Alistair Lattimore

SubWars

Al — Sat, 12 May 2012 01:34:13 +0000

Next time you see an old man on the train looking for a seat..

Remember that he could be an evil light sabre wielding Yoda from hell.

No related posts.

Dynamic Sculptures

Al — Mon, 07 May 2012 13:53:15 +0000

Reuben Margolin is an American sculptor known for creating beautiful mechanical, moving or kinetic sculptures that are inspired by nature and powered by math.

I’ve written about Theo Jansen’s Standbeests before, which are amazing wind powered PVC beach walking kinetic sculptures and you can see why the art from Reuben has my attention completely.

Spend a few minutes and be mesmerized by his art and the incredible attention to detail it takes to combine hundreds or thousands of individual components, lots of motors, cranks, wire and more into spectacular fluid art installations.

Jabbawockeez Jupiters Theatre Gold Coast

Al — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 08:05:18 +0000

Last night Claire and I attended the opening night of Jabbawockeez at Jupiters Hotel & Casino in Broadbeach.

I was fortunate enough to get a pair of tickets from work for not only the opening night of their incredible dance performance but also the grand opening for the $20 million refurbished Jupiters Theatre. The newly renovated theatre now has capacity for 1929 seated guests or 2150 including standing room, which is double what it had before the renovation started in September 2011.

The night kicked off with one of the Jabbawockeez in a janitors uniform entertaining the crowd as everyone got seated, interacting with the audience and generally having a good time. Once everyone was seated Craig Peachey, who is the Acting Managing Director of Jupiters said a few words, welcomed all of the distinguished guests and then our newly elected Queensland Premier Campbell Newman said a few words before they were ‘swept’ off the stage by the janitor.

Jabbawockeez was the collaboration of three dancers from different styles, who joined forces to form a new style and group known as Jabbawockeez in 2003. They started out small in San Diego and Los Angeles but their big break came in 2006 when they appeared on Americas Got Talent where they took the place by storm and have been growing in popularity ever since. Jupiters Hotel & Casino have managed to get them from Las Vegas to the Gold Coast for the next five months.

One of the key features of Jabbawockeez, which is different to most other dance groups you’ll see is that all of the dancers are wearing the same clothing and have expressionless white masks on. Initially I thought it was a bit of a gimmick but with such a dynamic high energy performance, it really lets you focus on the dancing and not worry about identifying an individual dancer who just did something amazing; they are all amazing and you don’t know who did what amazing piece of the performance.

Claire and I absolutely loved the MÜS.I.C (muse-i-see) Jabbawockeez performance, which was directed by choreographers Tabitha and Napoleon of So You Think You Can Dance US fame. The music that the dancers performed to was fantastic and ranged from Queen to Prodigy and everything in between. The new state of the art sound system in Jupiters Theatre was absolutely pumping. While the music was loud, the thing that really hit home, literally, was the incredible bass; bone shaking!

If you’ve got an opportunity to see Jabbawockeez in the next few months while they are here in Australia performing at Jupiters Gold Coast, I’d definitely recommend it – they were fantastic and well worth your time and effort!

Infolinks In-Text Advertising Review

Al — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 12:28:52 +0000

In March I decided that I’d start testing different blog advertising products that were available on the market. I’ve been out of the website advertising game for nearly two years, which is practically a lifetime in internet time.

My first blog advertising test was going to be with Infolinks In-Text Advertising. Infolinks is an interesting product in that an advertiser can choose the different keywords or key phrases that they want to advertise on, such as “blog advertising”. In that regard it is similar to how Google AdWords and Google Adsense works. What makes it interesting and quite different, is that while Google Adsense provides text links or banner ads to a publishers website in a predefined space allocated by the publisher, Infolinks adds additional hyperlinks to the page based on the phrases that an advertiser wants to be associated to.

When a user views a website publishing Infolinks ads, they’ll see the standard hyperlinks added by the website owner which are traditionally underlined and blue. Along side the traditional links, they’ll see Infolinks ads or links injected into the page that are a bright green by default (which can be customised) and carry a dotted or double underline to differentiate them from a plain link. When the user hovers over one of the Infolinks links, a small popup will appear near the link they hovered displaying the advertisers chosen ad and provide a way to click through to their website.

Signup

Signing up for Infolinks In-Text Advertising was a straight forward process and my account was activated within 24 hours of completing the online form.

I was pleased to see that Infolinks didn’t ask for too much personal information, enough to do their job and not a lot more which I think is great. To often these days businesses think they have a right to all of your personal information and I just don’t think that is reasonable in today’s age.

Installation

Installation of the Infolinks website advertising service was simple, notably because this blog runs WordPress and Infolinks provide a WordPress plugin that does all of the heavy lifting.

I was able to use the Install Plugins page within WordPress, search for “infolinks” and found their plugin without any issue. If I could offer a simple suggestion, it would be to change their plugin name from “Infolinks Official Plugin” to “Infolinks In-Text Advertising Official Plugin”, just to provide a little bit of extra relevance for users scanning down the bold plugin names within WordPress.

Configuration

The configuration provided by the WordPress Infolinks plugin is quite simple. As a publisher you can turn it on or off, provide your Publisher ID and Website ID so your Infolinks ads are tracked properly along with a handful of other basic options.

Most of the configuration for Infolinks, in terms of how it appears visually within a website and how it behaves is actually handled within the Infolinks website. For example a publisher can change the colour of the links, whether to use a dotted or double underlined links, vary the maximum number of links per page and specify a website content category to improve the relevance of the advertisers ads.

While the actual installation of the Infolinks WordPress plugin was straight forward, I thought Infolinks completely dropped the ball with the most important part of the whole process and that is getting the Infolinks configuration and script into the publishers website.

Instead of making that process completely seamless, a publisher is left to their own devices to take the configuration script provided by the Infolinks website and find a way to add that script to their own website. I ended up hacking it into my site using a completely unrelated WordPress plugin and I had to stuff around to get it to work. I could have edited my WordPress theme, however that seemed overkill for something that should have been simple.

I think Infolinks are missing a huge opportunity within the WordPress community by not making this part of the process simpler. Instead of leaving publishers to their own devices to find a way to get the script into their website – they should have provided a simple textbox within the Infolinks WordPress plugin to paste the configuration script provided by the Infolinks website and then dynamically add that to the section of the site using the WordPress theme API.

Reporting

Infolinks reporting interface provided the following information:

Net Impressions (Impressions that actually displayed Infolinks ads)
Clicks
CTR (Clicks/Net Impressions * 100)
eCPM ((Earnings / Net Impressions) * 1000)
Earnings

Out of the box they also provide five different date ranges, such as this month, last three months, since last payment along with custom date ranges, daily detail and summary views.

The above is certainly enough to get a feel for how well or poorly a website performing from an advertising stand point but I felt it was missing information about what pages on a website are generating clicks. As an example, over the last eight years I’ve been blogging I have published over 600 different posts, however I have no idea if it is three posts generating all the clicks, a particular category of posts or if it is evenly distributed. Knowing this information might influence my future writing, if there was money to be made in a particular vertical.

Earnings

Now the all important information, how much did I earn between 7/3/2012 and 9/4/2012 of having the Infolinks In-Text Advertising service running on my blog – the answer is not a whole lot.

What the above summary information says is that I served 9391 pages with Infolinks ads present, received 142 clicks, averaged 1.58% Click Through Rate with an eCPM of $0.34 and earned a total of US$2.81.

That’d mean if I continue to display Infolinks ads throughout my site for the next 12 months, I could nearly afford to buy two Gold Class movie tickets. Hardly worth the distraction to the user experience, so I’ll be moving onto the next advertising product to see if it performs any better.

Blog Advertising Infolinks In-Text Advertising

Al — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 13:00:55 +0000

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

Al — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 12:19:19 +0000

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

Al — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 10:11:08 +0000

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

Al — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:32:11 +0000

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

Al — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:56:42 +0000

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.

James Bond Theme Song Performed By Quadrotors

Evie, No More Bottles

Al — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:59:57 +0000

Over the last couple of months, Claire and I have been adjusting Evie’s bottles.

According to the formula, her age and weight she was meant to have two 250ml bottles a day however that rarely happened and she seemed more comfortable with around 200ml.

During September we thought it was time that she moved on from formula and onto cows milk so we made the switch. Of course that didn’t go down all that well, so we reverted to formula and started weening her off it by reducing the amount of formula per bottle from four scoops to three and then to two.

While all this was going on she was quite inconsistent with her bottles as well, sometimes she was drink all 200ml and want more and the next time she would protest after 50ml. As we got down to two scoops of formula in 200ml of milk, we thought it made sense to reduce the volume down to 100ml as well.

Not that long after we were down to a single scoop of formula, started introducing cows milk and Evie was happy as a lark. Next we stopped adding the scoop of formula all together and Evie didn’t seem to mind to much but another month or so later and she decided that she’d had enough of the bottle all together.

Claire and I miss giving Evie her bottle but they can’t stay little forever. Now we give her a sipper cup with milk in it and she is happy to drink smaller amounts of that periodically throughout the day and in the evening after she has had a bath.

Now it won’t be long before she is out of the cot and into a big girl bed!