yukes.com >> Lazy Jay

Today — while flying to Vegas for BlogWorld — I finally joined the Mile-High club!

Get your mind out of the gutter… I meant the Mile-High Blogger club!

Note: This post was written at 35,000 feet — thanks to in-flight WiFi Internet (brought to you by GoGo.) And I gotta say — Eddie inspired me to write this post, with his Facebook post today:

Those of you that know me, know that I occasionally party (read: drink a lot!!!) And am a big fan of my mini bottles! Take a look at the souvenirs I had after a couple long flights:

But yeah — nowadays the availability of in-flight WiFi is such a priority for me — that I pick routes based on its availability. Today, I’m flying AirTran from Sarasota to Las Vegas. AirTran was one of the first airlines to install GoGo WiFi on their entire fleet. Now, you can find GoGo Internet on the following major carriers:

• AirTran
• AmericanAirlines (some)
• Delta
• United
• Virgin
• AirCanada (coming soon)

And I mean — we’re talking good, crisp Internet — this ain’t no podunk Kentucky dial up shit.

I’m able to stream my favorite YouTube content — notice the progress bar is far ahead:

And the delay isn’t bad either — fast enough to make Internet phone calls (using Skype.) Quality was quite good — even though planes have quite a lot of background noise!

So I figure — might as well combine my 2 favorite past times — in-flight alcohol + Internet together at last… I celebrated with a mile-high video chat toast! Cheers!

Okay — for you normal kids — that’s all I’ve got for today. Techno-dweebs, read on…

The airplane shows up as a Texas IP — I guess it makes sense to be centrally located. Its in the 12.130 block — AirCell space:

I hopped over to speedtest.net and was able to pull 2Mbps down!

That’s faster than my Verizon 3G air card… and good enough for just about anything.

And the best part about it is — you can surf FREE — first time buyers, use discount code AIRTRANTRYGOGO at checkout.

Hmm… and if its not your first time? Simply create a new account — and you can try GoGo free again and again!

Safe travels!

Despite the many advantages of Tracking202 Pro — I get a lot of traffic to my offers from the old self-hosted open source solution — Prosper202 (Which can still be downloaded here http://prosper.tracking202.com/apps/download/)

When using Prosper202 on a separate tracking domain (i.e. different domain from your Landing Pages) — there can be problems setting cookies in IE6 + IE7. Take a look at this thread on WickedFire: http://www.wickedfire.com/newbie-questions/64275-tracking202-cookies-blocked-ie6-ie7.html Still unanswered 3 months later…

I Google’d it to see if anyone else was having issues –http://offermonitor.com/wordpress/?p=447 Yep, people be blogging about it.

There is a somewhat longwinded (and confusing) solution on Propser support forums: http://prosper.tracking202.com/forum/12/21/p3p-privacy-policy-problems-and-solutions

———-

Basically, we need to add support for some dumbass Internet cookie privacy standard — P3P — check all the criticisms in this Wikipedia reference.

The first thing I did when confronted with this problem was look at how other top affiliate networks set their cookies.

Let’s start with Hydra – I love these guys.
Here’s the P3P header that Hydra sends:

P3P: policyref="/w3c/p3p.xml", CP="NOR DSP COR ADM OUR"

And their P3P policy file (http://lynxtrack.com/w3c/p3p.xml) looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<META xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/12/P3Pv1">
<POLICY-REFERENCES>
<POLICY-REF about="/w3c/policy.xml">
<INCLUDE>/*</INCLUDE>
<COOKIE-INCLUDE>* * * </COOKIE-INCLUDE>
</POLICY-REF>
</POLICY-REFERENCES>
</META>


———

Next, lets look at Azoogle — or is it Epic — I dunno
Here’s the header that Azoogle sends:

P3P: policyref="http://azjmp.com/w3c/policy.xml", CP="ALL BUS LEG DSP COR ADM CUR DEV PSA OUR NAV INT"

Their P3P policy file was too long and boring for me to include — linked here: http://azjmp.com/w3c/policy.xml

———

CoreMetrics does it differently:
P3P: CP="NON DSP COR CUR ADMo DEVo PSAo PSDo OUR IND ONL UNI PUR COM NAV INT DEM STA"

Not to be outdone – DoubleClick adds:
P3P: policyref="http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/gcn_p3p_.xml", CP="CURa ADMa DEVa TAIo PSAo PSDo OUR IND UNI PUR INT DEM STA PRE COM NAV OTC NOI DSP COR"

Atlas Solutions adds this:
P3P: CP="NOI DSP COR CUR ADM DEV TAIo PSAo PSDo OUR BUS UNI PUR COM NAV INT DEM STA PRE OTC"

AdShuffle looks like this:
P3P: CP="CURa ADMa DEVa PSAo PSDo OUR BUS UNI PUR INT DEM STA PRE COM NAV OTC NOI DSP COR"

Look at MSN
P3P: CP=BUS CUR CONo FINIVDo ONL OUR PHY SAMo TELo

———

I started off confused — and looking at other implementations certainly didn’t help!
The more I looked around — the more confused I got…

But if you think about it — these guys ALL know what they’re doing — they can’t be losing conversions — so I’m gonna guess that any of these are gonna work.

I picked Hydra’s implementation because I love those Beverly Hills bastards!

Just install that /w3c/p3p.xml
And add this line right before you setcookie:
header( 'P3P: policyref="/w3c/p3p.xml", CP="NOR DSP COR ADM OUR"' );

Okay thats about it … no more techiness for today.

Recently, I’ve been putting in a ton of miles, on many different carriers…
But one is substantially different…

I fly Virgin whenever I get the chance — They are hands-down the best US carrier.

Everything is so dialed in — from the younger, more attractive flight crew — to the funny on board announcements — tons of MP3s and movies available on-demand.

Check this — they have phased mood lighting throughout the cabin:

The touch screen entertainment center is one of the best I’ve ever used.

Got munchies? Use the touchscreen to order food directly and voila — hunger solved.
Their ondemand library is impressive 25 movies, live Dish satellite TV, 3000 MP3s, and 20 radio stations. Not only that — you can surf the web at 30,000 feet!

Here, I’m watching CNBC + checking stocks with the inflight WiFi Internet!

And if you’re lucky enough to grab one of the front seats (First class) — enjoy the oversized massage chairs!

I fly Virgin whenever I can — which is typically when I fly to SFO — their Bay Area hub. Last time must have been for Ad:Tech San Francisco in April.

While many US carriers are having serious troubles — only a few carriers are making money — flying Virgin, I don’t notice the squeeze.

I’m a customer for life … now if they would just expand their US footprint!

You’re YUKE’S CO LTD — and you own yukes.co.jp
(Which — by the way — maybe you should figure out how to 301 your site at http://yukes.co.jp/ to http://www.yukes.co.jp/)

Can you keep your lame ass corporate emails out of MY yukes.com INBOX?
Why do you copy ME on half of everything?

I appreciated previewing your last financial report early…

Enough is enough

On Wednesday, I rolled out of bed late and had a voicemail from my friend. My buddy got comp’d a fat cabana over at Red Rock casino for their Wednesday pool party. Nice! Here’s how the day was gonna look:

Before heading to the pool, I figured I should put in a couple minutes of work. I logged in to quickly check some stats, and noticed one of my older web servers was in trouble.  I logged in and noticed that Apache httpd was using all the CPU — I was receiving a LOT of traffic!

Poking around – I got netstat telling me there’s a shit load of connections… Sweet!

# netstat -ntu | grep :80 | wc -l
318


Did I make front page on Digg?
Am I getting Slashdot’d?
Hmm… Looking deeper at the traffic source:

# netstat -ntu | sed -e 's/::ffff://g' | awk '{print $5}' | cut -d : -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
...
33 77.220.186.142
35 77.220.186.143
40 77.220.185.143
53 188.40.47.196
...

Fuck… some asshole was hitting my website from as many as 10 hosts across Germany and Russia! And they’re winning! My server had slowed to a crawl — rendering the website useless.

I’m supposed to be at a cabana at Cherry pool in Vegas — throwing down cocktails with friends! I don’t have time for some Euro trash hackers!

I quickly add some firewall rules to drop the heaviest offenders:

# /sbin/iptables -I INPUT -s 77.220.180.140 -j DROP
# /sbin/iptables -I INPUT -s 188.40.47.240 -j DROP
# /sbin/iptables -I INPUT -s 77.220.185.142 -j DROP
# /sbin/iptables -I INPUT -s 77.220.186.140 -j DROP
...

All said and done was back up in just 15 minutes… and off to the pool!

For more reading on the subject: http://deflate.medialayer.com/

And when I have a minute, I’m definitely gonna install mod_security http://www.modsecurity.org/

I almost peed my pants watching Hangover last night…

Go see it… Tonight!

I’m gonna watch it again in a couple hours — just to see if it has that repeat offender power kick.

Will keep you updated…

The smartest thing I do in life is hang out with people who are brighter, smarter, faster, hotter than me.

Last year in April, I jumped on the chance to hang out with some super dope marketers in San Francisco.  Elite Retreat is a small gathering of top movers and shakers.  Some people are put off by the $5K ticket.  But thats shortsighted.  You instantly gain amazing contacts… the lineup consists of Internet icons like Jeremy Schoemaker, David Dellanave, Neil Patel, Andy Liu, Aaron Wall.  The rolodex alone is easily worth the ticket price!

There might be 30-40 people in attendance … and they are equally inspiring!  You meet people like 16yo millionaire Harrison Gervitz,  David Klein,  Mitchel Harad to name a few.  Its been fun watching these guys develop significant shit this year… Harrison launched LeaderClicks… Justin Goff launched GymJunkies

Check this — the 26yo kid sitting next to me (in the back row holla!) is a multi-millionaire… We became good friends…  and jumped head first into a project together right after the event!

A great measurement of an event — is how many repeat attendees there are — and here you will find a bunch!  I wanted to go again this year — but had already booked a trip to Brazil when the dates were announced

I think there’s gonna be another Elite Reatreat this summer… so definitely put it on your radar!

You know what memcached is, right?

memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.

Danga Interactive developed memcached to enhance the speed of LiveJournal.com, a site which was already doing 20 million+ dynamic page views per day for 1 million users with a bunch of webservers and a bunch of database servers. memcached dropped the database load to almost nothing, yielding faster page load times for users, better resource utilization, and faster access to the databases on a memcache miss.

PHP has long had memcached support… but its weak… and still has fairly basic issues (I have an open bug – consistent hashing algorithm broken)  Also, it isn’t compatible with the MySQL UDF memcached functions, or command line tools!

One of MySQL’s top dogs — Brian Aker — built libmemcached… a C/C++ library that found its way into Ruby, Python and Perl. All except PHP!

Until now! A new Digg employee — Andrei Zmievski — has wrapped libmemcached into a new extension! You can download it here: PECL memcached Finally!

UPDATED: 2009/02/18

For you tech wiz kids out there… Read this dope article by Paul Saab / Facebook Engineering …. how they leverage memcached and super optimized the hell out of it!

UPDATED: 2009/09/30

I just noticed that this PECL memcached is now ’stable’ as of 2009/07/07 — def check it out now:
http://pecl.php.net/package/memcached

Well technically, I had left it there on deposit… over a year ago… since then moved to Flordia.  Was in Miami for 6 months, then Sarasota/Tampa area for a while.  And completely FORGOT about this account!

I was recently over at the Hard Rock celebrating a friends birthday — imagine my surprise when I discovered I had $17,500 in my account waiting for me!

You see, I leave cash at casinos, because they have some benefits over banks:

• They’re open 24 hours a day!  Show me a bank that can compete with that!  I do a lot of things last minute, book my flights day before or same day.  One night at 10pm, I book a 9am flight to Aruba… needed cash for the trip… thank goodness for my 24hour casino bank!

• Casinos have unlimited cash on hand!  Try and withdraw >$20K from a bank… did you know that usually its not available?  Each branch knows how much money it needs on a daily basis.  And they don’t forecast for unusually large cash withdrawals.  Most of the time, the branch will require you to order the cash, and it can take a couple days to get it!

• No government reporting!  When you withdraw $10K+ from a bank… they make you fill out a nifty little IRS form.

But wait!  It gets better… I deposited $45,000 at Harrah’s in Atlantic City and they instantly upgraded me to their VIP card.  Then I showed a Borgata host my Harrah’s VIP card, and he gave me a Borgata VIP card too.  You bring the cash – and they’ll take care of you!  (Just don’t lose it on the tables!)

This seems to work all over… I’ve been to casinos in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Tahoe, Bahamas, Aruba, Monaco, Amsterdam, Australia.

And in a year – where several of my investments have been losers…  Getting 0% interest at Hard Rock casino feels like a winner!

A couple days ago, I talked about squeezing the profits out a campaign… every last drop! 1-2% matters!! To me anyways, but allow me to set the stage for you:

A few weeks ago, Scott Richter (Affiliate.com) came to Las Vegas to party. I met up with him, and he was rolling with a deep entourage… Gilbert, Lou, George, and who knows who else? I had pre-gamed, and was already buzzing at the time.

We went to Bank @ Bellagio and crashed the Vegas Socialite party. Gill+Scott+crew showed up the entire night club that night. The smoke would barely settle from the sparklers + last magnum bottle of PJ before the next would arrive! I approached Scott — and was like — “yo I gotta introduce u to my host… we get 2 for 1 bottles all over town” And his reply told all “Its all good… Gill’s taking care of it!”

… Economy must be good! …

Anyways for the rest of us, that aren’t dropping $10K+ a night on bottle service, I gotta recommend the AMEX Plum Card. Uber Affiliate Paul Borque has already written about the AMEX Plum card benefits here.

Basically you get a 2% discount on your spending if you pay the full statement balance within 10 days. This is very significant. And I wish I could take advantage of it more — but as a merchant, most of my partners require me to wire cash! Publishers, definitely get one now!

Otherwise, you’re leaving money on the table…