how to use your own domain name with Amazon S3. If I missed something or if something isn't clear, let me know in the comments and I'll fix it.

I recently needed to share some open source files via BitTorrent and wanted to host them on my Amazon S3 account.  For those of you familiar with S3, here is the short-answer: add ?torrent to the end of the URL of a public-shared file to get the *.torrent file, so the link would be http://s3.amazonaws.com/your_bucket_name/your_file_name?torrent

If you're new to Amazon S3, read on for more info and detailed instructions.

Why would you want to distribute a file using BitTorrent?

I wanted to do this because, when sharing a file via a torrent, you use less of your Amazon S3 bandwidth and lower your monthly expense. To be more accurate, according the S3 documentation:

The difference is that if a lot of clients are requesting the same object simultaneously via BitTorrent, then the amount of data S3 must serve to satisfy those clients will be lower than with client/server delivery.

I knew it was possible to host a torrent on S3, but wasn't quite sure how to do it. After quite a bit of searching and reading, I found that it was actually pretty easy to do.

Here are the details on how to copy a file to your Amazon S3 account, make it public, create the torrent seed / tracker, and have Amazon S3 share both the .torrent file and seed the download.

Preliminary Steps for new Amazon S3 Users:

1. You must first have an Amazon S3 account
2. Secondly, you need a way to create/manage Amazon S3 buckets, so you'll need to install a client on your PC.
   • I recommend using Bucket Explorer, which is a full-featured and easy-to-use client that runs on Windows and Linux; (a Mac version is in private beta and should be available Oct 2007). A free, less-featured alternative is the S3 Organizer add-on for the Mozilla Firefox web browser.
   • Install your application of choice and either:
     • Open Bucket Explorer -or-
     • Open Firefox and go to Tools menu -> S3 organizer, and click the Manage Accounts button
   • Enter your AmazonAWS Access Key and Secret Key
   • These are available by going to http://aws.amazon.com, mousing-over the "Your Web Services Account" in the upper right-hand corner, and selecting "AWS Access Identifiers"
   • 

How to Create and Seed a Torrent Download on Amazon S3:

1. Create a new "bucket" (a.k.a. folder) by clicking the "create folder" icon in the right-hand panel of S3 Organizer. Note: you must use a unique bucket name; you won't be able to create bucket if the name is already being used by someone else.
2. Upload the file which will be shared into the desired bucket using S3 Organizer
3. Make the bucket public read by right-clicking on the bucket name and selecting "Edit ACL". Select "Read" access for "Everyone". Note: you may also have to repeat the read access step for each file that is uploaded to the bucket.
4. Now that the file is uploaded and shared, it can be downloaded via standard http from the following location: http://s3.amazonaws.com/your_bucket_name/your_file_name .
   • Note 1: You can also find the URL by right-clicking the file in S3 organizer and selecting Copy URL to Clipboard.
   • Note 2: Unfortunately, the file will always be available via http download, which can be faster than BitTorrent download, but will use more of your S3 bandwidth.)
5. Now you want to create the torrent file itself. Just enter the following URL: http://s3.amazonaws.com/your_bucket_name/your_file_name?torrent and the torrent file will be created and you will be able to download it the *.torrent file to your computer.
6. You can share this downloaded *.torrent file with others via e-mail, webpage download, etc.

According to this article, you can use Amazon S3 as the torrent tracker only by following the steps above, opening the torrent file on your local PC, start seeding from your local PC, and then remove the original file. S3 will continue to be the (ultra reliable) tracker for the file but you don't have to use S3 bandwidth to share the file. To save bandwidth usage and prevent someone from going directly to the http download of the file instead of using the torrent download, it's probably best to download the small *.torrent file and share that with others instead publishing the URL to the torrent file on the Amazon S3 server.

Assuming you have the file being shared stored on your local computer, you can download the *.torrent and start seeding from your local PC without re-downloading (the shared file) from S3, further reducing your S3 bandwidth.That's it, my start-to-finish guide on how to take a file and share/seed/tracker it via BitTorrent and Amazon S3. If I missed something or if something isn't clear, let me know in the comments and I'll fix it.

I noticed a weird charge on my credit card from "Mnesvc Inc Seattle" on 9/1. I initially thought it was a fradulent charge, but it was for less than $2, so I was a little confused. After a little more research, I found that Mnesvc is really Amazon.com and this is how they are now billing their monthly Amazon Web Services, such as S3 backup. Why they made this change, I don't know, but it probably signals a move to integrate TextPayMe in some fashion. I just wish they had provided me with a more clear warning of what to expect on my credit card statement.

If you're like me, you probably registered a few extra domain names over the years and never got a chance to do anything with them. They just sit there and you keep paying annual renewal fees. While renewing one such domain name, I noticed that GoDaddy.com now offers a service that they call Cash Parking.  I decided to give it a try to see if I could at least get these domain names to pay for their own registration fees.

Looking at the example GoDoddy shows, it appeared that a domain would easily be able to pay for itself. With any luck, my domains should generate somewhere near this level of performance. Here is how GoDaddy is promoting the service:

Make money from your domains' parked pages! It's easy with CashParking. Whether you have one domain or a growing portfolio, CashParking can turn those domains into a cash generator!

I start by sitting-up a Cash Parking account. The cheapest account is $3.99 per month. I was a little surprised, because I figured if there was so much profit potential in Cash Parking, I wouldn't have to pay GoDaddy up-front to receive it. But what the heck, I'll give it a try anyway. I pay my $3.99 for a month and move over 14 domains.

After a 5 weeks, my results are terrible.

•  Number of Domains: 14
• Total Impressions: 90
• Total Clicks: 12
• Revenue: $0.99
• Customer Share of Revenue (minus monthly fee): -$3.00  (note: GoDaddy provides this stat in their Cash Parking promotional material, but not in their reports once you actually create an account.)
• Average RPM: $11.00  (Revenue per 1000 impressions)
• Average CTR: 13.33%  (Click Through Rate)
• Average CPC: $0.08  (Cost per Click for an Ad)

So, at the end of one year, I stand to make about $10 from cash parking, while paying GoDaddy  $47.88. Plus I still have to pay GoDaddy the annual registration fees for each domain name.

I don't think my lack of success is because of the domain names are terrible, because some of them are not. I would list the domain names here, but I'm not going to because 1.) I don't really endorse the content of the sites, and 2.) I'm paying GoDaddy $3.99 per month so they should be creating some traffic.

The lack of revenue is not because the domain names are brand new, because all of them have been parked at Godaddy.com for quite some time and GoDaddy has been making ad revenue from them for years and the pages are already in the search engines or where ever they should be by now.

I should state the at the monthly fee gives you Cash Parking for an unlimited number of domains, so the per-domain burden of the fee is higher the fewer domains you have. This program is really geared to having a large number of domains. But even if I did have a large number of domains, I still wouldn't made enough to cover the annual registration fees of each domain.

One last complaint is that 4 of the domain names were flagged as "adult". They clearly are not, in any way or permutation, adult-related domain names. But GoDaddy will not allow me to tailor the content to anything non-adult. Plus, there is no way for me to have them made "un-adult" and there is no explanation as to why they were tagged as adult in the first place.  The only way I can have ads on these sites is if I allow them to display adult content, which is not something I am willing to do. The domains were registered in response to GoDaddy charging me administrative fees for "maintaining my whois information."  Perhaps GoDaddy flagged them as adult so that they could only display adult ads and not ads that may conflict with their business model. They would not allow me to use the keyword "GoDaddy", so they are obviously looking after their own interest est in terms of content.

Conclusion

GoDaddy Cash Parking is a great way for GoDaddy to make more money from their existing customers. It's a great way for customers to pay GoDaddy more money. It is not a money making opportunity. Perhaps if you have a large number of high-profile domain names, if you are will to do a lot of work promoting the domain names, and perhaps if you are willing to display adult-themed content, you could make money using Cash Parking. But I couldn't and doubt the vast majority of GoDaddy customer could either.

I had my doubts about the scheme going in. It only cost me $4 to try it out, and now I know it's not for me. For a reason I can't fully put into words, the entire ordeal has lowered my opinion of GoDaddy. I've used them for years and I've put up with their relentless pitches for extra costly features each time you renew a domain. But something about this experience made me feel like I was been scammed. Perhaps it was the fact that some of my domains were forced to display adult ads or none at all. Perhaps it was the deceptive monthly reports that don't show I'm losing money. Whatever the reason, I plan cancel my Cash Parking account and I also plan to forward the domains to existing website, rather than allow GoDaddy to park my domain name and display a GoDaddy logo and lots of ads (from which no revenue is shared with me.)

Despite being around for years, RSS and Atom web feeds have managed to stay below the mainstream radar; a quick poll of my tech-savvy friends proved this to be the case. This article explains what web feeds are, why you care, and how best to take advantage of them.

What are web feeds? According to Wikipedia:

A web feed is a data format used for serving users frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation.

What's the Benefit?

The benefit to the user is step 3 of the syndicate->subscribe-aggregate chain. Using a web feed reader, you can aggregate all of your favorite sites together on one screen, browse new headlines, and then read the content that interests you most. In my feed reader, I aggregate feeds from 38 different site; I can browse through the entire list of new headlines and read the articles that interest me in less than 30 minutes. If I were to visit each of the 38 sites individually, it would take hours.

What's the Best Web Feed Reader?

I've tried different web feed readers over the years, including: My Yahoo!, News Gator, and the Sage and Wizz RSS News Reader add-ons for Firefox, but none of them every impressed me as being great, with each having their own shortcomings. Then I found Google Reader; it makes all of the others obsolete. It has a clean interface, is fast, is accessible from any computer, highlights new content, is easy to navigate, has a great summary page, uses the terrific Google search algorithms to find the feed you're after, and it's free. Click the thumbnail above to see a screen shot.

How Do I Subscribe to a Feed?

If you're not using Google Reader, the subscription process goes something like this: go to a site, look for an RSS link in the page or an icon () in the location bar (if your bowser is new enough), click on the link/icon, copy the resulting page location (while ignoring the mangle of XML code on the page), and then paste that feed location into your feed reader. Then, you'd be ready to aggregate. But with Google Reader, all you have to do is type the website name into the search box and it takes care of the rest.  That alone, plus the other features listed above, make Google Reader the best way to digest the most information in the least amount of time.

Unfortunately, not all sites include all of their content in their RSS feed. Some of the better sites on the internet, such as Gizmodo, offer advertisement-free summary feeds or ad-supported full feeds. I wish all sites did this. Unfortunately, sites such as AntsMarching.org (feed link), and this other site (feedlink) offer only summary feeds. I find this very frustrating, especially since neither site has advertisements. And then are site like RemoteCentral.com that don't provide any feeds at all. Truth be told, I find myself spending less time on sites with no (or lacking) feeds because, without the feed, there is nothing to pull me in.

In conclusion: if you find yourself going to the same sites/blogs for info updates and news, go to http://reader.google.com, sign-in, and search for the site by name. Most likely, you'll soon be browsing your news in a whole new way.

My long-time friend Bryan recently described me as "a person who will spend a lot of money on some new electronic gadget and then take it apart before he even uses it." He's right; I can't help myself. I want to make everything "better." This has extended into the use WordPress Plugins on my site. I'm always looking to add something new and my plugin count has increased to nearly 40. But the list has grown large and I've started to debate the usefulness of several of them. I then receive an e-mail from a native Dutch speaker by the name of Ilse, who reverse-translated the Global Language Translator plug-in translation. I found out all sorts of interesting facts about myself:

• My sex is not male, but little man (ouch!)
• I really like the television show Lights That Shine on Friday During the Night and that the classifications of NBC smell really bad (a.k.a. their ratings are low)
• My favorite artist is the Band of Matthews of Dave
• And, most alarmingly, I really like young goats but don't have them yet

In case you're as curious about that last one as I was, Ilse was kind enough to  inform me that it was supposed to read kids instead of goats.  Trust me, it is kids, and not goats.

So now that the non-English-speaking world perceives me as a little man who likes young goats and watches smelly television , I think it's time to cut my losses. Global Translator has been uninstalled. I tried it out on the promise of "making the site more accessible to non-English speakers." It is certainly a worthy goal, but I wasn't doing anyone any favors, especially myself.

I've uninstalled several other limited-value plugins over the past few days and hope to trim the list down to below 30. There's nothing worse than upgrading to the latest version of WordPress only to have a long since abandoned plugin break everything. Combating this is the excellent WordPress Plug-in Installer plugin, which makes plugin installation a 20 second vs. 5 minutes process, and the new WordPress Plugins site, which allows publishing, voting, popularity ranking, and comments for all plugins (I've been begging/voting for this for a long time.)  Must. Fight. Urge. To. Tweak.

I'm gleefully excited to have just completed my order for a brand new Lenovo Thinkpad T61 laptop. I've been a huge fan since my first Thinkpad 600 in 1999, followed by a T20 in 2001, and a T30 in 2003. They are extremely solid, well supported premium notebooks and are well worth the extra investment versus lesser hardware. Better yet, they were provided by work, so I didn't have to buy one. Unfortunately, my employer switched to Dell and I've been stuck with the mandated Dell D620 for the past year. I've gotten used to it, but it's no Thinkpad.

I re-tasked my current desktop as a dedicated server (more on that in a future post) and needed a replacement. My initial reaction was to buy a bunch of parts from Newegg and build a desktop myself — this is what I've done every couple of years for the past decade or so. But after I spec'd and ordered the parts, I experienced a paradigm shift: "Why are you buying a desktop when you really want a laptop." Not 30 minutes later, I receive an alert from DealNews.com that there was a 10% discount on ThinkPads. I canceled my order for a desktop and embarked on the first purchase of a laptop.

The only other laptop I considered was an Apple Macbook Pro. I just purchased one for my father-in-law and it is a great piece of hardware. Truthfully, I went Mac to recduce the number of support questions I receive (I can always claim ignorance with Mac OS.) But after using Mac OS for a while, I was slightly irritated by the interface and very irritated by a lack of free / open-source programs. I'm very specific about the software I use, and some of it does not conform to the Mac way of thinking. Plus, I'd have to re-purchase some of the software I own. The final nail in the Mac Book Pro coffin was that could get pretty much identical hardware for a half the price. Case closed; I'm a Windows / Linux control freak and will remain so for a few more years.

Here are some details on the deal I got:

• 10% coupon from DealNews.com
• 7% cash back from the American Express TailorMade program
• 3.5% cash back from FatCash.com

The Upgrades that I Picked:

• Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T7300 (2.0GHz 800MHz 4MB L2 cache) — passed on the 1.8GHz 2MB L2 Cache CPU
• 14.1 WXGA+ TFT, w/ Camera — an upgrade from the lower-res WXGA / no Camera version
• NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M (128MB) — I need this to drive my 30" Dell 3007WFP LCD monitor
• UltraNav (TrackPoint and TouchPad) with Fingerprint Reader — upgraded to the fingerprint reader for quicker log-ons
• 100GB Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm — a priced-reduced upgrade from a 60GB, 5400RPM drive
• 7 cell Li-Ion Battery — the standard 3-cell battery is a joke
• ThinkPad Advanced Mini Dock – unfortunately, this is the only way to get Dual Link DVI-D output; shame on Lenovo for no on-board DVI port

The Downgrades that I Picked:

• CD-RW/DVD-ROM Combo 24X/24X/24X/8X Max, Ultrabay Slim — I don't burn DVDs, so no need to waste money on a DVD burner
• ThinkPad 11a/b/g Wi-Fi wireless LAN Mini-PCIe – I can get an Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN Laptop card off of Ebay for less than from Lenovo and don't need it unless upgrade to 802.11N wifi at home
• 512 MB PC2-5300 SDRAM DDR2 667MHz SODIMM Memory (1 DIMM) — I can order 4GB of memory from Newegg for the price Lenovo was going to charge me for 2GB; I'm not afraid to take thinks apart
• No 1GB Intel Turbo Memory Card — I'd need to get more memory to qualify for this, plus it's a standard Intel part that I can get a card cheaper off of Ebay than I could directly from Lenovo; I'm not afraid to take things apart
• Genuine Windows Vista Home Basic — the cheapest Operating System option; I already own a Windows OS — and shame on Lenovo for not offering an even cheaper Ubuntu Linux option!

Unfortunately, because I picked the WXGA+ screen with camera, it may be several weeks before I receive my new object of tech lust. I'll be sure to post when I've tried it out.