As you all know, I recently created an AMI which allows a user to instantly launch a Magento ecommerce site using Amazon’s Cloud Computing Technology. So that brings me to two very different points (I should probably break this into two posts):

Point 1: Magento Rules the Ecommerce World

Magento is now more popular (at least more visited/searched) than other major open source ecommerce web applications (Checkout Google, Compete). Currently, I believe Magento is leaps and bounds above any other ecommerce system out. If you don’t agree, I urge you to show me a more fully featured, open source ecommerce system.

Point 2: My Personal Backup is still Jungledisk

I’ve been developing with Amazon’s AWS services for about a year. They’ve really been leading the development of “cloud computing” applications. Their API’s are pretty straight forward and although I have a few complaints, it’s a pretty nice system.

The Amazon S3 Network (which allows you to store data on Amazon’s cloud) has been my latest love. Amazon’s “pay as you go” pricing model makes it competitive even when you compare it to a DIY project.

After checking this out, I wanted to start running my personal backups onto Amazon’s S3 network. I thought I’d have to develop something but then I found JungleDisk. JungleDisk is a Windows and Mac backup system that stores all of your data on Amazon’s S3 network. That means, if someone steals my laptop, all of my data would still be safe. JungleDisk currently costs $20 (one time fee) and Amazon’s S3 network costs me about $6 per month for around 40GB worth of a data.

I’m real happy with JungleDisk and I’m proud to recommend them. Its automated, fast, reliable, and cost-effective. But, they have a few things that they should be worried about… They were recently bought out by Rackspace (Amazon’s cloud computing competitor). Although you can choose to use either Amazon or Rackspace, I’m usually scared to commit to a vendor unless I know their future intentions. I hope things aren’t going to change (JungleDisk claims nothing will change), but you never know. Also, JungleDisk has a very strong competitor in Mozy (Bought by EMC which also claims nothing to will change due to their buyout). Although I have used the mozy system, I stuck with JunlgeDisk b/c of it’s performance and the Amazon’s S3 network. But now, Mozy only costs $5.00 per month! For $5.00, its definitely worth trying. I’d love to hear your thoughts on Mozy and Jungledisk.

My recommendation: personally, I don’t care which backup system you use. You can continue to use 3.5″ floppy disks… but please… please… PLEASE BACKUP. I once had a client pay $10,000 for data recovery. Seriously.

      

Check Out the Original Magento Amazon AMI Here!

I wanted to setup a magento store and compare it to a number of competitors. But, to get the thing launched, you need to customize your server. I didn’t want to modify our server because I wasn’t sure if I was going to like magento and I didn’t want to make unneeded changes to the server.

So, I decided to make a new instance on my amazon EC2 account and build a new server.

I spent a ton of time looking for an existing AMI for Magento. After I didn’t find one, I set out to build one. I built an AMI that has Magento 1.2.1.1, CentOS 5.2, PHP 5.2.9, mysql 5.1.

If you want to check it out: download The Original Magento Amazon AMI.

Good luck and let me know if you need anything.

      

“Crisis Boosts the Learning Curve” on 12/31/2008 by Tom Keene on Bloomberg Radio

Tom was discussing the popularity of news coverage. He discussed that due to the the financial crisis, more people are interested in the news.

After hearing Tom’s statement I really thought about how much I learn during any crisis. I came to the conclusion that this is why so many people say you learn more from failure than success.

In the year and half of law school, I’ve learned (and remembered) more about law when there is some type of crisis than I have in class. In the 7 years of running my own business, I’ve learned more during our “times of crisis” than I ever did by reading a great book or college course.

I learn more about my friends and family when we disagree than when we agree.

Think about it.

      

I laid out over 18 goals for last year. I accomplished less than half. I tell you that just to let you know that I’ve laid out even more goals for this year. Just because you do not reach your goals, doesn’t mean that you should not make goals.

      

This past Saturday I went to my brother’s house in Missouri. My sister and her fiance are huge UFC fans and so she rented the UFC 92 paper fight. Just for kicks I went on my online sports book account to look up odds. I noticed that I had a whopping $10 in the account left over. So, I picked a fight with big odds and I thought you guys would be interested in seeing how this works.

I previously posted a note on how boxing odds work but this gives a real world example.

This is what you would have seen before the Nogueira v. Mir fight:

Antônio Rodrigo Nogueira -325 vs. Frank Mir +250

What this says is that if you pick Nogueira and he wins, you would need to bet $325 to win $100. But, if you pick Mir and he wins, you would need to bet $100 to win $250.

So, I picked Mir for $10 and I won $25. This time last year that would be 25 double cheeseburgers at McDonald’s.

Questions

1. What is your favorite sports book site?
2. What are the laws for me gambling in Arkansas over the internet?

      

I never buy anything with cash. For the last 5 years, I have tried to make all of my purchases using a credit card or debit card. This requires me to enter the transactions into my personal finance software (I use Quicken). If a transaction is in Quicken, I can easily run reports to view where I’m spending my money.

Since I never use cash, it does me no good to have it. If cash is on me it gets wasted on something like:

• vending machine candy
• gas station food
• girl scout cookies
• etc etc etc

About three years ago, I emptied a huge “Orange Juice” bottle. The orange juice bottle sits in my closet and every day when I get I home, I dump any spare change into it. Now, when I say spare change, I’m talking about any literal change or dollar bills that happen to be laying in my pockets. Sometime I drop ten-dollar and twenty-dollar bills, but typically its just singles or change.

Last month I decided to empty it and take it to the bank. I dropped the change in an automatic change-counter and deposited the bills. It worked out to almost $300.00. Now that isn’t a ton of money but it was a nice surprise. I didn’t work for it; It’s like reaching into your pocket and finding $300.00.

You Should Try It
This is an easy task. Just go out and purchase a nice piggy bank. If you don’t want to purchase a piggy bank, do like I did and empty a big orange juice (Sunny Delight) bottle. I know a lot of people like to have cash on hand but the truth is: you don’t NEED cash. It is almost an unspoken rule that businesses must accept credit cards (or debit cards) and even if they don’t, you always have an ATM near by.

      

Audio File for SEC Bans Short-Selling
(1 minutes 37 seconds)

Last night the SEC put a ban on short-selling 799 financial companies. Read the Official Release Here (PDF).

From my understanding, here is the SEC’s reasoning behind banning short-sells:

Due to a horrible real estate market more people are foreclosing on their homes. This has had a tremendous ripple effect. We have seen financial stocks lose a ton of value.

As traders noticed the uncertainty in the financial markets they freaked out. When people freak out, panic rules the stock market, not fundamentals. Short sellers take advantage of the sell off by selling stocks they don’t own. This causes the stock to lose even more value.

To put a halt on this, the SEC ruled to freeze short selling on 799 companies. This freeze will allow the market to stabilize and THEN they’ll turn short-selling back on.

Although the move by the SEC to ban short-selling has had a positive effect on the market (up over 1,000 points in 2 days), it also comes with some horrible side affects or at least some BIG questions.

1. Short-sellers make money by realizing that stocks are over-valued. If they aren’t in the game, the stocks could be WAY over-valued. What is the real value?
2. When you re-initiate short-selling, there is no guarantee that the market has stabilized. What happens when you allow short-selling?

My Predictions

1. Although short-selling is due to start again on October 2, 2008, it will be extended due to the political effects of a down market (It looks bad on the president if the economy is in the gutter).
2. Stocks will rally and continue to rally until short-selling is allowed again.
3. When short-selling is turned back on… we will see a major sell-off.

Due to surge in stock prices, options have become a very popular investment strategy. View my “Options” post here.

Personally, I can’t wait for short-selling to be allowed again… I’m going to be short a ton that day… I’ve already got my shopping list ready.

      

Audio File for Feedburner, Wordpress, and the RSS Feed
(1 minutes 37 seconds)

For you Wordpress and Feedburner users:

I’ve been a long time fan of Feedburner. But one day, my feed magically broke. I recreated the feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/RjMartinosWebLog) and pointed it (rjmartino.com/wp-rss2.php).

Then, as I started creating new posts, I realized that nothing was being sent to feedburner. When I viewed my feedburner page, it was BLANK. When I logged into Blogline, my feed was blank.

I checked the Original Feed Validity. It checked out just fine…

I checked the FeedBurner Feed Validity. It checked out just fine.

I even re-synced… nothing.

I searched forums and found a guy named Rajasekharan at http://www.mtherald.com. Rajasekharan had fixed the same problem but he didn’t list the fix. So I visited his medical transcription blog, found his email address, and shot him an email.

He was really helpful. He explained that when he setup his feedburner feed, he gave the URL of his original feed (ie http://mtherald.com/blog/wp-rss.php). As he later found out, that was the blunder.

After changing the RSS feed to the correct URL, http://mtherald.com/?feed=rss2. It was solved.

I did the exact same thing. I set feedburner to look at http://wwww.rjmartino.com/wp-rss.php. The feed should have been set to http://www.rjmartino.com/?feed=rss2.

After changing the setting, I “pinged” the page using http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/ping, and a few minutes later, my feeds showed back up!

      

A typical day In our business… Replace “Boss” with “Client.”

What is your favorite Dilbert strip?

To view Dilbert Cartoons, go to http://www.dilbert.com.

      

Audio File for LiveValidation.com Review
(1 minutes 12 seconds)

For you web developers:

Finally… with all my extra time during the summer, I’ve spent more time coding.

I’ve always had a “I can do it better” coding style. I can think of hundreds of times that I’ve seen a piece of software (or code) and said, “I can do it better.” Then I go out and sure enough, I do it better

The problem is that I spend hundreds of hours doing it.

Just recently I needed a form validator. The form validator simply needed to verify that two different passwords were typed correctly. Although server-side data validation is required, its ugly. Server-side validation requires a user to hit a submit button and wait for a response. I wanted something that was real-time… So, I reminded myself how much time I waste trying to recreate the wheel and I set out to find a solution that was client side (preferably JavaScript).

And I found it… I’ve started using LiveValidation.

LiveValidation is a javascript library that provides form validation on the fly. It’s open source and completely free. You can find a ton of examples on their site. And if you can’t find an example, LiveValidation has well-written documentation (something that is hard to come by these days).

Good Luck