Judd Muir

Quick plug: next week, on Oct 19th at 18:00 CET, I’ll be doing a webinar with the friendly crew from CAP: Spanish iGaming 101: A How-To for Affiliates to Launch & Succeed in this Market

Topics to be covered:

1. What & Where does the Spanish Market Encompass?
2. How will the Online Gambling Legislative Changes in Spain affect Affiliates?
3. Who to work with? (What are the Questions Affiliates Need to Ask to Ensure Higher Conversions and Retention?)
4. What are the Most Lucrative Opportunities that will Deliver the Best ROI to Affiliates?

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the CAP Webinar recording

written by Judd Muir

(Gaming in Spain Conference held in Madrid, June 9 2011)

First and foremost, the minister present (specifically, Juan Carlos Alfonso Rubio, Subdirector General de Regulación del Juego) confirmed which games are to be included in the first round of legislation – specifically, this now includes bingo. Prior to last week, it had been thought that they would class bingo under “lottery”, which would mean bingo would have fallen under the national lottery operator ONLY, so this is a good thing. However, slots are NOT included in this first round, so it’s uncertain how they’re going to deal with sites that offer slots alongside bingo (i.e. all of us!).

In terms of time-scale, the legislation is to be finalised mid-July and passed to the EU commission for approval. Applications for licenses are to be made from November 1st, and from Jan 1st 2012 licenses are required to operate in the Spanish market.

Financial highlights:

• Operators must have a permanent presence in Spain, as a Sociaded Anonima (S.A. – i.e. a public limited company) with a minimum capital of 100,000€
• The license application fee is also 100,000€ (non-refundable)
• A bank guarantee of somewhere between 1,200,000€ to 2,200,000€ will have to be lodged when making the application.
• Tax rates are 25% on NGR
• An additional tax of 0.1% on DEPOSITS, to finance the regulatory body (!)
• Taxes are to paid every 3 months, and must be kept up-to-date or license is forfeit

Operational highlights:

• Players’ identities have to be verified via their name, address, and National Identity number at point of registration against a government-held database
• No international shared liquidity
• Software/platforms have to be certified by as-yet-to-be-specified 3rd parties. Two kinds – game software and server security.
• Bonus policies are likely to be controlled, as they are viewed as “encouraging gambling”
• All operators must use .es domains

Implications:

• Operators and their associates (white-labels, marketing partners, affiliates, payment providers, etc) who continue to operate in Spain after Jan 1st will be pursued using all legal means, including blocking of domains and/or IPs at an ISP level. In the case of payment providers, those that accept payments for an unlicensed operator will have their rights to trade in Spain removed
• Any partner/business found working with an unlicensed operator will be legally and financially responsible for the operator and subject to very heavy fines. I.e. it is the responsibility of anyone working with an operator to ensure that the operator in question is licensed, or suffer the consequences. Affiliates are running for the hills…

What’s still uncertain:

• Whether one license will cover multiple white-labels/network portals.
• Whether the bingo software itself must conform to the Spanish bingo definition i.e. draws from a series of 1944 predefined tickets, vs RNG bingo (which I believe is your case)
• Whether servers must be physically located inside Spanish territory
• Legality of slot machines in the period between first round and second round legislation

On the plus side:

• Online gambling becomes legal and “main-stream”, and players protected/reassured
• Advertising is allowed, including on TV
• Um, that’s it. In theory, due to the above two points, the market will grow and we will all benefit…

As you can see, this new law is a game-changer, it has implications for anyone and everyone operating at any level in the Spanish market, is going to be heavily enforced, and is coming into play in a very very short time-frame.

Many thanks to GamingInSpain for organising this enlightening conference

written by Judd Muir \\ tags: igaming, spain

Bingo Rumba launched a few days ago, if you’re following the online bingo scene in Spain, it’s worth checking out this newcomer. Great site, fast loading, and packed with popular games

Now you can follow Bingo Rumba on Facebook

written by Judd Muir

Recently had an issue where everytime I tried to send an email, it was getting rejected by my smtp server. At the same time, it seemed like I was getting a barrage of spam hitting my inboxes, so I assumed I had been hacked.

To cut a long story short, turned out to be that my server had lost its configuration for DNS lookup, and the anti-spam rule reject_unknown_sender_domain was then being triggered! 3 fucking days to work that one out…the following two files should have contained some DNS info:

• /var/spool/postfix/etc/resolv.conf
• /etc/resolv.conf

I used dig to prove that I did not even have DNS lookup abilities. dig is a command-line tool for querying DNS name servers for information about host addresses, mail exchanges, name servers, and related information.

• # get a list of yahoo's mail servers
  dig yahoo.com MX +noall +answer

In the end, I defined Google’s open DNS servers in the interfaces configuration file at /etc/network/interfaces: dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4 (ref : http://wiki.debian.org/NetworkConfiguration#Definingthe.28DNS.29Nameservers)

In the process, I learnt a lot about Postfix anti-spam config:

• A good overview of how Postfix anti-spam works: http://www.akadia.com/services/postfix_uce.html
• For a full postfic config plus comments: http://jimsun.linxnet.com/misc/postfix-anti-UCE.txt
• To test if known spam merchants get blocked: http://www.crynwr.com/spam/ or send an email to nelson-SBL-test@crynwr.com
• Spamhaus: http://www.spamhaus.org/zen/
• And to check if a given email sender is in the block list, pull the sender IP from the full mail header, and run the check http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=85.234.24.52 (replacing IP as needed)

written by Judd Muir \\ tags: dns, myserver, postfix, spam

A Unix machine’s hostname appears at the shell prompt, and is also the name used many of the networking pro-grams to identify the machine.

• To see what the hostname is set to:
  • $ hostname
• And to change it:
  • $ hostname new_name_here

written by Judd Muir \\ tags: shell

Adding folding to CSS blocks in TextMate

(From http://stefan.sofa-rockers.org/2010/07/14/adding-sections-folding-css-textmate/)

Top tip for folding CSS according to comments such as:

/* start ContentBlock */

/* end ContentBlock */

1. Added snippet called “sectionfold” to the Textmate CSS bundle:
   • Bundles -> Bundle Editor -> Show Bundle Editor
   • New Snippet, then paste in the following:
   • /* start ${1:section} */
     $0
     /* end $1 */
   • It gets activated by the tab trigger “sec” (or as you like), and set the scope selector to source.css.
   • 
2. Modify the CSS language definition:

   • foldingStartMarker = '/\*\*(?!\*)|\{\s*($|/\*(?!.*?\*/.*\S))|/\* start \w+ \*/';

   • foldingStopMarker = '(?<!\*)\*\*/|^\s*\}|/\* end \w+ \*/';

   • 

written by Judd Muir \\ tags: textmate

Damned Americans and their illogical data formats…trying to import a 100MB file into MySQL, and the date fields are in MM/DD/YYYY instead of the traditional YYYY/MM/DD that we all know and love…so I turned my hand to sed:

First, a quick test on the command line:

echo “MM/DD/YYYY” | sed -e “s_\(..\)\/\(..\)\/\(….\)_\3/\1/\2_”

=> YYYY/MM/DD

echo “textbeforeMM/DD/YYYYtextafter” | sed -e “s_\(..\)\/\(..\)\/\(….\)_\3/\1/\2_”

=>textbeforeYYYY/MM/DDtextafter

Then let’s let it loose on the file itself:

sed -e “s_\(..\)\/\(..\)\/\(….\)_\3/\1/\2_” test_in.csv > test_out.csv

Took a few seconds to run against a 100MB file

Many thanks to Bruce Barnett for his Sed – An Introduction and Tutorial , an invaluable reference for a neophyte like me

written by Judd Muir \\ tags: dates, sed, Unix

Let’s get the clock ticking for a new project: Hotel Affiliate Club

Thanks

written by Judd Muir \\ tags: projects

I bought an Aspire One about a year ago, the intention being to surf and email from the comfort of my own sofa…so far, it’s been an unsatisfying experience due to the boot process freezing on startup if it’s previously died from lack of battery, and the interminable dropping of the wi-fi connection, not too mention the rather ridiculous Linpus operating system.

A year down the road, and I’m suddenly determined to turn this little thing into something useful, and after doing a little web-research, I’m going to attempt installing Ubuntu Network version onto my Acer Aspire One.

The starting point:

Acer Aspire One model AOA 150. Its an 8.9″ model with the Atom N270, 1GB RAM, and a 120GB hard drive, currently on the crappy BIOS version v0.3114, and the simplistic Linpus OS.

The process:

1. First, I made sure the BIOS was up to date. There appear to be a lot of issues with the earlier version of the Aspire One BIOS, which I was still running. I followed macle’s excellent instructions, with the latest BIOS version v0.3310 downloaded from here
   • Failed at the first hurdle – turns out you need to make sure your USB drive does not have any spaces in it’s volume name….so, rename / remount…start again…
   • …Flash update successful – and yes, a quick system check shows that I’m now running with BIOS v0.3310
2. Right, now to install Ubuntu Netbook
   1. Ok, an obvious step, but first I needed to download it – at 700MB, it took awhile, so I should really have downloaded this before I got started, to avoid thumb-twiddling….
   2. Then I had to root around for a 2GB-plus USB drive to copy Ubuntu onto, then followed Ubuntu’s instructions for creating a Ubuntu-bootable USB drive …which also took awhile..
   3. And finally, plugged in the USB stick into the Acer Aspire One, remembering to F12 to boot from the USB drive, and took Ubuntu for a test run…if I want to install it instead of run it off the USB, there’s a big fat “Install” button on the desktop…
3. Things I’m going to keep an eye on
   1. Wireless connection
   2. Skype webcam – one main usage for my netbook is to Skype my kids in the UK, so it’s essential that the webcam works!
   3. Cisco VPN: sudo apt-get install network-manager-vpnc

Update: I managed about an hour before installing Ubuntu for good and wiping Linpus away for ever. My netbook has never been so happy!

This is a good reference for one man’s journey down this path.

written by Judd Muir \\ tags: acer aspire one, ubuntu netbook

I just wrote a review of two great tools I’ve only recently come across, that are invaluable time-savers for any practicing SEO. Check out my review of Advanced Link Manager and Advanced Web Rankings

written by Judd Muir \\ tags: SEO