A few months ago, I had a discussion (read argument) with some more left-wing friends (full disclosure: I'd like a 30% smaller, highly localised state, with the rich paying for everything) about the Tobin Tax. A tax to be levied on a small percentage of the value of every foreign exchange transaction. Apparently this will stabilise the FX markets, making incidents like the Asian currency crisis less likely.

Any decent sized website that sends emails needs a way to keep its email addresses up-to-date. The standard for doing this is Variable envelope return path (VERP). With VERP, we send a unique id in the Return-Path header of every email. If the mail's bounced, we pick the id out of the To: header and invalidate the associated email address.

Oddly Django doesn't seem to offer this.

Having spent some quality time with SMTP whitelists lately, it's occurred to me that all these lists exist to do is costly signalling. In my experience, all that getting added (or being removed from) a list takes is a polite note confirming you're real and have a reason to send bulk mailings.

Rather than giving money to ReturnPath, why not have charitable whitelists. A single tax-deductible bank transfer (no stolen credit cards please) to your chosen charity, a quick sanity check by their staff (or Amazon Mechanical Turk) [call the phone number, visit their site, etc] and you're listed.

If you want to offload your static file hosting to CloudFront, have a look at the snippet below. It's currently powering we20.org. You'll need to adjust it to your own file layout.

Requires s3-cmd.

First we need pre-gzip our content. [CloudFront won't do it for us.] Then have the script grab our svn rev number and push all our content to S3 in a folder of that name. We need to have the rev. number in the URL, as CloudFront can take up to 24hrs to refresh content from S3.

Having your own office phone system can be huge asset, but commercial systems are often limited or expensive, and the free solutions have their rough edges. These are my notes from re-building our office PBX. Hopefully they'll save someone some time.

"Dear Customer, your computer is probably compromised and several criminals probably have full access to your all your accounts. Neither me, nor my company are particularly concerned. It almost certainly doesn't matter, and will never affect you if we do our job properly."

This is the conversation everyone who does finance online would, if they were honest, eventually have with their customer. It's one we avoid, which is hardly surprising! Customers do not have a conception of somewhat, mostly, or subject to conditions, secure. Things are secure or not.

This is mostly a response to James Gardener's posts, so you might want to read them first. This was written with a high degree of ignorance about actual bank cost structures and revenue streams, so criticism is both welcome and deserved

Yes, I'm a total tourist and went to Starbucks on Najing Dong Lu.

Chilled Dumpling

But I did get to sample Starbucks Chilled Mango Dumplings, individually wrapped in a single leaf. Which you don't get in London (yet). For the record, they're gelatinus and refreshing!

Shanghai Street

Back on the 24th