Want to install a specific piece of software?

Think portable. More and more software is available in a portable version. Notably, PortableApps.com has an ever growing collection of them (and they’re most if not all free as in free speech). With some portable software and in some environments, you’ll want to rename setup files to some other name not containing the word “setup” (yes, there are some administrators who think they can prevent you from installing stuff by blocking executables named “setup” or “install”). Some software isn’t distributed in a portable version but can still be made portable: for instance R can’t be found as a portable package, but if you install it at home and copy/paste the folder where you installed it, you’ll have a perfectly working R for your USB stick… or for work.

Need this cool Visio/[insert any commercial software there], but it costs money and needs a long request that may never succeed anyway?

Think Open Source Alternatives. For instance Osalt.com is a directory of commercial and open source software, which for every piece of commercial software lists the commercial counterparts. For instance you’ll find that Microsoft Visio can be replaced by Dia, StarUML or even… OpenOffice Draw. And the great thing is, most of these exist as portable apps (see previous chapter).

Want to keep your privacy when browsing around the internet?

This part is a bit more complicated. First you need a proxy with an encrypted connection. For this you can set up OpenSSH at home on Windows or on Linux, or for a faster connection on a dedicated server. Anyway we won’t detail this part (for instance on Ubuntu server you should have everything already properly set up right after installation) and we’ll assume you managed to get this proxy with SSH support. Now we’ll see how to connect to it, from Windows:

1. Get PuTTY
2. Launch it using a command like putty -D 9990 -P 22 150.127.5.5 where 150.127.5.5 is the IP of your proxy (it can also be a domain name resolving to this IP) and 22 is the port on which OpenSSH is listening on your proxy. You should create a batch file with this command to make it faster for the next times.
3. Now configure your browser (e.g. Firefox portable edition) to connect through socks proxy 127.0.0.1:9990
4. If using Firefox, in about:config configure network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true (the default, false, means that any domain name you query will be sent unencrypted over your company’s network…)
5. Everything should be set up and working now, but you may want to check your IP to be sure you’re going through your proxy.

We’ll see in a later post how to configure PuTTY in the case where your company forces you to go through an HTTP proxy. For the moment, that will be all, folks.

… but, remember

You’ll still be vulnerable to key or screen loggers, and also your network admin will be able to see that you’re surfing through SSH, even though he won’t see what’s inside it. So stay reasonable!

=> First summary: I got an ad e-mail saying I’d get 100€ of free advertising without anything to pay (the e-mail clearly stated that the 5€ activation fee could be deducted from the 100€ offered), in reality I got 110€ of advertising credits but paid them 10€

Here goes the campaign, not too hard to set up (the “easy” mode is what made me waste a lot of time at the beginning, and now that I switched to the “Standard Edition” – ie the edition not for retards – I have a nice undismissable sticky polluting my Account Snapshop page – see screenshot), and running smooth at start: over 50,000 views within the first 12 hours.

Something that struck me, though, is the very high default CPC: if you use the noob-mode campaign set up, it’s around 0.69€ (which, as of today, is pretty close to 1$). But even though I lowered it to 0.10€, the ads displayed fast… at first…

I also chose some keywords to display the ads on some relevant Google Search result pages. Wiki4Games being a video game wiki, I notably chose “video game wiki” and “video games wiki” as keywords. Our current position to these keywords is around 4-5 (see screenshot), over more than 22 millions other results.

Adwords gently complained that my max CPC bid was a bit too low which would result in a bad placement and fewer impressions, still I got over 75,000 during the first day, then 50,000, then a bit less, and then it fell to almost nothing – less than 900 today (with no impression on Google Search, only impressions on the Adsense network). And the worst part is, Adwords claim my keywords are irrelevant. More precisely, they became irrelevant: during the first days, my keywords were rated 7/10 (one of them was even 10/10). Since 2 days, they are rated 2/10, that’s right, my website is in the top 5 over 22,000,000 results for this keyword yet the keyword is irrelevant!

So is Google irrelevant or am I too cheap for them? I guess I’ll have to increase my CPC bids and see if my relevance increases too… I’ll then see if Google violates the very web neutrality they made so much ado about, or if Adwords just sucks at keywords…

PS: and I forgot to mention, my second ad (pointing to a page about Dune) has been pending for review for 5 days, and counting…

Update on July 31: Dune ad still pending review! (a month and a half after submission!)
Update on Aug 29: The Dune ad was finally approved, at some unknown point in August