All posts by Alistair Lattimore

About Alistair Lattimore

My name is Alistair Lattimore, I'm in my very early 30's and live on the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. I married my high school sweet heart & we've been together for longer than I can remember. Claire and I started our family in September 2008 when Hugo was born and added a gorgeous little girl named Evie in May 2010. You can find me online in the typical hangouts, Google+, Twitter & facebook. . View all posts by Alistair Lattimore →

Blog Advertising Infolinks In-Text Advertising

March 10, 2012BloggingAlistair Lattimore

I thought I’d start playing around with some different website advertising networks again.

During 2006 when I first started to dabble with blog advertising, I signed up for Google AdSense. It was simple to sign up, fast to implement throughout my site and I liked that it was backed by someone like Google.

It didn’t take long before Google AdSense was earning small but useful amounts of money, which I was quite excited about. For reasons I can’t remember, in 2010 I stopped running Google AdSense through my blog and haven’t run any form of advertising since then.

For no particular reason, it seemed like a good time to start experimenting with a few different advertising networks to see what is about in the market and what might work best for my blog.

I’ve just signed up for Infolinks, which is an in-text advertising product. The signup process was simple and my new account was activated about 24 hours after my initial signup. Implementing Infolinks throughout my blog was really straight forward as they provide a WordPress plugin, so that made everything quite simple. The plugin as a handful of options and when you login to the management console on the Infolinks website you can also configure additional settings like the link colour, the type of underline, the maximum number of links per page and more.

The in-text advertising that Infolinks provides differs from Google AdSense in that Infolinks dynamically ads links to the content on a page, whereas Google AdSense adds an image banner or a block of text links in an area of the page that a publisher would nominate. For example in this post you’ll see a link I added above in blue and with a solid underline & you might also see some green links with a dotted underline inserted by Infolinks.

Infolinks works in a similar fashion to how Google AdSense runs, in that they both scan the content of the page to understand what the page is about. From an advertisers stand point, both products allow you to target a page based on the keywords/phrases that exist in the page – the major difference is in how the ad is delivered to the user.

Now that it is up and running, I just have to be patient and see if it works. If it doesn’t, I’ll keep trying a few different internet advertising networks and will invariably come full circle and add Google AdSense back into the mix at some point as well.

James Bond Theme Song Performed By Quadrotors

March 5, 2012VideosAlistair Lattimore

Last month I wrote about some small quadrotor helicopters that could do some pretty incredible things that were developed by the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania.

The two engineers from University of Pennsylvania, Daniel Mellinger and Alex Kushleyev who formed KMel Robotics are at it again & this time they have their quadrotor helicopters playing the James Bond theme song!

The quadrotor helicopters aren’t being controlled by any humans and the entire performance has been programmed by the engineers. Throughout the demonstration you’ll see them play a keyboard, drums, maracas, a cymbal and custom guitar built from a couch frame.

Next I want to see the duo do something crazy but with real world implications, such as search & rescue in small confined spaces or synchronised large area surveillance so that collectively the swarm are maximising visual coverage by co-ordinating their collective viewing angles.

Debris

March 2, 2012TravelAlistair Lattimore

On the way home this evening from work on the M1, I noticed something on the road very very briefly three or four cars in front of me.

While I slowed down to try and avoid whatever it was on the road it didn’t help because the car in front of me hit the motorway debris and it kicked up.

Next thing I know I have a 50cm x 100cm piece of cardboard stuck to the drivers side of my windscreen nearly completely blocking my vision.

Fortunately I was able to reach the edge of it from inside the car and pull it to the side so i could pull over with hitting anything else.

2011 Traffic Statistics

February 9, 2012WebsitesAlistair Lattimore

In keeping with my annual review of things and following on from my 2010 website traffic statistics, below is a quick summary of what happened during 2011.

Throughout 2010 my blog took 97,509 visits and 132,068 pageviews and for the year of 2011 108,325 visits and 140,882 pageviews. It is nice to see that my sites visitation has grown over the year, however it is a long way from the hay days of 145,000 visits when I was writing technical style posts and a mixing it with pop culture items like Australian Idol.

Breaking down the traffic sources for the year, shows a 4% increase in search engine traffic as a percentage of the whole site, up from 74% to 78%. Within the search engine space, Google continues to completely dominate, increasing by 2% to just under 96%. Despite every effort made by Microsoft, such as buying the search engine business from Yahoo! in an attempt to gain market share – it isn’t reflected in the traffic for my blog and collectively Bing & Yahoo! represent about 3.5% of my search referrals.

The most popular posts for the year were nearly identical to the past years, with the a cute Ragdoll cat photo edging its way into the list:

Ignoring posts I’d written in a previous years and isolating only 2011, a different picture arises:

Bring on 2012, with a bit of luck the landscape will have changed by then again.

Nano Quadrotors

February 6, 2012VideosAlistair Lattimore

In January 2010 I wrote about an amazing radio controlled four rotor helicopter known known as the Parrot AR.Drone, which utilised the iPhone gyroscope, touch screen and built in wifi to produce the most amazing flying toy I’d seen at the time.

Two years have passed and now the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania with development by KMel Robotics have miniturised the same basic concept to produce nano quadrotor helicopters.

As you’ll see in the video, a lot has changed and they possess some amazing built in technology, such as being able to right themselves when thrown into the air, along with clever algorithms to control moving between obstacles, flying in formation and much more.

I think this is absolutely mind blowing, least of which because they’d make an amazing toy but mainly because it represents a huge leap forward in robots and sensing, a lot like the self driving cars that Google have developed.

Amazing.