Over the weekend, my ftp client was scraped by a Chinese trojan for access to my web sites. This was a pretty good trick as I wasn't on the computer the whole weekend because of the Olympics. Now I had passwords stored on the family computer in the kitchen which wasn't the smartest thing to do but hey, who knew?

Sunday night I was on the phone with my business partner and he was all of a sudden, hey what's up, the website is down! So I get on the phone and check with the hosting provider and every web site I own (or have access to) is getting knocked out.

So yeah, that's when I learn that there are Chinese trojans that scrape your PC looking for ftp clients like pureftp, coreftp, etc and if you store your passwords on them, they scrape 'em.

Then, once they get a hold of your passwords, they ftp in your account and download the virus that gets triggered if you use php in your website (and pretty everybody on Linux runs php on their web servers).

All yesterday, I was writing up tickets for web host support, trying to get all my web sites restored from backups. The clients sites got up first, with this blog not getting restored until early evening. So now you know why I was down yesterday.

So how do people know the Trojan is from China? Well the servers that load the virus (you can track the IP addresses in Apache logs) originate from China. Maybe in a few years, they will get as sophisticated as the Russians, who first write Trojans to get  PCs (outside their native country) acting  as 'bots for them.

I do know that the Chinese trojans are really annoying a lot of guys trying to make some coin on the internet. I've see (and used) block lists of Chinese IPs addresses, which basically deny access to your website to any computer that originates from China. That's how much of a pain these Chinese scrapers have become.

In the meantime, I have been resetting passwords on all my websites and making sure to NOT store them anywhere on the computer. Fun, fun, fun.

Well, if you don't know it yet, the 2010 Winter Olympics start in Vancouver tomorrow, or today by the time you are reading this. And not only does the family of Prepress Pilgrim live in Vancouver, we live right in the middle of Vancouver, like Main and King Edward, which if you Google-map, you will see we are pretty well dead-center in the middle of metro Van.

So I yanked the kids out of school this afternoon so they could watch the Olympic torch relay. At first they were so excited they could hardly contain themselves, but then they realized that watching the torch relay meant leaving the house and not playing games on the Wii. So a bribe was in order....

Umbrellas! Yes, here on the west coast, we bribe our kids with bright shiny new umbrellas. Then we take their pictures with a crappy $99 camera from Wal-Mart.

Anyhow, we make our way to Cambie Street near 19th Avenue, where the torch runner is to arrive at approximately three o'clock. We are to rendezvous with an elite battalion of youth ninjas, of which my oldest son aged 8, is a member. Of course they are disguised as:

Wolf cubs ie junior members of the boy scout organization. You see, they have to be disguised otherwise they would freak out the neighbourhood. But really, they are ninjas. Honest.

In the above picture, there is a ninja in full camouflage garb. See if you can spot her.
Anyway, we stake out a spot on the sidewalk and patiently wait. Well, the boys wait patiently but my daughter, who is training to be a supermodel, decides to put on her best impersonation of Naomi Campbell and throws a hissy fit. (No pictures taken).
Okay, so finally they close the road and my middle son can no longer play chicken with incoming SUVs. But it is the torch? No...what is it? Oh my goodness, it's... it's...

The Olympic torch relay procession sponsors!!!

Let me tell you, nothing symbolizes the games more to me than the sponsor wagon, complete with free swag. Except that I was holding on to a wailing 3 year old girl (not in picture), so I couldn't run forward and grab one of those groovy free Canada flags.

By the way, the first sponsor wagon was Coca-cola. Grab a coke and a smile. I'd like to teach the world to sing. Drink New Coke. Nobody paid me to write the last paragraph.

Now the second sponsor wagon was RBC, or Royal Bank of Canada.

Now I wouldn't say that RBC is smug or anything like that, but their new company motto is: "Yes, we are solvent because we didn't let crackheads or people on welfare take out mortgages like some *cough* American *cough* banks."
Anyhow, after the sponsors trucks moved on, they opened up the road to traffic and my middle son could start playing chicken with cars in the passenger lane again.
Finally, another procession, this time it's the real deal:

I get pumped, I tell my kids that this is once-in-a-lifetime-event. Not to be missed. And the wifey then tells me that Rachel needs to go pee. Now. Fortunately, there is a Starbucks on the other side of the street, and it's easy to jaywalk when the only cars on the road are police vehicles. Alright, we hustle over to the green mermaid, do our business, and hustle back just in time to get the snaps:

And here's a closeup:

Now we'll have two weeks of road closures and an inability to order sushi from our favorite restaurant because of the out-of-town curlers scaffing all the raw tuna (the curling rink is about 4 blocks from our house).
Wouldn't miss it for the world.

More posts to come.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I exchanged emails with a Kodak field that I knew from waaaaay back, like the 1990s. He was always field while I was always product development. Usually when we talked, that meant something had gone really wrong. Trust me, when things are running smoothly, the product guys and the field guys never talk.

Anyways, it went something like this:

He sends me an email "Look here Pilgrim..." and points to a funny Youtube video. I email him back asking if he is still working at Kodak and...

"Yes, I am part of the thin blue line that remains. For now.
I was telling someone the other day that it is actually kind of an adventure now. Like a computer game of survival. To see how long one can last as a functioning worker before one is fired, laid off, hired away, falls into a tragic downward spiral of drink and recreational drugs, or is driven past the point of endurance to an irreversible psychotic break. Last one standing supports the Prospero."

And I say:
"I have you in my dead pool for the month of March. I hope you don't take it personally."

Him:
"Certainly not! I welcome Death's final, icy embrace. But I must inquire how you calculate such odds"

Me:
"Easy. In the last week of February, I make a post that craps on Kodak management (again) and mention what a close personal friend you are.
In March, you get canned. Power of the press m'boy. Or in the case, behold the awesome power of the Prepress Pilgrim blog."

Last word to him:
"Hmph! I'm not going to be a sucker for a rigged game. It will never work. Kodak management knows perfectly well I have no friends. Besides, I am confident they would never be so petty and vindictive to a loyal worker who bears the red and gold badge embroidered upon his Made in China service uniform."

Hah, it was great talking to them. That's one of the things I miss, is shooting the breeze with the field guys. Pretty well all of them had a good sense of humor and enormous balls, especially the workflow specialists.

Anyhow, this brings (somehow the preamble above was a bridge, trust me on  this) to the matter at hand, Kodak's last quarter. Like no kidding, they made money. No matter how they made money, that's a nice achievement for a company that won the Motley Fool worst stock of 2010 contest. I mean,  I'm right there dumping on Kodak with all the other vultures, but people are saying its worse than Fannie Mae?

There's lots of buzz saying that too much of the profit is coming from patent licensing deals and if you put that aside, there's really no growth in revenue. This is really bad, according to those financial experts with the shiny shoes and the fancy degrees who have really shown John Q. Public how clever they are in the  last few years, what with the financial crisis and all.

On the other hand, you know, if you actually own Kodak stock, it's nice to know that Samsung is paying Kodak $450 million in licensing revenue this year. Nice work if you can get it, and kudos to the Kodak suit that got that deal signed. Hey, if I ever called you guys a bunch of pinheads, I take it back.

So far, the stock has bounced back to $6, and the Motley Fool grumps have sarcastically noted that's the same price that it was 40 years ago. Sure it is, but Kodak paid dividends up until this year, and why don't you get the list of the Fortune 100 companies from 40 years ago, and tell me today how many of those guys are even in business?

Kodak's been trying to go digital since Clinton's first term, and the jury is getting awfully hungry and wants to get this over with and go home to see the kiddies. Honestly, some people just want Kodak to go bankrupt just to see the end of the drama show.  But unless the forecasting is waay off, it looks like we're gonna see Perez at the end of the year, taking shots from the analysts all over again.

Looks like I'm going to do lousy in my dead pool this spring. But hey, wait until autumn.

By the way, the niece and nephew are visiting and they brought the cat. It's a very quiet, child-friendly cat, except that at about 3 a.m. it gets the urge to wage a battle to the death with the living room carpet. I guess what I am trying to say is that I didn't get much sleep last night.

And oh, last evening the virtual private server of my client's main money site went down for a couple of hours. Awesome, I love going to bed with a thudding headache. And right now some supplier wants 2k up front for a SAAS  (software as a service) package. Um, no  you'll supposed to soak me after I get hooked on your service, not before.

Oh hey, were was I vis-a-vis this blog post, after explaining why my brain is numb. Oh yeah, spray-on-liquid-glass. No, it looks really cool. Probably the most interesting thing you'll read today.

I would go home and sleep, but the cat and kids are there. Maybe somewhere in this coffee shop, is a dark corner where I can lay up and have a nap.

Insane traffic over at Tech Crunch which is covering the release of Apple's tablet, the ipad. I've ripped off the latest news just in case you have trouble accessing the site:

Steve Jobs revealed the Apple iPad today, its much-awaited tablet computer (see our live notes). Jobs positions it as a third computing device between a laptop and a smartphone geared towards the “key tasks” of Web browsing, email, sharing photos, watching videos, playing games, and reading digital books. All current iPhone apps will run on the device, as well as new games and digital books designed specifically for it. An enhanced iPhone SDK released today will support both the iPhone and the iPad.

"Some specs: The device has a 9.7 inch display, weighs 1.5 pounds, and is half-an-inch thick. It is powered by new chip made by Apple itself, a 1 GHz A4 and will come with 16Gb to 64 GB of storage. It supports WiFi, has an accelerometer, compass, and built-in speaker and microphone, just like the iPhone. The screen is a full capacitive multi-touch screen. Battery life is supposed to be 10 hours. And it will cost $499." - Courtesy of techcrunch. Thanks guys

The iPad also comes with a new app called iBooks, of which there is absolutely no information about on the internet (yet). If you go to ibooks.com you'll see it's owned by a domain squatter who even now is probably getting a letter from Apple's legal representatives (give us the domain name or we kill you).

What is the ibook format? PDF? Ah, that would be interesting as we all know the printing industry runs on PDF. Probably not, as copy protection in the PDF is easily hackable so not very attractive to Apple. Still, the market has been missing an ebook reader/tablet that can give a nice visual presentation of colored PDFs and now the market has it.

The magazine publishers and newspapers are probably lining up at Apple's door trying to get their stuff in ibook format, whatever it is. As for printing? Well, this has been coming down the pipeline for quite awhile. What is your strategy for adapting?

UPDATE: Popular Mechanics liveblogged the event and has more info.

Only youtube video I could find of the event was a 41 second clip courtesy of NY Post. Oh well.

M-bossed did a blog listing his top 10 print blogs. There are some familiar ones there, like Gordon's Quality in Print, and the group bloggers at PrintCEO. There are also some  print blogs I've never read before, like the dieline, a blog for the packaging printers (the pictures are gorgeous, by the way).

There was also a mention of  the tough love for xerox blog, which I've peeked at every once in awhile. I don't follow it that much because he does talk mostly about (guess) Xerox and while Xerox is my favorite digital printer, I'm not obsessed with it. On the other hand, Michael (the tlfx owner) is getting into Twitter a bit and its fun to watch that.

There are two blogs that should have been on my list but weren't (in my opinion, of course). One is the venerable and authoritative Prepressure and the second is Poor Richard wordpress blog. I'm suspecting that Laurens of PP got bumped the list because he has prepress in his URL?

But I'm not surprised that Poor Richard is left off the list since the guy writes beautiful essays but never links to other printing blogs so nobody knows about him. I know that smacks of cronyism but hey, I don't spend all day searching Google for other blogs that write about printing and prepress. I usually find out about blogs in one of two way: 1) They link to a story of mine and I get a pingback (notification somebody linked to me) or 2) I'm reading a familiar blog and hey, they mention a blog I've never heard of before. Let me be blunt on this: If you don't do the linky-link with other blogs of your ilk, you're not going to get the traffic in the long run, unless you bang out beautiful essay day after day. And that's hard.

However, I don't think Poor Richard gives a bleep anyways, as he is too busy running a real live print shop, as opposed to Prepress Pilgrim who spent way too much last week trying to configure a virtual private server for an upcoming client site migration.

And try as I might, there was no way I was going to make a semi-interesting blog post out of THAT adventure, hence this blog post must suffice.

And now we will take a pause from attempting to write reasonably amusing blog posts to focus on the logistics of building and maintaining a web site. You may click away now.

Prepress Pilgrim was the first web site I ever built, apart from a blogger account (now closed) and some weird pay-for-hosting account that had the world's ugliest templates but promised to make you lots of money by advertising (it didn't). Since starting Prepress Pilgrim, I have built about 60 or so web sites, give or take a dozen. A great many of those web sites were "thin" sites, only 3 or pages, and more than a few have been discontinued ie not ever worth paying the $10 a year domain renewal fee.

The first sites I built for myself were an attemptto make money using Adsense and Clickbank and Ebay and a bunch of affiliate programs most of which I've dropped and forgotten. A lot of websites I built never made me a dime. But not all were failures.That's the beauty and wonder of the internet. There is stuff that people are not interested in, even if you think it's interesting. Then is stuff that other people find interesting and you wonder why. THEN there is stuff that people are so interested in that they buy stuff off your site or at the very least, they click on ads.

I've built some sites with very little time and effort that make money with only a few hours effort a year. Not a lot of money, but some. And as the years go by, little bits add up.

Additionally, by word of mouth, word gets out and people ask you to build websites for them and of course you get money for that. Now, building websites for people can be a real low-margin business. It's not just printers who are cheap, every small business out there watches costs like a hawk. So if you are not careful, you can get stuck building a $3000 web site for $300.  But not always.

Time passes. One day you log into your chequeing account and all this internet stuff that you are doing is no longer a hobby, no longer a dream. You're paying the mortgage, or at least you're paying the mortgage this month.

Prepress Pilgrim is not a money site for me. Well, not a serious money site. But it's still very useful to me as it's a good "authority" site and my most visible presence on the internet. For example, I can't remember the last time I sent out a resume. You want to know me, professionally, you read my blog. There's hundreds of pages of copy here, enjoy.

Another useful thing that this web site is good for is experimentation. Whenever I see a groovy new plug-in for Wordpress or I get the twisted urge to edit some php code, I don't do it first on my client sites or my money sites. That's right, it gets done here. Of course, that means that sometimes Pilgrim is at risk of going boom-boom, which happened at least twice in my first year of operation in this site. And it nearly happened last month.

Recently I developed the urge to build a large site. Really big, like thousands of pages. You can do that with database-driven web sites like Wordpress which backed by the MySql database. You find some good data and munge it into a CSV (comma separated values) file and use a special plug-in to import the data into Wordpress and voila, you have just created 3000 new pages. In this case, I uploaded parts and supplies numbers for pretty well every darn inkjet and toner-based printer since the Apple Laserwriter,

This was an experiment and it worked, sort of. I mean, the web site didn't blow up. But it wasn't a perfect experiment by any means. For one thing the posts entries didn't get a category assigned to them. This is important, as the entries won't get catalogued unless they are assigned entry and furthermore, unassigned posts don't make MySql very happy, or so the error logs were telling me. Thus, I had to spend more than a couple of hours going through each and every post to assign it to the proper category.

Secondly, the plug-in that generates the sitemap for Google indexing basically threw up its hands and packed it in when it was faced with the prospect of indexing 3000+ pages. After a little bit of poking and editing of the php.ini file, it would generate a XML that was corrupt. Fortunately I was able to find an another sitemap plug-in that did work but some damage was done. According to Google webmaster, this blog has about 6000 pages but only 350 were considered worthy of being included in the Google index. Before the plug-in blew up I had over 450 pages included in the index. But now that the sitemap is valid, the number of indexed pages should go up.

However, because Google is only indexing about 10% of my blog, that does raise another question: How can you actually find stuff on the blog? Like for example, if you are looking for HP C5069A ink cartridges, there's no way somebody's going to go the HP category and spool through the 500 entries on HP looking for that particular yellow ink cartridge. People want a search box so they can type in the part #, and away they go.

However, it's well know that the default Wordpress search box is not-so-good, so I replaced it with the Google engine about a year ago which worked pretty well. But with the parts catalogue loaded up, it's wasn't going to cut it anymore. So again it was back to the Wordpress plug-in library to install the search unleashed for Wordpress which has a module that will scan every last entry in the MySql database for whatever string you type in the search box. So you type C5069A and bang, it's right there in the search results.

Now of course, before being able to do that. I had to do some database maintenance and run an "optimization" script for the MySql database and build an index but hey, there were plugins for that too and I even read some of the instructions instead of charging ahead and pushing every button that I could find, which is my usual procedure.

All in all, the web sites now works reasonably well, no more MySQL hiccuping and the site comes up in the browser reasonably quickly, and if somebody want to actually order some parts or supplies off the website, they have a chance of finding it.

Mind you, there is still a ton of work to do. It would an interesting exercise to rearrange the linking structure within the web site to see if I could get more of the catalogue entries indexed in Google. And I only uploaded half of the database. That's right, there are another three thousand entries that I could upload if I ever get the courage to do so.

Mind you, why there is such an incredibly variety of inkjet and toner printers out there is almost worthy of another blog post in itself.

So anyways, if you were every wondering how much work there is behind the scenes at a web site like Prepress Pilgrim, now you know.

Thread over at Printplanet about Adobe killing the Print Service provider program.
Lots of people not too happy. Dov Isaacs, to his credit, is jumping in and speaking for Adobe. Good for him, too many vendors that sell to printers don't actually, you know, communicate with printers on forums when tough decisions have to be made.
Dov's been around for years and actually knows the printing business, which puts him head and shoulders above the usual marketing drone that try to "message" in this business and get their heads bitten off as a result (not by me, of course, I am always sweetness and honey).
Okay, enough of the Dov-lovefest. Printers are complaining that Adobe is pulling the rug out from underneath them. So are even threatening to move back to Quark. Dov, to his credit, did not giggle when Quark was mentioned. But he did say that basically the Adobe Print Provider membership was dropping off and so was revenue. Which allows me to grind my axe ask this question: When are we going to see a printer arbitrage program that leverages media buys on the internet?

Let me explain: So Adobe had the Print Service Provider program. HP did Marketsplash. Even Quark got in the game. All the same idea. You go to the HP/Adobe/Quark website and look for a printer or for some printing to be done. Whatever, now two out of these three program are dead (Yeah Adobe's program was more than printing services arbitrage but don't stop me, I'm on a roll) and nobody is thinking Quark's thing is going to last long against Vistaprint.

Why did these program fail? Well, nobody visited the web sites, I guess. Okay, so what was the plan to drive traffic to the printing arbitrage websites? AFAIK, there wasn't one. Or there was one, it was a secret plan that never made it to light of day.

Okay, so maybe these programs would have worked if the web sites had generated a high amount of traffic that converted to leads for Jim and Jenny's medium-sized print shop down the street. In case you missed it, most leads for printing come from the internet now. You don't believe me? Try bidding on the keywords "business cards" or "poster printing" on Google search or Bing! I tried last year for some affiliate program and stopped when the bidding got to $5 a click.

You just can't get leads off the internet for print business in any type of volume unless you got the dollars to negotiate for media buys with Google, Yahoo, Facebook, 360pulse, and all the other ad networks out there. So I don't get why these guys didn't think of lead arbitrage. You know, buy traffic and send it to the local printer and put in some tracking and charge for either raw clicks or lead conversions. The system wouldn't be simple to implement but not impossible either. Remember, I'm talking about Adobe, Quark and HP, you know there's got to be somebody in those companies that may know a little bit about coding.

Ah well,  a lead arbitrage network for printers will come along one day, it's just a mystery why it hasn't come already.

I last wrote about digital picture frames here. Slowly but surely they are gaining market share, but of course one barrier is usability.  Like my Mom loves getting pictures of the gran- kids but is not one to set up an electronic picture frame so that its ready for action.  The market needs a digital picture frame where you can just email it pictures. Why hello Kodak Pulse 7-Inch Digital Frame.

This is a great gift for geeks to give to their Moms because you open up the packaging, configure it, re-package it and send it off. Then when you have a new picture of the kiddies, you can email it to her. Awesome.
Mind you, you just don't have to buy it for your Mom. Let's say you have a girlfriend, you could buy it for her and email pictures of you so she is always reminded of the one she loves. Then, if she breaks up with you, you can email pictures of you drinking with the boys and whooping it up and having a good time, just to show that you are over her.
Wait, did I just write that?
Anyhow, Popular Mechanics liked the Kodak Pulse too, it was one of their picks at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas.

So seriously, how do they know that's the name of my frickin' blog? It's obviously some sort of localization algo, as they are showing queries that are relevant to Canadians in prepress, but how did they know to show my blog as #1.  It's not like I feature a lot of Canadian content either.

The server that host this blog is based in Vancouver. But even so, so what?

Creepy.