Monthly Archives: January 2010

Parrott AR.Drone, The Ultimate iPhone/iPod Accessory

Hardware

Parrott have just released the Parrott AR.Drone, a four bladed helicopter or quadricopter, which is controlled by an iPhone or iPod Touch. They utilise the motion sensitive nature of the Apple products to make controlling it intuitive, with the connection handled through WiFi. It gets better though, much much better – the AR.Drone has two video camera’s, one is used by the quadricopter to aid in flight, the second streams in real time straight into the iPhone or iPod Touch.

No pricing has been released for it yet but if they can manage to make it even passingly affordable, I can’t even begin to imagine how many of them they are going to sell. While everyone thought that micro-helicopters and planes about the size of a deck of cards were incredible – the AR.Drone and its derivatives are taking that to a whole new level.

WordPress Upgrade

Blogging, Software

The WordPress development team released the next major update for the popular blogging platform, version 2.9 on the 19th December 2009 – code named Carmen. With it came over 500 bug fixes and enhacements from version 2.8.6 which was the previous latest build available.

When the WordPress team release a minor revision, moving from 2.8 into the 2.9 version space I like to wait until the next point release has been made before upgrading. Normally a raft of very subtle issues will arise when it hits the community and millions of people are using it instead of only tens of thousands.

On the 4th January 2010, WordPress devlopment team released version 2.91. after going through a beta and a release candidate which included about 25 bug fixes and enhancements over the initial 2.9 release.

Instead of doing a standard upgrade, which involves me taking a databae backup, unpacking the WordPress source and uploading it – I instead opted for a completely clean installation. This time around, I still took the backup (good practice) but instead of just uploading the source code – I deleted everything first and then uploaded a fresh copy of WordPress – which mean no extraneous files laying around.

At the same time I’ve gone back to the standard WordPress theme for a short period of time and installed a raft of very popular WordPress plugins to make things run a little more smoothly. In the next few days, I’ll be moving back to my old theme and will update my own WordPress plugins to make sure they work with the latest version of WordPress.

2009 Traffic Statistics

Blogging, Websites

Following on from my 2008 web statistics, below is a summary of what traffic the site took in 2009.

In 2006 the site took about 95,000 visitors, increasing to 145,000 and declining to 135,000 respectively in 2007 and 2008. In 2009 the site took 106,930 visitors over the entire year which resulted in 136,525 pageviews. It’ll come as no surprise that from a traffic driving potential, a lot fewer people are interested in reading about my personal ramblings compared to technical style posts that I used to post.

While last year saw a couple posts catch a moderate amount of attention and punch through the metronomic rise and fall in traffic each day, in 2009 none of my posts really got any traction within the greater internet. Not surprisingly traffic did start to decline towards the end of the year, however I’m happy that it wasn’t obliterated like it was last year when I moved web servers within the same host.

The traffic breakdown, just like in 2008  shows the complete dominance that Google has within the web search market. Yahoo! are still the first non-Google search engine and is still delivering approximately 2.5% of the traffic the they were in 2008. The latest addition to the web search ecosystem is Microsoft’s Bing, which sits at position five. Of course, that isn’t a fair comparison since they haven’t been around for the entire year. If you count Bing, Live and MSN together they drove about 1750 visits for the year putting them in at fourth however by the end of May 2010 I expect Bing to have delivered 2000 visits – narrowing the gap against Yahoo!.

The most popular posts for the year were similar to 2006, 2007 and 2008 but with a few newcomers:

  1. Select Option Disabled & The JavaScript Solution
  2. Disable Options In A Select Dropdown Element
  3. Oracle RETURNING Clause
  4. HP Laserjet & Windows Vista Driver Support
  5. ORA-04030: out of process memory when trying to allocate <x> bytes

Removing those posts from the top of the list since they clearly dominate, changes things a little:

  1. Making HP Laserjet Printers Work In Windows Vista
  2. Oracle Dynamic SQL Using The DECODE Function
  3. ASP Error ‘ASP 0104: 80004005?
  4. ORA-06552: PL/SQL: Compilation Unit Analysis Terminated
  5. Australian Idol 2006 Contestants: The Real Contenders

However still none from 2009 were showing up in the list. Isolating the posts written in 2009 and the landscape is vastly different:

  1. Apple iTunes Store Account Signup Process Needs Work
  2. Windows Vista Business Double Clicking On Single Click
  3. Best Home Phone Plan & Telstra
  4. Apple iTunes Account Verification Has Poor Usability & User Experience
  5. Gold Coast Beach Weddings Are Spectacular

I find it telling that my two gripes about the quality of the Applie iTunes account sign up process are within the list. You’d assume a company with a market capitalisation of nearly USD$200 billion would have such a visible component of their business highly polished but it just goes to show everyone has their problems. Having a home phone plan comparison post residing at position three is just more evidence that the consumer is becoming more savvy by researching online, even when purchasing offline.

Onward and upward for 2010!

Danger, No Break Lights

General, Travel, Work

Earlier in the year I came very close to having an accident when the car in front of me had his break lights reversed. This meant that breaking turned off his tail lights – thus making red lights meaning go, no lights meaning stop. This afternoon on the way home, in a very very similar stretch of road I nearly came unstuck as the minivan in front of me had no break lights whatsoever.

I was heading west on Smith Street, approaching the intersection and traffic lights of Kumbari Avenue and was increasing speed heading down the hill. The lights had been green for a little while so the dozen or so cars in front of me were all accelerating, due to the decline, green light pressure and the faster speed zone on the other side of the lights. With less than 50 metres before we cleared the intersection, the car in front of me decided to break suddenly as soon as the light went amber – when the car to his left and four more went through on the orange.

Had at least one of the minivan’s break lights been working, I would have slowed down with plenty of time to spare. However, it took another fraction of a second before I closed enough distance to realise he was breaking and aggressively.

Fortunately, I allow a little more breaking distance when driving my Ford Telstar; which has a striking similarity to a small tank and even smaller breaks!

2009 Blogging Statistics

Blogging

At the end of last year, I posted the 2008 blogging statistics for my site including the previous years. In keeping with that trend, below is the amended table which now includes 2009 as well.

POSTS AVG. POST LENGTH TOTAL POST LENGTH COMMENTS AVG. COMMENTS
2004 1 478 487 0 0.0
2005 82 1949 159835 511 12.7
2006 103 1837 189259 865 4.5
2007 127 1977 251150 229 1.0
2008 68 1597 108623 78 0.6
2009 77 2114 162804 104 0.8

While I haven’t managed to get back to my peak of 2007 in the total number of posts, I’m happy that I’ve managed to increase it slightly over last  year. In 2010, I’m going to try and increase it again to between seven and eight posts per month. While that doesn’t seem like that many, it can be difficult to write at least one post every four days – I challenge you to try it yourself.

For those that are interested in doing the same, I’ve made the blogging statistics SQL script available for you to use.