Amazon on Pieter Viljoen's Blog

Amazon Associates Account Closed

Wed, 31 Aug 2016 17:55:07 +0000

Amazon just notified me in email that my Associates account was closed due to not being in compliance with their operating agreement:

“You are not in compliance with Participation Requirement Number 29 because purchases resulting from Special Links on your site have been used for resale or commercial use.”

I have no idea how or why this happened.

A couple of years ago I moved my blog from the free Blogger platform to a paid WordPress.com hosted site. About the same time I signed up for an Amazon Associates account, profiting from any Amazon links resulting in sales, hoping that the proceeds would cover the costs of WordPress hosting and domain registration.

Looks can be deceiving

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 05:28:00 +0000

It has been almost two weeks since I switched to using Blogger’s new dynamic template.

Browsing the site with the new template works really well; it uses most of the available browser real estate, it looks good on an iPad, it feels nice and fluid, but it also has problems.

For some reason my AdSense integration stopped working, and the AdSense site said my account needs to be verified. AdSense was working fine in the old template, so something in the new template, or switching to the new template, must have triggered this. I’ve had AdSense for almost a year, and in that time I’ve not even made enough for Google to trigger a payment. In order to verify my account, I had to enter a PIN they mailed me on a postcard, enter the amount of a test transfer in my bank account, and enter a PIN read to me on my phone. Two days after the verification steps were completed ads started showing up again.

Zotac ZBOXHD-ID11 4GB RAM

Wed, 19 May 2010 02:46:00 +0000

In this post I describe my experience while upgrading the BIOS, in order to support 4GB of memory.

This is the third post in a series of posts related to the Zotac ZBOX ZBOXHD-ID11.

Summary:
- 4GB is supported after upgrading the BIOS.
- BIOS has to be updated using less than 4GB, else ID11 fails to post.

[Update: 20 May 2010]
After writing this post, the machine started bluescreen / BSOD crashing.
Mostly MEMORY_MANAGEMENT / 0x0000001A errors, with occasional 0x000000BE and 0x0000003B crashes.
When I initially installed the 4GB RAM, I ran memtest for one cycle, and the RAM tested fine. I just reran memtest, and it is reporting the memory as bad.
I replaced the memory with a new stick, I ran memtest overnight, and everything seems back to normal.
I hope it was just a bad stick, and not the ID11 that killed the memory.

Hitachi Ultrastar and Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB drives

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:54:00 +0000

In my previous post I talked about Western Digital RE4-GP 2TB drive problems.

In this post I present my test results for 2TB drives from Seagate and Hitachi.

The test setup is the same as for the RE4-GP testing, except that I only tested 4 drives from each manufacturer.

Unlike the enterprise class WD RE4-GP and Hitachi Ultrastar A7K2000 drives, the Seagate Barracuda LP drive is a desktop drive.

The equivalent should have been a Seagate Constellation ES drive, but as far as I know the 2TB drives are not yet available.

Western Digital RE4-GP 2TB Drive Problems

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 02:16:00 +0000

In my previous two posts I described my research into the power saving features of various enterprise class RAID controllers.

In this post I detail the results of my testing of the Western Digital RE4-GP enterprise class “green” drives when used with hardware RAID controllers from Adaptec, Areca, and LSI.

To summarize, the RE4-GP drive fails with a variety of problems, Adaptec, Areca, and LSI acknowledge the problem and lay blame on WD, yet WD insists there are no known problems with the RE4-GP drives.

Power Saving RAID Controller (Continued)

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:20:00 +0000

This post continues from my last post on power saving RAID controllers.

It turns out the Adaptec 5 series controllers are not that workstation friendly.

I was testing with Western Digital drives; 1TB Caviar Black WD1001FALS, 2TB Caviar Green WD20EADS, and 1TB RE3 WD1002FBYS.

I also wanted to test with the new 2TB RE4-GP WD2002FYPS drives, but they are on backorder.

I found that the Caviar Black WD1001FALS and Caviar Green WD20EADS drives were just dropping out of the array for no apparent reason, yet they were still listed in ASM as if nothing was wrong.

Amazon Unbox on x64 Vista

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 03:41:00 +0000

While shopping on Amazon I noticed that they were offering the Pilot of the Showtime series Nurse Jackie in HD for free, so I decided to give it a try.

The install (version 2.0.1.95) went smoothly, and the 1.3GB download also completed pretty quickly, and I watched the show.

Ok, now I wanted to stop the Unbox player service from running and terminate the tray icon application, I have no need to have it running all the time.