Monthly Archives: June 2008

Analytics

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I’ve been playing with Google Analytics for a little time now on my blog, and I find the overall use of this feature nice. It allows you to see what type of audience is reading your site, where their visiting, and from which site they came from. 

Ethics of it, I’m still unsure about, yeah sure a site owner can do what ever they like, but is tracking people going to far. A lot of assumptions can be made from the data too, which I really wouldn’t like to happen to me. Although it does help the writer target the text at a particular country, language and internet speed.
It can also help with targeting and placement of ads, it wether or not they are actually doing their job.
I suppose it can be a good tool, if it is used correctly. 

OpenID Fun

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I’ve been messing around with my OpenID, which blogger runs for me, on OpenID enabled sites like Propeller and Magnolia (both digg alternatives). Which has been quite fun. I also found Plaxo, which seems to sync all your contacts (OS, email server, email client, IM services) and it created a generic profile that allows you to have your youtube, last.fm, myspace, facebook, twitter, digg …. (The list goes on) stuff all in one places. It basically puts every Web 2.0 app in one place and includes calendar and address book syncing with several services. It seems really new so it’ll be nice to see how it turns out.

When pasting some items on Pastebin.ca, which I do quite often, I noticed an OpenID flavored login box, I further explored their site and noticed that they also do a image and file hosting service too, which I’m going to use for the moment. Skitch is a handy app to have, to take screenshots and upload to the net, allowing you to highlight certain aspects of the screenshot easily. A one click image upload feature is really handy, and I have enjoyed Skitch so far. I suggest you check these out.

I’m generally pleased with Bloggers OpenID simplicity.

Human Barcode Reading.

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Long story short, practice tests are boring, and boring times provoke doing boring tasks, such as learning howto decode barcodes.

The coputer read sheet contains a 4 by 8 square matrix, with certain squares blackened.
Hmm, 8 squares, sounds like 8bit binary. Kinda. This is what I learnt, remembering that I was in an exam so I couldn’t use outside world help.

This is the barcode if it was written as binary (the first few attempts of me decoding it failed because I was reading it upside down).

11011100 | A
00001101 | B
00010101 | C
00000001 | D
(3349)

Now to read is quite simple, you get rows B and C and put next to each other, which make a 16 bit binary code.

0000110100010101

Which equals 3349, correct according to the number under the barcode. Now the next problem is what are rows A and D for. I presume they are for check sum, row D is a simple, “this row should equal one” check, but row A is left. If anyknows how the checksum works, comments would be nice. Btw, this was from a QCS prac. exam, I thought they would use something a little more harder.

Some more barcodes
00010111
11110001
11110110
00000001
(61942)

01111110
10000010
11111110
00000001
(33534)

Bonjour (and wikipedia mirror)

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Opps, I missed a post on Sunday, so this ones a double (for tomorrow)

First off, which is the reason I missed posting on Sunday, is that I am mirroing wikipedia so I can use it as school without an internet connection. It’s a simple, but length process and if you follow this ( guide it’s easy. I’ve been processing pages from Friday and I’m only just half-way through. The compressed download is 3.7gb and the decompressed version is 16gb.

The second thing I would like to touch on is Bonjour which is brilliant networking system made by Apple, which simplifys networking. I’ve been using Leopard and Tiger for more than a year now, and this is the first time I saw it in action. I had a ubuntu box up, and I enabled vnc access. I started searching for some alternatives to Chicken of VNC os OS X since it was getting old, and tried a few, and then I noticed that the ubuntu box was in my finder window. I clicked on it and noticed that it screen sharing button enabled. It’s preformed its job so well and seemless. It’s kinda a mash up of Hamachi and local networking.

Wifi Fun

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Doing some home brew wifi stuff. This is also a test post for flickr blogging. The plan is to setup two directional antenna pointing between mine and friends house, and play Battle Field. We have perfect line of sight, and it’s only about 500m so it be easy. I’ll post some more information after we get everything going.

I think the FCC should raise the level of radio transmissions for home so it’s possible to setup large wifi area’s from home and antenna’s on new equipment should be of a higher quality.

As for commercial directional antennas, why are they so expensive. Resource wise, the required materials don’t cost much at all.

iDrive

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yum9me later this week talked about backing up data and online storage solutions. After my hard drive wipe, I thought I’d try something a little differnt. I got a free account at iDrive, whic offers 2GB upload for free, which is plenty for me to upload my school work. The user interface is really nice and the upload speed is amazingly fast. It also does incremental backups to save time and bandwidth. The scheduler feature works excellently and even sends me an email once a backup is done. 

The only thing I do hate is the fact that you can’t change the colour of the little menu bar icon. Which is really annoying because I had a nice forest/tree theme going on. If you’re going to have something so out there, please allow people to change it, if not stay with the standard black icons. Speaking of which, here is my solution.

In finder goto /Applications/IDriveforMac/IDriveMonitor.app/Contents/Resources using the goto folder function in the go menu. Open up IDriveMenuIcon.tiff in your favorite image editor and change the colour or what not.

Blogger Dasboard Widget

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I’m not typically one that has a lot of desktop widgets, as the two I do use are ones I want to be able to check quickly, and widgets take of so long to load on first viewing after a reboot, but using the Blogger Dashboard widget is really handy to have if you don’t want to login to blogger or load up Safari. It’s simple to configure and use. I think’ll be using this a lot. 

PS. This blog post was written on the widget.