It has been six years since Kabir and I started Tool Navy.  Go us!

Being able to search your shell command history (CTRL+R) is a prime example of the power of the Unix-style shell.  Just sayin’.

I just came across this nice article entitled “Getting Around Amazon’s Post-Order Price Guarantee“.  They were kind enough to mention (and recommend!) C3 so I thought I would pass it along.  If you are a Digg user, you should Digg the article.  Camelspam is good spam.

Found another one!  Read the review entitled “LinkLinkLink“!  And another here.

I ran across an interesting problem with Amazon ECS (the API provided by Amazon for helping them sell their products) today.  It seems that they have (suddenly?) decided that certain products are too good for ECS and that data on such products will not be available.  If you try to use ItemLookup to find the Wii Fit, for example, you get the following result:

<Error>
<Code>AWS.ECommerceService.ItemNotAccessible</Code>
<Message>This item is not accessible through ECS.</Message>
</Error>

Same thing for the Wii and likely countless other Awesome Products.

This, to me, seems indicative of two things.  One, Amazon is continuing its long slow march to the shithouse.  And two, Amazon is trying to force websites like camelcamelcamel to scrape their site instead of, you know, using the API like one is supposed to.

A constant tightening of the rules by Amazon is likely to have one result – the end of the Amazon Associates program and, with it, the beginning of the end for Amazon itself.