Horas and konnichiwa untuk semua

Don’t use AdWords, you waste money by paying the lazy giant Google.
It cited “rapid growth” as the cause of 19 days it took to respond to my complain. Yeah, I can as well say my body was healthily resting and growing so I overslept and kept my customer waiting.. so silly.
And it tried to make me do the work that they should be doing. Who is the one paying here?? Even regular person can search the web and find out that we carry legal music from their respective music labels. Ironically, this shows that even Google staffs don’t become smart on searching. Perhaps it is time to move on, search is past, what’s next? BTW, the ad was running perfectly happy on Facebook, and I am convinced that Facebook advertising is much better than Google Adwords, in term of price, exposure, GUI, etc.

Here is the mail exchange (mail address concealed):

Never mind.

I suggest you to see our site http://www.streamsation.com
and contact by yourself the music label companies. Use
also your favorite search engine (is it Google??) to search
the news of our site launch together with the label companies.
I don’t have time to prepare docs to convince you, since
I am paying money to you to get this advertised, so it is your
job to do the investigation. How come you just sit on your
desk and tell your customers to do the work that you should
be doing. Don’t charge customers for your lack of knowledge
and unwillingness to work to find out whether we are legal or not.

Tell me how to claim my money back.

——-
Arnold P. Siboro (**@**.jp)

2010/12/21 AdWords Support :
- Hide quoted text -
> Hello Arnold,
>
> I apologize for the delayed response. Google AdWords is experiencing rapid growth, and we’re doing our best to respond to all email requests within 24 hours (Monday to Friday). Thank you for your patience.
>
> I’ve reviewed your account and confirmed that it has been disapproved for being in violation of our Copyright policy. At this time, advertising is not permitted to promote the copying or distribution of copyrighted content for which you don’t have consent from the copyright holder and which is not otherwise permitted by law.
>
> Arnold, I understand that you claim to have authorization to promote copyrighted content on your website. Please note that we won’t approve your ads without receiving documentation of the authorization, such as a .pdf version of the complete and signed licensing agreement that grants you distribution rights. To allow us to re-review your ads, please reply to this email with a copy of your licensing agreement.
>
> Thanks for your efforts to comply with our policies Arnold.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Manoshi
> The Google AdWords SEA Team
>
> Original Message Follows:
> ————————
> From: **@**.jp
> Subject: 不承認の広告
> Date: Thu, 02 Dec 2010 08:44:19 +0000
>
>> I don’t understand why you said our site promotes illegal distribution of
>> copyrighted materials? We carry legal songs from their label companies,
>> whose logos are at the bottom of the site.
>>
>> AWCID: 595-272-1174
>> AutoDetectedBrowser: Google Chrome 7
>> AutoDetectedOS: Intel Macintosh OS X
>> IssueType: disapprovals
>> Language: jp
>> Login_Email: **@**.jp
>> Topic: disapprovals
>> ad_group_name_req_1: Campaign #1
>> adsl:
>> campaign_name_req_1: Campaign #1
>> disapproval_reason: others
>> displayedAnswer: 14073
>> experiment: 1
>> first_name: Arnold
>> last_name: Siboro
>> origin: cluster
>> source: cuf
>>
>
>

At least currently, Google mail’s capacity grows at 4 Bytes/second. You can watch it grows on login screen like below:

I previously wrote that I need additional 4GB per year. At the rate of 4B/s, in a year there will only be an increase of 4B x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365 = 126.1 MB Hopefully there will be rate ups from time to time.

The other day I was given this link which tells about Yahoo Indonesia and a research company announcing their research on Indonesians’ online behavior:

Internet, Kita, dan Masa Depan

http://cetak.kompas.com/read/xml/2009/03/27/03024518/internet.kita..dan.masa.depan.

I am a bit skeptical about statistics like this, since research companies like AC Nielsen, IDC etc often lack the knowledge they need to analyze the market. They are already famous so they dig lots of money, though their research staffs lack the knowledge to analyze the market.

So I decided to find out by myself.

I took Facebook as my target, as Indonesians are said to be crazy of Facebook and my observation shows it is true. I wanted to find out how long is an Indonesian online on Facebook everyday. Just logging in into Facebook makes one’s status online. I thought I needed to check who among my friends on Facebook that get online and when. I decided to use Adium, since it has Facebook client and senses when a friend becomes online. I thought Macruby would be nice since it has Cocoa natively, but after trying for a while I thought it was too much to learn and I only got a few hours. I turned to AppleScript, which is also new to me, though I used to be programming on HyperCard, its predecessor. I finally coded the stat tool in a few hours using AppleScript, Adium and Growl. Growl is only used for visual feedback, because the script must be running throughout the whole data gathering session.

The next day I ran the script and gathered the data from 7:30AM to 17:30AM West Indonesia Time. I got quite consistent results, as follows:

1. Around 25% of my Facebook friends (more than about 99% of them are Indonesians) went online that day
2. Average total online time among friends who went online that day is about 60 minutes (i.e., 1 hour)
3. Standard deviation is high (around 60), indicating that total online time varies a lot among friends
4. Average total online time for the whole population (which includes those who did not go online that day) is about 15 minutes

My tool has room for improvement indeed (e.g., I am polling once every 60 seconds, so users who went online and offline in between pollings won’t be noticed), and the sample for this statistic is too small compared to the population (the sample is 259 friends, and the Indonesian population on Facebook is around 800,000 users, according to Facebook Ad). But at least this shows that there is a good probability that 200,000 Indonesians (i.e., 25% of 800,000) are online on Facebook every working day during working hours;)

Now I wanted to know what would be the result if I measure during the night (off-hours) and during weekends. This might give some insights on whether there are significant mobile users logging in into Facebook. In Japan, more users use mobile to access Mixi, a Japanese SNS, than PC. By the way, Mixi was made by an (former) Indonesian named Batara Kesuma

No, sorry, this is not April’s Fool. I really did the above research

Here is the AppleScript code. Comments are welcome but be gentle, as this is my first AppleScript script and I coded it in a few hours. I originally wrote the data to file, but then changed the implementation to use Sqlite, so some garbage is still in the code.
(more…)

I have been having this strange problem that decreases productivity and increases stress level: the MacBook Pro would start up with a little less than 1GB of free disk space, instead of the usual 2GB to 3GB, and then it gradually decreases as I use the MBP, and then it will quickly comes to about zero free disk space and I have to reboot.

I am not sure what did I install that causes this, but before this memory has been a problem too. So I browsed around and found out that extra RAM for MBP is not as expensive as I thought (yes, I have been ignorant). I then upgraded the MBP from 2GB of RAM to 4GB, an increase of 2GB, and voila, MBP suddenly starts with 2.7GB of free disk space! I didn’t delete files, so it seems that MBP has been paging or doing something similar that uses around 2GB of disk space from the start. Now with 4GB of RAM, it does no longer need to do that, so I don’t only have more memory available but also more free disk space.