Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

Today, as I was reading an article on Nascar.com, I noticed a banner on the left margin. They were toting "Celebrating 5 years of caring". Well, I don't think I took that how they wanted me to, but I see that as "before then, we didn't care at all". Seriously, how do people at these marketing companies get jobs? That's a terrible message they're sending, which for a charity shouldn't be tolerated. Surely someone other than me can see the negative side of this message. Usually, I like Nascar's advertisements. This time, I almost found it offensive. Really, if you didn't care in the past, cover it up... don't flaunt it.

I made my first widget the other day. One line of JavaScript and I now have sale items showing on my blog here in the margin. It only changes every 5 or 10 minutes right now (memcached is beautiful, no?), but it should scale well because of that. With the way that our affiliate program works, it would be really easy to create about 5 of these for affiliates to embed along with the tracking image, then control the actual content on our end. I think I'll make a few config options first, like titles and colors, but it should be useful.

Servers. Gotta love 'em. I know I do. It's been a while since I posted up some hardware to keep my geeky friends drooling, so I thought I'd show a few pictures of our hardware setup now. The first picture is our server room, which I haven't featured before. Top to bottom: Tape backup, the server that had our inventory / accounting system on it before (now just file storage for the most part), our old dev box, our internet gateway box (XML interface between our site and our system as well as a firewall / NAT system), a Google Mini for ProperPet, the KVM switch for these servers, 3 dev servers for the sites (1 dev, 2 staging to mirror our setup downtown), the UPS for those 3 (which barely shows up with some green lights), the keyboard and monitor for it, our ACD server, and the big Dell box that powers our system now with its battery right below. That's a decent amount of hardware for one cabinet, but it's not nearly as dense as our environment downtown. This is o...

Eventually, every ecommerce company hits the crossroads where PCI compliance goes from being a nice to have to being a need to have. Of course, those in charge say everyone must be compliant regardless of size, but who are they trying to fool? They're not going to waste time auditing someone doing $10,000/year online. Hackers probably won't waste their time on those people, either. The part that makes compliance tough is the moving target. Come July, there are a whole new batch of standards that merchants need to follow or risk huge fines. Not only that, they could possibly lose their ability to process credit cards. I doubt that, though, or someone like TJX would have lost their card processing abilities. Personally, I'm in the middle of buying application firewalls. That sure beats pushing everything through a third party code audit if you ask me, but either is very pricey. So, do any of you reading this have any opinions on app firewalls? Good brands? Bad? Features? Reli...

If you're interested in web design and in the Omaha area, as so many of us are, there is a local meetup you may be interested in. Check it out here . Heather, the organizer, seems like a nice gal that just needs a little bump to get this thing going, so I thought I'd give it a mention here. It's great to see another local meetup in the online space. It compliments NPMMO nicely.

I was playing around with Kontera tonight, and decided to check a few pages to see what gets displayed. Let me tell you - some of these are funny. Yes... I've always wanted a review of how nice it is to have herpes. Or maybe I haven't. How lovely. Saving money. What is this, a discount in Vegas? Too weird. Wow, I never realized that smarter.com was an adult site. Here I thought they were shopping related. ;)