You could say “this is a service to watch” but that would be missing the point. Yesterday the ‘Unglue.It‘ service launched as a way to crowdsource the funding of a fee to authors to release their own works under a Creative Commons license.

This is new model that doesn’t have an equivalent in the analog, print world or the existing digital, ebook world. In the analog world, the right of first sale reigns supreme; as a purchaser of the book, you have the right to do just about anything you want with that copy: you can give it to a friend, you can sell it at a garage sale, you can donate it to a library. Since it only exists as a physical object, once you give it up you no longer have access to it.

In the digital world, exact replicas are as easy as clicking and dragging a file to a flash drive, posting it to a website, or e-mailing it to friends. And you still retain the original copy. The concern for this sort of proliferation of copies is why many (most?) publishers insist on using various forms of DRM. DRM is a royal pain in the butt, though, (and publishers know it) because most forms don’t allow you to convert a file to be read across various readers (e.g. from Kindle to Nook). And you don’t really “own” the file; the DRM software “phones home” resulting in cases where files are removed from devices and files that are permanently locked because “home” has shut down.

Enter the Unglue.It model. Rights holders can set a price that, when reached, they promise to release a digital version of the work that is unencumbered by DRM under a Creative Commons License. (The worldwide non-commercial, no-derivatives license is the default.) Readers that want to see that happen pledge an amount that they choose towards the campaign. If the accumulated pledges reach the price by the campaign deadline, readers’ credit cards are charged, the author receives their money (minus a commission fee to the Unglue.It service), and posts the ebook somewhere for anyone to download and read. Rights holders can also offer incentive premiums, such as signed posters from cover illustrators, virtual author visits, and opportunities to interact with the author as they create a new work. If the amount isn’t reached by the deadline, the campaign fails — no one’s credit card is charged and the book isn’t released.

The economics of this are fascinating. Publishers will let titles go out-of-print when they think the market for new copies reaches a point where maintaining the inventory is no longer cost effective. In some cases, print-on-demand from devices like the Espresso Book Machine have filled that void for single copies, but no one is really sure what the value of a work is worth as time marches on. The Unglue.It model enables us to see what the value for some of these works really are after their initial publication by creating a market for wholesale, after-first-run, unlimited copy licenses. It will be interesting to see how these first few campaigns go and how the market settles out.

The Unglue.it funding process serves two very important ends – it helps writers and content providers like myself get paid for the work we produce while at the same time making that work freely available to readers all over the world. No one else, anywhere, is doing anything like this and I couldn’t be more excited about being a part of this ground-breaking launch.

So, rather than to be “something to watch”, go ahead and register at Unglue.It, participate in one of the campaigns or add books to your wish list to encourage other rights holders to join, and see where this new model takes us.

It is time for New Year’s Resolutions, and the new habit I aim to pick up is setting aside some serious, concentrated chunks of time for writing each day. In taking a high-level review of goals and tasks at the end of the year, I found that I was tending to put off writing actions and had a significant number of them that had piled up. So I’ve decided to set aside the first 60 to 90 minutes of the work day focusing exclusively on writing. I know my mind is freshest at that early morning time, so I think it would be possible to knock out some good work then. Here are my thoughts on the process thus far.

Late last year I also encountered the Pomodoro technique of breaking up tasks into 30 minute chunks: 25 minutes of concentrated activity followed by a 5 minute break of something unrelated to the original activity. This makes a lot of sense to me, and I’ve started using the Pomodoro timer Mac application to help keep me on task. I like it because it includes a constant ‘tick-tock’ audio cue that reminds me to stay on task plus it has spoken warnings at various intervals to help you keep track of time. I don’t use any of the interruption tracking or reporting features of the software at this point, although it can be helpful to look back at the day’s activities as I make reports of time allocation for grant reporting purposes. So, for those of you instinctively good at math, my morning writing time would consist of two or three Pomodoro sessions.

My morning routine as encoded in OmniFocus actions

You should review a few things in the morning, but no your email. This is the one thing you won’t find in my Daily Review. I check emails twice a day at 10am and 4pm (if I stick with my principles) and my Daily Review typically happens before I check my emails in the morning. The risk of including ‘Check email inbox’ into the Daily Review, or even worse check it before, is that you can easily be rat-holed by only one email in your inbox and before you realise you have reached the afternoon and lost control a fair bit.

My use of daily task folders actually extends past the morning routine because I have an entry each day that is set to start at 4:30pm and be due at 5:00pm to enter the day’s time allocations in a time tracker. Those start and end times make the task stay out of the way for most of the day and pop up to remind me to end the day with it. (By the way, the “Walkabout” context refers to the name of my laptop, so those are tasks that I can do on my laptop without needing to connect to the internet.)

(I’ll also admit to being unable to break the habit of checking e-mail first thing in the morning for anything important. Perhaps it is just the position I’m in, but others expectations of me means I can’t let some important e-mail go unanswered until mid-morning or later. I have gotten pretty good, though, with being able to turn off new e-mail updates/prompts/alarms and only checking for new messages a few times a day.)

Where I’m stuck at the moment is when I should add the writing block to my morning routine. I definitely need to put it after the “Check calendar” task — there might be entries in the calendar that would supersede the writing block — but I don’t know how far I should let myself get into through the collection stage of the Getting Things Done day. I’ve experimented with right after the Check calendar task, but the inbox tray full of miscellaneous stuff is a distraction — especially after living with the habit of emptying that tray as one of the first activities of the work day for about six months. But putting it as far down as the “Process OmniFocus Inbox” can burn up a lot of time and energy completing the 2-minute actions that I encounter in those collection steps. It is going to take some more experimentation to find the right balance of clearing-the-morning-clutter and concentrated-writing-time before I get this right. Any advice on what has worked for you would be most welcome.

11/22/63Stephen King; Scribner 2011WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
Pluck a string and it vibrates. As it vibrates there are points along the string where it is absolutely still. Pluck a companion string and sometimes those points line up. If you pull that string tighter there are more points of stillness and a greater chance that points will line up. If you pull it too tight, it snaps.

In Stephen King’s 11/22/63: A Novel, Jake Epping is a high school English teacher that plucks the strings of time through a wormhole in the back of a friend’s diner. The wormhole leads to a New England town in 1958, and no matter how many times Jake goes through the scene seems to reset itself back to the same point in 1958. A wandering soul in 2011, Jake takes on the challenge of changing one particular event on the date of the book’s namesake — the assassination of President Kennedy. What happens in the five years between 1958 and 1963 is a masterfully woven story of strings plucked — as he kills a father before that father murders his family, as he saves a child from a hunting accident, as falls in love with a high school librarian — and the unexpected highs and lows as the strings of time line up at those points of stillness.

This is not the typical Stephen King horror story; if that is what you are expecting, you will be sorely disappointed. 11/22/63: A Novel is a story that is infused and lubricated by deep research into the places and collective psyche of Dallas, Texas, in general and the specific people surrounding Lee Harvey Oswald. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this story and feeling the rush of the ending. This is also a story that I can now put aside for a few years and read again to savor the nuances embedded in the narrative. While King kindly signals the obvious points of absolute stillness, I’m sure there are other points of near stillness that are just waiting to be discovered.

Disclosure: I was given a free product or sample because I’m a Klout influencer. I was under no obligation to receive the sample or talk about this company. I get no additional benefits for talking about the product or company.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the House Judiciary Committee markup session for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that have happened over the past two days along with the tweets that have been going out in reaction to the proceedings. One of the running threads in the commentary has been the theory of a correlation between campaign contributions from media creators and a desire by representatives to push SOPA through the committee. (Disclosure: I’ve come out publicly against SOPA.) By tabulating the roll call votes and using data from OpenSecrets.org, there does appear to be a correlation, and one that gets tighter the higher the percentage of contributions from media creators. I’ll show my work below.

Gathering Data

• Vote 1 (discussion ongoing at the start of the video) roll call at 13:53
• Vote 2 (discussion starting at 17:41) roll call at 36:55
• Vote 3 (discussion starting at 40:10) roll call at 54:59
• Vote 4 (discussion starting at 58:00) roll call at 1:16:58
• Vote 5 (discussion starting at 1:43:28) roll call at 2:05:11
• Vote 6 (discussion starting at 2:21:56) roll call at 2:40:42
• Vote 7 (discussion starting at 3:13:49) roll call at 3:34:28
• Vote 8 (discussion starting at 3:38:30) roll call at 4:23:24

For campaign contribution information, I relied on the OpenSecrets.org site, and I was specifically looking at two categories of contributions: those affiliated with TV/Movies/Music and those affiliated with Computers/Internet. For each category, I looked at contributions for the 2011-2012 cycle to a representative’s campaign committee and leadership PAC (where applicable). There are probably other industry categories that could be included on each side and one could certainly look at history beyond the current year, but I think this slice of information is enough to see if the correlation holds true.

Based on the above, my data table looks like this:

(Available on Google Docs and downloadable as an Excel file.)

Now for some assumptions. First, all proposed amendments (and consequently all roll call votes) were for language that weakened SOPA in some way. Second, the difference between contributions from the TV/Movies/Music industry category and the Computers/Internet industry category is a measure of how those industries feel about SOPA. (In other words, there aren’t significant contributions from the TV/Movies/Music industry that are opposed to SOPA and vice versa.)

Results

Contributions versus Votes

Another interesting point, given today’s hyper-polarized political climate, is that the pro-SOPA and anti-SOPA divide was not along party lines:

Party versus Voting Percentage

Commentary

I had heard in news stories that the TV/Movies/Music industries has been courting the members of the Judiciary Committee for a number of years, while the Computers/Internet industries have been relatively late to the game. That might explain why there is a higher voting affinity between supporters of SOPA and votes supporting SOPA as proposed.

A Plug for Rootstrikers

In a blog post last month, Lessig offers an explanation on why he is not visible in the SOPA fight.

I am not at the center of the SOPA fight (though obviously a strong supporter). Here’s a couple sentences why.

First, and again, this is a critical battle to wage and win. SOPA is just the latest, but in many ways, the most absurd campaign in the endless saga of America’s copyright wars. It will be yet another failed attempt in a failed war, and I obviously believe it should be opposed.

But second, and as you describe, this isn’t my war anymore. Not because my heart isn’t in it, but because I don’t believe we will win that war (or better, win the peace and move on) — even if we can win battles like this one — until the more basic corruption that is our government gets addressed. That’s the fight I have spent the last 4 years working on. That’s where I’ll be for at least the next 6.

Lessig goes on to describe and cheer for the efforts inside Congress and outside to make sure SOPA doesn’t become law. Then he ends with:

For this is what I know: We will never (as in not ever) win the war you care about until we win the war against this corruption of our Republic.

The corruption he speaks of is the undue influence of campaign contributions to American politics. He and other similarly-minded citizens have formed Rootstrikers to start a movement in this country to eliminate that influence. To learn more about Lessig’s Rootstrikers project, watch his recent interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, or — for a longer version — his Republic, Lost lecture screencast.

I think Lessig is onto something. If nothing else, the appearance of corruption is enough of a reason to address the fundraising needs of politicians. It would seem, though, that the fundraising need is indeed an unhealthy influence on the daily schedules (if not decisions) of politicians and we need a way to remove that influence. The Rootstrikers proposals seem like a reasonable solution to this problem.

Update

BREAKING: Judiciary has scheduled the rest of #SOPA markup next Wednesday, Dec. 21 at 9 AM EST. #stopsopa #open #dontbreaktheinternet #ip

— @DarrellIssa Darrell Issa December 16, 2011 at 4:48pm EST

What do you suppose the conversation was like after the the meeting ended. I imagine it went something like this:

Media lobbyist:

Hey! You said you were going to run this legislation through your committee and get it to the house floor before the end of the year! What happened?!?

Judiciary Committee Chairperson Lamar Smith:

Well, yeah, that was the plan, but all of these facts kept coming up about how the bill was going to break things and be unenforceable and not actually fix the problem. It was looking bad — I was looking bad — so in the end I said we would wait until the new year when hopefully things will have cooled off.

Media lobbyist:

You can’t do that! I promised my clients to give them SOPA for Christmas. If you know what is good for you you’ll get back in there and make it happen.

Chairperson Smith:

Alright, alright…I’ll call everyone back to the the committee room three days before Christmas Eve and wear down the opponents.

Media lobbyist:

That’s better. By the way, how ’bout I host another fundraiser for you in January. Is the evening of the 6th good for you?

Somebody — please prove me wrong!

Earlier this month there was an amazing groundswell of opposition to SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. I participated in a 1-day anticensorship campaign designed to bring awareness to the proposed law, as did thousands of others around the country. It has been reported that this groundswell of opposition caught many in Congress by surprise.

In an interesting turn of events, SOPA’s parent — the PROTECT-IP Act in the U.S. Senate — may come up for vote on the Senate floor this week. (PROTECT-IP, in case you are wondering, is an acronym for “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011″.) This bill still contains many of the same troublesome definitions and technical issues of SOPA, and it deserves to be blocked as well. Senator Wyden of Oregon submitted a statement to the U.S. House hearing on SOPA warns of severe repercussions to a free and open internet if SOPA and PROTECT-IP were passed, and he has said he will filibuster an attempt to pass this in the Senate.


You, too, can use the form on the Stop Censorship website to ask Senator Wyden to read aloud your name as part of the filibuster act and/or have your name submitted into the official Congressional Record. (I’ve done this myself and have tweeted about it.) I have also used the Contact Congress feature of OpenCongress to register my opposition with my U.S. Senators, even though one is a co-sponsor of the legislation.

Why I Oppose PROTECT-IP Act and SOPA

This is a tough battle, though. OpenCongress has a blog post from last week about Why SOPA and PROTECT-IP Are So Hard to Kill that points to a graphic from the end of a Politico article where writer Jennifer Martinez outlines the careful lobbying and spending by the film, music and TV industries over the past few years to grease the wheels for their goals behind SOPA and PROTECT-IP. These are strong forces behind the passage. I hope the voices of Americans are enough to cause senators to back off passage. If you feel the same way I do, I encourage you to let your state’s senators know of our opinion.

This blog will be participating in the American Censorship Day awareness campaign on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 to show opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R.3261). There is an effort in the U.S. Congress to give power to the Department of Justice to disrupt the domain name service (DNS – the bit of internet infrastructure that makes human-readable things like “dltj.org” meaningful to machines) and order websites and search engines to remove links to targeted services (among other things). This legislation is supported in large part by the content creation industries to “address today’s gravest threat to the American film industry workforce: the illegal distribution of content online.”¹

The Center for Democracy and Technology has as a 2-page overview of why this is bad a bad law:

Why I Oppose SOPA

Footnotes

1. From the Motion Picture Association of America. Citation: IFTA: Jennifer Garnick, NATO: Patrick Corcoran, MPAA: Howard Gantman, Deluxe: Cathy Main, (2011, October 26). Creative Community Hails New Bipartisan House Legislation to Shut Down Rogue Websites that Steal American-Made Content. Retrieved October 31, 2011, from MPAA.

Two phishing¹ attempts made it through the work spam filter earlier this month, and they show the creativity of bad guys as they try to get access to your machine. The attempts at social engineering were interesting enough I thought I’d describe them here. We’re getting pretty close the line where we can’t tell a legitimate e-mail from ones with nasty side effects.

The Fake Bounced Message

Screenshot of a fake bounced e-mail message.

Received: from cyber.net.pk (124.72.91.188) by mail.lyrasis.org (10.10.10.2) with Microsoft SMTP Server id 8.1.436.0; Sun, 16 Oct 2011 06:48:44 -0400

The payload is in the ‘document.zip’ file. I downloaded it without opening it, and uploaded it to the Microsoft Malware Protection Center. It told me that it was a version of Mydoom — an old e-mail worm that installs a backdoor on your computer. Mydoom is listed on Wikipedia as dating from early 2004, so maybe this isn’t all new — but this is the first one I’ve seen leak through the e-mail firewall in quite some time.

Fake Scanner-to-Email Message

Screenshot of a fake e-mail message from a networked scanner.

In short — be careful out there everyone, and if you see something suspicious or unexpected, ask someone about it. (Oh, and keep your anti-virus and internet security software updated!)

Footnotes

1. I think these would be classified as spear phishing as defined by Webopedia: “A type of phishing attack that focuses on a single user or department within an organization, addressed from someone within the company in a position of trust and requesting information such as login IDs and passwords. Spear phishing scams will often appear to be from a company’s own human resources or technical support divisions and may ask employees to update their username and passwords. Once hackers get this data they can gain entry into secured networks. Another type of spear phishing attack will ask users to click on a link, which deploys spyware that can thieve data.”

When Stanford University’s School of Engineering announced its free Artificial Intelligence class last month, the news took the geek world by storm and even worthy of note in the New York Times. The initial news articles made it sound like another example of open educational resources — a movement popularized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to put course materials and recordings of lectures online for anyone to use. But with registration for the class open and more details posted on the class homepage, I’m not so sure.

To start with, here is a sampling of articles describing the class:

The course is an experiment in an idea called massive open online courses, where anyone with an Internet connection can take classes without paying tuition. The professors are recommending that students buy the class textbook, which is co-written by Mr. Norvig, and dedicate at least 10 hours a week to the course, which Stanford considers an intermediate-level class that requires some mathematical and programming knowledge.

- Stanford U. Offers Free Online Course in Artificial Intelligence, by Jie Jenny Zou, 2-Aug-2011, Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus blog

Stanford has been offering portions of its robotics coursework online for a few years now, but professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig are kicking things up a notch (okay, lots of notches) with next semester’s CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. For the first time, you can take this course, along with several hundred Stanford undergrads, without having to fill out an application, pay tuition, or live in a dorm.

- You (YOU!) Can Take Stanford’s ‘Intro to AI’ Course Next Quarter, For Free, by Evan Ackerman, 4-Aug-2011, IEEE Spectrum Automaton Blog

Dr. Widom [chair of the computer science department] said that having Stanford courses freely available could both assist and compete with other colleges and universities. A small college might not have the faculty members to offer a particular course, but could supplement its offerings with the Stanford lectures.

There has also been some discussion at Stanford about whether making the courses freely available would prove to be a threat to the university, which charges high fees for tuition. Dr. Thrun [professor and instructor of the AI class] dismissed that idea.

“I’m much more interested in bringing Stanford to the world,” he said. “I see the developing world having colossal educational needs.”

- Virtual and Artificial, but 58,000 Want Course, by John Markoff, 16-Aug-2011, New York Times

Curious about the class (to brush up on my AI undergraduate class two decades ago and to experience how Stanford could conduct an online class with so many people), I was one of the several tens of thousands that signed up for more information. On Friday evening I got an e-mail with a link to register for the class. I’m also one of those people that sometimes actually reads the terms of service before agreeing to them. That is where I found this:

KnowLabs, Inc. (collectively, “we,” “us” or the “Company”) has developed the Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course website (registration available at the entry-point URL http://www.ai-class.com) (the “Class Site”) and the accompanying videos, course materials, exams, homework assignments, forums and other related documents and services related to the class (collectively with the Class Site, the “Online Course”) that is available subject to the terms and conditions described in this document and any other guidelines, rules or licenses posted in connection with the Online Course, including the general Terms and Conditions of Use. These Beta Terms and Conditions of Use (“Beta Terms of Use”) apply to the first class offered on the Class Site, or any website maintained by the Company which is designated as a “Beta” area.

We will provide you with, and you desire to receive, the first publicly available access to the Online Course on a non-commercial basis (i.e., “beta” access) to assist us in developing and evaluating the Online Course prior any commercial release of the Course (“Initial Course Offering”); provided, however, that your participation in the Initial Course Offering and/or use of the Online Course is subject to your compliance with the Beta Terms of Use set forth herein and the general Terms and Conditions of Use (collectively the “TOS”). Your continued participation in the Initial Course Offering and/or use of the Online Course evidences your agreement to be bound by the TOS and constitutes a legally binding contract between you and the Company.

- Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Beta Terms and Conditions of Use, accessed 5-Sep-2011 and snapshotted here

Now this sounds more like an internet startup than a university experimenting with a new form of course delivery. In fact, if you go back to the New York Times article, you learn a little more about KnowLabs: “Part of the instructional software was developed by Know Labs, a company Dr. Thrun [professor and instructor of the AI class] helped start.” Know Labs is not listed on the home page of the course, but it is listed on the registration page.

There isn’t much to be found about KnowLabs. The domain was registered to Sebastian Thurun on May 20th. A Google search for KnowLabs brings up:

• a blog post by Seb Schmoller in the U.K. that wonders about the role of Know Labs.
• a blog post by George Siemens that wonders how the course will be taught.
• a website called mangrin.org that contains the same splash page as the KnowLabs site.
• the LinkedIn profile of David Stavens, Co-Founder, CEO at Know Labs. Know Labs is described on his profile as an “angel funded startup to re-envision and revolutionize education using the social web and mobile apps. We launched www.ai-class.com and attracted over 130,000 students in 190+ countries.” He was a research assistant working as a member of Prof. Sebastian Thrun’s research lab.

So here are my questions:

1. The Terms of Service make no mention of Stanford University and the Frequently Asked Questions make no mention of Know Labs. What agreement exists between Stanford and Know Labs? Who owns the intellectual property created for this class?
2. What material (lecture notes, videos, etc), if any, will be openly available after the course?
3. Are there statements anywhere that distance this experiment from the open educational resources movement? There seems to be confusion in the press that the Stanford AI class is some form of OER, so clarity here would be welcome.
4. Are the Introduction to Databases class and the Machine Learning class experiments going to use the same platform with Know Labs with the same conditions?

Mind you, I see nothing disagreeable with the terms of service, and still completed the course registration. I just wish there was a little bit more transparency in the relationship between Stanford, the instructors, and Know Labs.

O’Reilly Media — my favorite technology publisher — is offering a contest in which they are giving away $500 worth of books from their catalog. To enter, one must post a public wish list to books, e-books, and videos from the O’Reilly catalog and send the URL to O’Reilly using a web form. As long as the total of all the items on your wish list is less that $500, you’re entered. The deadline is 11:59pm PST on Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2011, and the sweepstakes is limited to U.S. residents only.

These are the books (all in EPUB ebook format) on topics that I’m interested in or would like as reference works.

• Confessions of a public speakerScott Berkun; O'Reilly 2010WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
  
• 25 Recipes for Getting Started with R: Excerpts from the R CookbookPaul Teetor; O'Reilly 2011WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
  
• An Introduction to Testing Web Applications with twill and SeleniumC. Titus Brown, Gheorghe Gheorghiu, Jason Huggins; O'Reilly 2007WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
  
• Enterprise cloud computing: Building Applications and Infrastructure in the CloudGautam Shroff; O'Reilly 2009WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
  
• Cloud security and privacyTim Mather; O'Reilly 2009WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
  
• Complete web monitoring: Watching your visitors, performance, communities, and competitorsAlistair Croll, Sean Power; O'Reilly 2009WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
  
• Google Analytics: Understanding Visitor BehaviorJustin Cutroni; O'Reilly 2010WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
  
• Google SketchUp: The Missing ManualChris Grover; O'Reilly 2009WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
  
• Head First PhysicsHeather Lang; O'Reilly 2009WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
  
• Head first statisticsDawn Griffiths.; O'Reilly Media 2009WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
  
• JavaScript Patterns: Build Better Applications with Coding and Design PatternsStoyan Stefanov; O'Reilly 2010WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
  
• Learning UML 2.0 (Learning); O'Reilly Media, Inc. 2006WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
  
• Mining the social webRussell, Matthew A. computer scientist; O'Reilly 2011WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
  
• PHP: the good partsPeter MacIntyre; O'Reilly 2010WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
  
• Programming Amazon EC2Jurg van Vliet; O'Reilly 2011WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
  
• Web Operations: Keeping the Data On TimeJohn Allspaw, Jesse Robbins; O'Reilly Media 2010WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
  

The list totals $418.84 for the ebook versions of all of the titles. (I don’t think it is cheating to select the less expensive ebook versions; the EPUB versions are perfect for reading on-screen, searching within the books, and copying code snippets.) This post uses the WordPress Open Book Data plugin to pull information from Open Library based on ISBN and link back to the O’Reilly catalog (via the publisher name in the above list; link to the O’Reilly Media catalog entry are a requirement of a contest entry).

I don’t think I’ve mentioned O’Reilly Media on DLTJ before, but they really are my favorite technology publisher. If we were to focus on just their book publishing activities, I like how they offer free errata updates to the ebook editions. Earlier this year they announced how they retroactively went back and improved the formatting of their ebooks. Sure, it was a relatively simple thing to do, but they offer the updated editions to previous purchasers for no extra cost. That really encourages customer loyalty (and another reason why I’d like the ebook editions, should I happen to win the sweepstakes).

Beyond their book publishing, though, they are the force behind Make Magazine (all about making stuff), Ignite events (five minute talks using 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds), O’Reilly Radar (insightful blog posts), and the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) conference. Many of the artifacts from these activities are posted freely online.

By the way, neat idea for a contest. Doing it this way probably generates a lot of Google Juice to O’Reilly items.

I just got the bill for the first month of hosting this blog on Amazon Web Services. The total for the month was $23.60, and includes:

• data transfer charges for all in-bound and out-bound content;
• a full-time use of a LINUX micro-sized Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance (with backup to the Elastic Block Store (EBS));
• a Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket for static files (Cascading Style Sheet and JavaScript files, images, and other media); and
• use of the Amazon CloudFront content distribution network.

All told, I’m pretty pleased with the costs — particularly as I was considering the amortized cost of buying a new server to replace the one I had been using for the past five years. The itemized bill is included below.

Given the success and satisfaction level with this project on Amazon Web Services, I’m going to commit to a year-long “reserved” EC2 instance that drops the hourly cost for the instance even further. Based on running an instance continually for 732 hours per month, the cost for the EC2 part of the bill drops from $14.64 to $9.62. (The monthly total of $9.62 comes from $5.12 per month for the hourly charge plus one-twelfth of the annual $54 charge to reserve an instance.) Assuming the rest of the variables stay constant, that is $18.58 per month or about $220 per year.