Dude. A million bucks? Dude!

SnapNames auctions off used domain names. I had never heard of such a thing, but tomorrow (1/28/08) they're holding one their regular - sorry - Extended Catalog auctions.

You can download the spreadsheet of available domains here. When I sorted the spreadsheet by Minimum Bid (Descending), I was astounded that dude.com was being shilled at $1.1m.

That's what, about €20 these days?

I understand the value of the domain to your nascent breakthrough Web 2.0 social networking youth focused music downloading video game playing site. But $1.1m?

Rather cheaper at $200,000, and probably more profitable in the short run, is dominatrix.com (nsfw), although I don't know if you get the site content too. A steal at $100,000 is traillawyer.com, although if it goes all the way to supremecourt.com you're looking at $300,000.

However, not to worry if your mortgage business has gone belly up and you're living out of your car: loansmobile.com has a minimum bid of $1. Good luck.

Reality and 419 scam merge

Maybe you've already received one of these, but this was new to me, and apparently to the Google spam filter:

"I am manager [... same old same old ...] abandoned large sum of money (US$14.7M) belonging to one of our Foreign Customer Dr. George Brumley ... who involved in air crash along with his family. You can confirm from the website below.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/africa/07/20/kenya.crash/index.html

I am seeking for your Co-operation [... same old same old ...] please reply with ..."

What is interesting is that the link is real. Brumley was a real person, and he and his family did die in a tragic plane accident. Sadly, I think this extra touch of reality will convince more people to become victims.

I have to go now and mark it as spam - Google's spam filter is actually excellent and seems to learn very quickly (the wisdom of crowds no doubt).

The last 6.001

MIT's freshman programming class 6.001 was a legend, and the last one was just given.

Anyone who went through the class was taught not just how to program and a particular language (Scheme in this case) but what more importantly, what programming is.

It also tended to level the playing field between those who were pre-MIT hackers and those who weren't.

The course text was the classic "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs".

How do I know this? Well, back in the day my first programming class at University College London was essentially the same course structure and used the same book. So I share some of the nostalgia of the MIT students and alums for the seminal course.

While the ending was announced some time ago, (and I think they're using Python now, although that shouldn't matter), the course (of course) still lives on the web (videos, on-line version of the book). It's well worth your time.

Microsoft and "The dip"

As a recovering Seth Godin fan-boy, I enjoyed his short book "The Dip". It's an interesting read.

I've always said that the standard opinion about Microsoft that they don't innovate, their products are always late and  they've failed on the Web is exactly the the wrong way to look at them.

To quote Mr. Godin (who puts it much better than I ever managed to):

"Very quietly, the Microsofts of the world hang in, going from version 1 to version 2, knowing that by version 3, the world will be a different (and better) place for them. Microsoft failed twice with Windows, four times with Word, three times with Excel. The entire company is based on the idea of slogging through ... relentlessly changing tactics but never quitting the big idea"

And, I might add, allowing the competition to make the mistakes, abandon the strategy or let themselves get distracted by new "cool" market opportunities.

Outside of search and advertising, is Google doing the same thing? Or is it trying to do 100 things poorly?

We'll see.

Test your backups

First the "Hello World" of blog posts about backup:

"You do backups don't you?"

There, moving on:

Raymond Chen, in his year end round up of links, () points to an old article which describes a policy of randomly restoring one file a week from backup.

I think that this simple idea is astoundingly useful. Whether you use Mozy (didn't realize they'd been bought by EMC. Hooray!) or Time Machine or burning DVDs (which you keep off site, right?), you can never be sure that you're really backing up the files you want, and that even so, they're really, really, really backed up.

You don't want the first time you test your restore (and therefore your backup process) to be after a system failure.

I'm reminded of how - long ago - at Watermark we evaluated a nifty backup solution that used a jukebox CD burner for backup.

It seemed awesome: good UI, excellent drivers, well written manual. Apart from the manual didn't describe any restore process. At all. And the UI had absolutely no reference to any restore functionality.

We returned the box.