Shanti’s Dispatches

Garrett Johnson does a great job of condensing what’s been going on in the US economy and global debt markets in this fine article: The Insolvency Crisis: How we got here, and what to expect

Did you know that pennies are worth so little now that their base metals are worth more melted down than as currency?

This has been very common in history when a government tries to “create wealth” through uncontrolled fiat money printing. The difference this times, as opposed to historical comparisons, is that in history the governments outlaw ownership of precious metals. Our government has so devalued the currency that they are outlawing the melting down of base metals. (our government outlawed private ownership of gold from 1933 to 1974)

In 1923, the Weimar Republic in Germany printed their currency into extinction. Here’s how:

When the government needs more money than its people are able or willing to lend it, it monetizes the debt. That is what happens in this country when the government runs a big deficit. The Federal Reserve (our central bank) “buys” as many bonds as necessary to stabilize the market. It prints money on the security of these bonds. Despite the facade of the government supposedly “borrowing,” the net result is the creation of printing press money. (Actually these days the money is created in the form of new bank deposits–checkbook money–but the net result is exactly the same as if bills were printed.)

This is what happened in Germany. The government issued notes which were promptly discounted by the Reichsbank, i.e., the bank issued money on the “security” of these worthless notes. To compound the evil, the bank failed to raise its interest rate sufficiently. Businessmen found it very profitable to borrow money from the bank and buy up goods, shares and companies. Their debt was wiped out within weeks by the rapid inflation, and the businessman remained holding the valuable assets he had bought. The net result was a huge “private inflation” caused by the rapid expansion of credit. Even foreign exchange was bought with borrowed money, so that the Reichsbank actually financed speculation against its own currency. Yet the bank refused to raise interest rates, arguing that this would only add to the cost of business and thus would increase inflation!

Children playing with stacks of worthless currency, Germany 1923

Woman burning stacks of worthless currency in her stove for heat, Germany 1923

My geeklog / RoR / lolcat blog needed some lovin:

How To: SSH Seamlessly Between OS X and Remote Linux (No Password or passphrase required)

I find that posting something to a blog is the surest sign I’ll remember where to find the info next time I end up needing to do the same or similar thing.

It also forces you to make sure you get the instructions exactly right because you could come under some scrutiny if visitors actually attempt to do what you’re blogging about!

It’s not a perfect system but it works better for me than:

• A) Leaving the instructions buried in my now 1,900+ lines long ‘notes.txt’ file I keep handy on my desktop (that doesn’t count several archived versions that are just as long)
• B) Posting instructions to a Backpack page that eventually gets buried somewhere that I can’t find it and/or remember that I ever made a page for it.

Up next: Backup Brain post on howto SSH seamlessly between two computers sans entering a password or passphrase!

My original post on a Cox Communications issue has been googlized and attracted a few comments, from both irate cox customers as well as a Cox customer support rep.

My questions:

Are there any secrets #s or lines one can call to get through more quickly to you?

What’s the quickest way to get to a live human operator when calling into the main regular number?

What is the best way to deal with any “bad apples” that might exist there? i.e. I’ve heard of stories (at other companies) where you call in to cancel your account and the rep simply does not put the request in, because the person has to meet a certain quota each month of “saved” accounts.

Have you heard of that sort of thing happening at Cox?

Are there any special deals not offered on the site or not talked about much? (besides intro offers)

Is it true that if you call in to cancel your cable bill (to say that you are switching to DirectTV, for example) that they will offer you a reduced rate to stay on board?

If you don’t mind me asking, how much exactly do you make an hour?

Is it worth it? =)

Does Cox outsource any support calls to India or overseas?

Answers from Phoenix Tech Support Girl:

Morning! I just got off of work so my brain is mush but here goes…..

I have yet to hear of any secret numbers to get to a rep more quickly. The quickest way to get a human is to not talk to the automated system.

As far as I know we have no quota for saved accounts, but mind you I am just tech support that is more a retention thing. Never heard of the company not closing an account when they are supposed to but I have seen where an account was supposed to be turned on b ut for some reason the install was rescheduled or cancelled without the customer being notified.

We have a few deals going that I know of with phone and cable being $9.95. I have heard of reduced rates for customers wanting to cancel service. Things like throwing in phone or cable for an insanely low price. But I have been told that it is kinda rare.

I only make $8.50 an hour and some days it is worth it and most days it is not. I only stay because it is a very simple job (cushy almost).

The only calls that I know of that are out of the country are in Canada for some billing issues and whatever deal we made with Linksys and Netgear about the home networking tech support. HSI,cable and phone support are all in the country as far as I know.

You can post this if you wanna but yes please keep me anonymous because I do believe that talking about this would cause me to lose my job, which is on the line as it is for “over-teching”.

Apparently we are getting into major trouble now if we help with things we no longer or never have supported like Windows 98 or printer issues.

I love my job but some of the things we cannot do to help out are insane. Outlook and Outlook Express for example almost the exact same program, the view/pay bill online passwords that we do not have the ability to change and my personal favorite the fact that we can only change passwords to the capitol letter A followed by the account number.

I can handle being yelled at all day but it is just some of the things we cannot do that bothers me. Or now when we get what is called a “kudos call” we get jack for it. But if the customer calls into corporate and says what a great job we did we get some little piece of paper stating we did good or some crap.

We do not get recognition for a job well done anymore. But as soon as we screw something up we have all our bosses breathing down our necks and telling us what a bad job we did, go figure.

Sorry I started ranting there for a sec. It was a tough night tonight, and the friggin outage still rages on.

Thank you, Cox tech support girl!

If Google Apps enabled a Facebook-like developer system so that you could build on top of Google Apps and leverage your company’s Intranet information (logins, roles, etc).

Some uses I’ve wanted this for lately:

• Add a wiki on top of Google Apps (when is JotSpot on Google coming?!?)
• Add a private bookmarking service a-la del.icio.us
• Simple bug tracking
• Subversion diff logs
• Private company team/member blogs
• Basic project management
• etc, etc

Just as with Facebook apps, the possibilities are limitless.

See this post and this one (inc. comments) for some backstory.

Disclaimer: Vested Interests

I worked on SproutIt’s hosted Mailroom app since their early days.

I would say the target market between Mailroom and Litepost are fairly different.

Mailroom offers:

• a completely outsourced (hosted) solution
• spam protection right out of the box
• 24/7 monitoring for downtime/issues/etc
• great support (shoutout to Peter & the gang!)
• killer 100% AJAX UI (fine work of Charles Jolley)
• a team-based approach to handling large volumes of support@ and sales@ type of repetitive mails
• … lots of advanced features even GMail doesn’t have — i.e. autosaving & later autosuggestion of replies, etc

Litepost offers:

• ability to host the app yourself
• ability to modify the source code ass you see fit
• a typical “gmail for domains” type of approach to webmail where each user gets his/her own account (In Mailroom all mail is routed to a central account, with multiple users picking off their own messages to reply to)
• have 100% control of your mail data and how its stored/archived/etc
• an interesting take on email with the ability to rate conversations for later re-ordering

I’m sure Nathan has more but I’ll stop there. One thing I did notice is at this exact moment, Litepost does not seem to have a way to combat SPAM (unless it is first run through a filter). Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Of course I’m sure SPAM protection is on it’s way for Litepost. Heads up to Nate dog: combating SPAM (well) is a hugely annoying problem to solve and could easily be handled by a whole team of engineers working on it day & night, especially when when these spamf*ckers keep coming up with new & innovative attacks each week.

Nathan’s Reply

In the interest of fairness, here’s Nathan’s reply from Litepost:

Hey Shanti,

Thanks for buzzing me re this. Since the product isn’t remotely finished yet– we haven’t clarified the precise licensing provisions for the software.

Suffice to say, we want to abide by all relevant FOSS rhymes and riddles, and while there may be a tacit request to limit direct competition, I agree with you that this may certainly violate the spirit of open source:

So…I was actually planning on releasing the software under the NSL, Nate’s Software License, but I didn’t know if that would be too abominable or egotistical (to create yet another new license)…

This isn’t finished yet…it’s a work in progress so please tell me what you think of it (!).

NSL - Nate’s Software License v0.1 (aka GPLv4 LOL edition)

PREAMBLE

Software is too easy, free and fun to a) charge exorbitant sums for and b) require complex legal documentation (or indeed ideally documentation of any kind!!).

(Software is like sex and I don’t like getting my sex partners to sign contracts.)

So:

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

1. Litepost is totally free software. PLEASE FEEL FREE to do whatever the hell you want with it!
2. Always use condiments.

END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS

3. Interpretation of Section 1:

*ie, as long as it’s legal, lawful, loving (abiding by all other relevant licenses) and in all other regards respectful and reasonable.

Ideally, you will improve the software and contribute to the community.

Naturally, there are no warranties for software released under the NSL. Please modify the NSL as you see fit and as it suits the situation. Please send any good ones you come up with to me at nathan@litepost.com.

Thanks again for requesting the clarification; I am most happy to give it!

Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, clarifications, advice.

Best
Nate

Good luck, Nate. Competition is always a good thing. If anything, you’re primarily competing against GMail and that is one crazy sonofabitch thing to do!

Just came across this old post on TechCrunch.

The comments were mostly personal attacks & blatant sock-puppetry (TechCrunch should really post an IP hash with comments so people can tell if posters are posting from the same/similar IP Address).

One great comment by a former employee:

1) There was not a core group of in-house engineers working full-time on the product from beginning to end. There was a lot of turn over, which made it hard to keep consistent progress and polish the features.

2) There was a very unrealistic expectation about when the site would be ready. Rather than determining how long engineering would need to produce the product, it seemed that a date was picked and we went forward with it, regardless of the state of progress.

3) Part of the reason a bad deadline was picked, was because the requirements were not flushed out for engineering to determine how long it would take. So, during development, core concepts about about the site’s functionality changed several times.

4) A UI person was not hired to help ensure the site was usable.

Great stuff — To be ignored at the peril of your Web 2.0 startup!

Boy, it sure is easier to make money when you’re playing with $50M in the bank!

I’m up 2.4M after about a week of trading. (not that it couldn’t just as easily swung the other way)

Shorting the home-builders and real-estate related financials has been a huge win. My only mistake was not doubling down harder on the Beazer Homes short-sell. It’s off 34% from when I shorted it.

Current rank: 158 out of 50,000+.

Goal: Top 100

Next up: shorting a few Asian market stocks to get in on the current Asian sell off happening at the moment.

I don’t quite know 100% what the vibe was like in the general “open source” community back in the day (5-10 years ago).

But lately it seems like frameworks and apps (see comments) can’t catch a break. (there are other examples, i.e. people bitching about Rails’ supposed lack of documentation or whining about buying a $39.95 book, etc)

Update regarding Litepost and the comments on Matt’s blog: It was my interpretation that Nathan (a buddy of mine) of Litepost was making a friendly request not to clone his Litepost hosted offering and compete with his company based around his own source code (in that area).

But if he is in fact requiring anything like that, or any other “non-commercial” language, in the LICENSE file under which he releases the code, then I do in fact believe it violates the “spirit of open source” software. The code may be in fact freely visible and available (which would be cool and all still), but it’s generally not what people have in mind re: open source.

So, Nathan, care to clarify?

WordPress Analogy

What made me realize the point many were making was that if WordPress had in fact been licensed under a “non-commercial” license. What a joke that would’ve been. Hundreds of thousands of users would’ve never adopted it, just in case their blog ever became commercial (or for many, had commercial intents from the start). I also happened to build a company on top of WordPress and the efforts of Matt Mullenweg and all of the incredible work done by the WordPress team.

Open Source’s Impact in a Typical Web Browser Request

I’ve only released one open-source project but have stood on the shoulders of countless giants in my programming career.

Let’s take a look at a web request made from a Firefox browser to a RoR-powered site:

Client - Firefox + 15 extensions = all of the Mozilla Firefox team + 15 or more extension developers

Server

Apache -> FastCGI -> Mongrel -> Ruby on Rails -> Many Rails Plugins -> Ruby -> Countless Ruby Libraries/Gems -> Linux -> Countless Linux Libraries -> Open source drivers -> etc

Each of these layers were made possible by a multitude of developers who, instead of writing open source code, could’ve been writing corporate software on contract, working on a startup, playing World of Warcraft / Doom 2 — but no, instead they freely “gave away” their contributions to the community. For that, I salute you, real American heroes of the open source world.

Sure, there are times when an open-source app/framework/etc. doesn’t work exactly right, is missing documentation or has a few bugs. What were you expecting though, shrinkwrap?