An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

[tag]Google[/tag][tag]Microsoft[/tag][tag]Yahoo[/tag][tag]Google Analytics[/tag]Google Analytics is a new free service provided by Google, which looks to be the same service or a very similar one that http://urchin.com used to provide at a considerable fee. Now I’m kind of regretting my purchase of Mint as I haven’t been that happy with it as it often counts hits multiple times and the regexps to pull out the search terms is pretty poor plus it doesn’t handle referrers from Google Images at all well and now it looks like Google has a better product available for free.

As Scoble would say, what a major disruption for Microsoft and Yahoo! This will add a lot to the statistics that Google has at its fingertips especially with its integration with AdWords and will help Google remain at the forefront of online advertising for the forseeable future.

[tag]CSS[/tag]I had been thinking about redesigning my site to use a fluid layout as the fixed width looks crap at high resolutions and after stumbling across The One True Layout, I have gotten inspired and behind the scenes I am currently working on a fluid 3 column layout (Main, sidebar 1, sidebar 2) that keeps the current look & feel for the most part but I am already preferring it and I am haven’t even prettied it up yet!

So stay tuned as I should hopefully have it finished over the weekend sometime!

Admittedly I haven’t really paid much attention to developments with Windows Vista as I have stopped caring about Microsoft releases unless it is something server related and will affect me at work but from what I am reading it would seem that Beta 1 isn’t feature complete, excuse me? A beta release that isn’t feature complete? Since when can you call something a beta release when it isn’t feature complete? At best that would be a technology preview.

In other news Beta 2 has been pushed back to sometime next year and in order to meet their already committed ship date of sometime in Summer 2006 they plan on skipping a Release Candidate, now there is a wonderful idea! The software wasn’t ready for testing in time so lets just shorten the testing phase to get the product out the door, strategies like that always have fantastic results.

[tag]mobile phone[/tag][tag]RAZR[/tag][tag]V3i[/tag]They just released details on the RAZR V3i, which is basically a RAZR with “an updated and streamlined design”, the iTunes thing that the ROKR has and a 1.23MP camera (1.23? I guess I can live without the extra 0.07 but why they did that is strange) so the RAZR V3i has everything I want excepting the QWERTY keyboard, which it seems isn’t going to come to a suitable phone in the forseeable future so I can overlook that.

Now when can I buy one of these baby’s on eBay?

I forgot that after you upgrade PHP you must also recompile eAccelarator or nasty things happen like Apache refusing to start, but thanks to Tim that is all sorted now.

[tag]mobile phone[/tag]This time around I am looking for a phone that has a good camera, a QWERTY keyboard, Quad band, Bluetooth, EDGE and that doesn’t look butt ugly, although I could live with some degree of ugliness if it had all the other features.

The closest that comes to those needs is the LG VX9800, but it is CDMA! Come on LG how about hooking us up with a Quadband GSM version? The other contender is the Samsung D307 but it doesn’t have a camera, WTF Samsung?

I mainly want such a phone so I can moblog easier with the QWERTY keyboard, if you are wondering why.

[tag]wordpress[/tag]It seems there is a Wordpress bug hunt scheduled for this Saturday, did nobody realize that it is already Thursday and most people already have their weekends planned by now? I know the devs have been talking about having such a bug hunt for a while now so why not give more notice?

Can someone please tell me what all the excitement about Windows Live and Office Live is all about? Windows Live looks like another pathetic attempt at a portal and Office Live looks like Microsoft’s attempt to get into the canned website and hosting business.

Firstly portals have been tried many times and they have never taken off so why will Windows Live? What makes it different? Ooooh it uses AJAX and you click & drag things around, whoopy friggin do. Oh it has an AJAX instant messenger client, haven’t they seen Meebo? Oh and it has an AJAX email client, uhm say hello to Gmail. The one thing I will give them credit for although it is still an unreleased feature with no details on pricing is the ability to make outgoing VOIP calls to a POTS line through Windows Live, surely that is going to have to be a paid service or are they going to inject ads into that as well?

Microsoft Office Live will provide your company with its own domain name, Web site, and e-mail accounts for free.

Oh really? Free, eh? So does that mean your site will have Microsoft branding and/or advertising all over it or what? Maybe it will be free in conjunction with some yet to be announced license for one of their other products?

Why does all of this look like something hastily thrown together by a bunch of developers being forced to get something “live”? haha I made a funny! Seriously though reading the blog that I refuse to link to (the Microsoft geek one on Wordpress.com) it actually does sound like developers have just stayed back late one night to throw this stuff together.

I just love how they have big launches where it is just an announcement for a beta that will start sometime in early 2006 that you can register online for a chance to participate in, give me a break!

I almost forgot the Microsoft Gadgets:

Well, there are different kind of gadgets, Desktop Gadgets which are small applications written in WPF for example (will be able for windows vista beta 2’s sidebar (which will hopefully be compatible with windows xp)), Start.com/Live Gadgets which are written in DHTML + Javascript and allows you to personalize it and add the stuff you want, and there are auxillary gadgets for laptops.

Who the heck uses a sidebar? The majority of people are still using 1024*768 or less as their desktop resolution so how is a sidebar going to be usable?

Woohoo! You can also write your own gadget to add to your portal on Windows Live! I’m so excited I almost peed in my pants!

What the heck is an auxillary gadget for a laptop? Something that can work offline like a calculator or what?

I think Microsoft should just exhange a ga for a wi and be done with it.

[tag]blogging[/tag]I’m not going to name names but one that comes to mind is one of the popular blogs on Wordpress.com at the moment, like really how do people get paid for this stuff? I swear if I sold my soul then I could probably make a fortune online but you know what just because you can doesn’t mean you should, professional blogging is going to be another bubble that is going to burst anytime now it just makes no sense.

Can anyone remember when “blogging” was just fingering the ID software guys’ plans when the likes of the original Quake were under development? Those were the days…

There is a new Akismet plugin for Spam Karma 2 that is currently in beta that sounds like a great idea where SK2 is still used to determine if the comment is Ham or Spam but if it needs assistance instead of sending a comment to moderation it will then check with Akismet but even if it doesn’t it will submit the comment to Akismet as either Ham or Spam to help build the central database so classifciation at Akismet can be improved over time.

Sounds great, eh? But Matt’s comment on the Akismet plugin page states that it is no good to just send comment marked as Ham or Spam back to Akismet unless they had been previously classified incorrectly by Akismet itself so that means any classifications made locally by SK2 won’t be fed back to Akismet. It is almost like Akismet is setup to become the only spam detection service available and be exclusive to other systems like SK2 and well that just doesn’t sit well with me so I’ll just keep using SK2 on it’s own as it is yet to give me any problems.