The Servant Leadership Training Course

I've just finished The Servant Leadership Training Course on CD.

There isn't anything new in this book and if you've read and understood the other popular books in this area then this will just be a repeat.

However, having this information repeated to you on a regular basis is very useful. And having it repeated from a different point of view is even more useful. For that reason I enjoyed it. The first quarter of the book was a bit redundant but the rest was good.

I didn't care much for the author's condescending tone and attitude but if you look past that you'll see that the material he's presenting is of value.

 

 

 

Install an HttpModule in IIS 7.5 on Server 2008 R2

Mostly for my own notes for when I next need to do this again. Assumes that the HttpModule has already been compiled and that you have the DLL.

Copy the DLL to the server and put in any folder.

Install the module into the GAC

1. Right click on a command window and select "Run as administrator"
2. At the command prompt type "explorer c:\windows\assembly" without the quotes.
3. Find the folder that you copied the DLL to and while holding down the control key right click this folder and select "Open in a new window".
4. Drag the HttpModule DLL from the new window and drop it into the c:\windows\assembly window.
5. The HttpModule is now installed in the GAC.

Add the module to IIS 7.5

(This assumes a .NET 2.0 module (there's a good reason why it's .NET 2.0 and not 4))

1. Open IIS and navigate to root. This is usually the machine name and adding the module here will ensure that it operates on all websites.
2. In the Features View find the IIS section and double click on Modules.
3. Click "Add Managed Module"
4. In the Name field put any name you want.
5. In the Type dropdown you should find the module that you added to the GAC above. Select this.
6. Leave the "Invoke only for requests to ASP.NET applications or managed handlers" unchecked.
7. Click OK and you're done.

This HttpModule will now execute against every request on all web sites.

Kintiskton LLC IP Ranges

There's a company called Kintiskton LLC who either own or are owned by Mark Manager and they provide a trademark protection service. They have a spider that crawls the web attempting to identify their customers' copyright material posted on sites other than their customers'. In principal I don't have a problem with this because I agree that copyright should be respected.

There's a good write-up about them here: http://endellion.me.uk/info/Kintiskton.html

The problem is that their spider aggressively spiders sites without respecting the robots.txt file. It hits the site hard and fast and ignores the crawl-delay directive and exclude directives. Ignoring the excludes directive is understandable (but not tolerable) as rouge web sites that are violating copyright could "hide" their content from respectful spiders by adding an exclude directive in the robots.txt file for that part of the site. This spider, however, also ignores the crawl-delay and is also not very well written as it generates a fair number of errors in the log files making it easy to see.

If you want to exclude this spider from your site you can exclude these IP ranges: 

65.208.151.112 - 65.208.151.119
63.110.158.48 - 63.110.158.55
65.200.47.0 - 65.200.47.7
65.208.189.24 - 65.208.189.31
65.208.185.96 - 65.208.185.103
65.211.195.16 - 65.211.195.23
5.208.151.112 - 5.208.151.119 (probably a mistake - see Zap's comment below)

If you discover another range that they are using please post as a reply to this blog post and I'll add it to the above list.

 

Google Maps slows down on Saturday mornings

I use Google Maps a lot to investigate a place I'm going to or to get direction there. I've noticed that on Saturday mornings Google Maps often fails but when it doesn't it just runs real slow and I get this message:

Still loading... Slow? Use the troubleshooting guide or basic HTML.

My theory is that everyone is using Google Maps to find directions before or while going out on a Saturday and this is overloading their maps servers. When are you most likely going to need directions? When you go somewhere you haven't been to in a while or ever. That's not going to happen during the week when you're going to and from work, that's going to happen on the weekend when you have the time to adventure off the beaten path. So my guess is that the requests to the mapping service peaks over the weekend.

AdWords AdSense Arbitrage

 I've heard about people doing AdWords/AdSense Arbitrage but I question if it's even possible.

First of all, what is arbitrage? The classic definition of arbitrage has someone, usually a trader in the stock markets, buy and sell a financial instrument at exactly the same time such that there is zero risk and an instant profit. Essentially you are the middle-man who has a buyer and seller lined up and you pass the item being sold from one to the other and pull in the difference.

With AdWords/AdSense arbitrage it's a little different because it is by no means risk free and it does not take place at the same time. The idea is that you buy traffic using AdWords and then you sell it on to another site using AdSense and the rate that you buy it at is lower than the rate that you sell it at.

Let's look at the math involved.

Google keeps 32% of the revenue earned from a click on an advert on your site (assumes AdSense-for-Content). So if you pay $1 through AdWords to bring a visitor to your site you need to earn $1.47 from AdSense from that visitor in order to break-even. So far this is not impossible but there's a lot of competition out there and you have to assume that your visitors are looking for the same type of item so advertising rates should be similar. It also assumes that 100% of visitors arriving through your AdWords campaigns click on an AdSense advert.

Now let's imagine that only 10% of your visitors that arrive from your AdWords campaigns click on one of your AdSense adverts. At our example rate of $1/visitor you have spent $10 to get someone to click on your AdSense advert and you need to make sure that you earn $14.71 from that click to break-even. That's a huge jump from a $1 Adwords campaign to an AdSense advert.

This table shows you how much you have to earn per AdSense click in order to break-even based on the click-through-rate based on $1/AdWords click:

CTR	AdSense
1	147.06
5	29.41
10	14.71
20	7.35
50	2.94
75	1.96
100	1.47

This is why I think that AdWords/AdSense Arbitrage is almost impossible. 

Gigabit networks with low quality cables

I have 2 computers attached to a Gigabit switch and both these computers have NICs that support 1 GBPS speed. However, I noticed that transferring files between them was slow so when I inspected the speeds I saw that one of them was operating at 100MBPS and the other at 1GBPS.

At first I went into the driver config setup and fiddled around with half and full duplex to see if that would make a difference. After a bit more research I found a comment that a network cable might be the culprit and that some network cables (e.g. Cat 5) do not support speeds over 100MBPS. I didn't believe that could possibly be the problem but it was easy to test so I switch the cables and the slow speed moved with the cable. So replacing the cable did the trick. Apparently Cat 5e and Cat 6 are what you need to get the higher speeds.

I'm now transferring data at 10 times the original speed.

Mouse without Borders

Do you have 2 or more PC's on your desk that each have their own keyboard and mouse? Do you want to control it all from one keyboard and mouse without using a KVM and have the mouse float from one monitor to the next and allow copy and paste between them? Then Mouse without Borders is for you:

http://aka.ms/MouseWithOutBorders

I've been using it for a few days now to link my two desktops together and it's working very well. The only hiccough is that I need to sign in to my primary computer first and then the secondary computer second (with its keyboard) if I want them to work together. After that it's all controlled from the primary keyboard and mouse. If I sign in in the other order then I have to use their own keyboards and mice to control them.