In the Year 2011

As usual, first post in 2012 is great chance to recapitulate what was going on in previous year.

There was total of 106 posts (which is slight decrease from last year) with around 40% of them being related to programming and 10% being related to my programs. Rest of posts is anybody’s guess - I am annoyingly bad at assigning categories to posts. Improving on that might even be my New Year’s resolution. And, as it happens with all of those, it will fail miserably. :)

Total number of visits has increased to 90,000 (from 54,000 last year) so I would say that blog has some traction going. Search engines bring little bit over 50% of traffic (90% of that being from Google). Referral sites bring 30% which means that there is almost 20% of people who enter this link directly.

Analysis says that 25% of you are from United States, 10% from Germany and further 30% from all around world. My own country (Croatia) brings 2.7% to the table. That leaves something like 35% of people that have no location on this world. Either browsers got better at hiding their tracks or aliens just love my blog. :)

Internet Explorer still leads in browser wars with 36% of visitors using it. I was pleasantly surprised that majority of those using it were at version 8 (55%) or version 9 (33%). That leaves only 12% for older versions of IE. Firefox was second with 33% and my favorite Chrome was third with 25% of a pie.

This year also marks special moment for me - I left Blogger platform for self-hosted WordPress site. This step included not only efforts of installing WordPress (which was really easy) but also manual conversion of 340+ posts. And it was worth it since WordPress gives me much better control over almost every aspect of my blog, since speed is improved, since I was able to integrate everything with my old site, and list goes on and on. Only downside is that I am now responsible for making backups and paying for hosting costs but it is small price to pay (and one can always make a donation).

Happy new year to everyone.

Fax 0

What to do when you are stranded in foreign land and you have an fax to send? As always Internet brings solution to a problem.

My search gave me lot of results for Fax subscription but very few that allow simple one-time sending. Even worse, most of those that do allow single payment had issues with my Croatia-issues credit card. After long search I did found one that I could use.

FaxZero.com has rather simple page where you can opt to do single send (with ads or with payment) and their subscription. I tried sending single .pdf files with payment and everything works as expected. Once your fax is uploaded, you are taken to PayPal. As soon as payment is completed your fax is in sending queue. It does take some time to send a fax but you will get confirmation on your e-mail. It does everything you would expect of fax service.

However, there is dark side to this. As soon as I sent my fax via FaxZero, I started getting new spam. It amounted to total of ten or so spams before my spam filters started working again. Yes, it might be just coincidence that those spam e-mails started arriving as soon as I gave my address away. But my experience teaches me that real coincidence is rare thing.

My final verdict about this service is to use it nevertheless. Just be sure to get yourself some throw-able e-mail that you can close once fax is sent.

HackNotifier

There is new site that seems to get a lot of attention lately. It is called HackNotifier.

Basis premises are quite easy. You give them e-mail and they will check whether it appears in any of hacker released databases. For small sum of $5 per month they will check your account in real-time and notify you if it appears in fore-mentioned databases. For two bucks more it will even send you a SMS.

On their main page they claim total of 1,485,523 e-mail accounts that were hacked and invite you to check yours. In order to protect you they even have https certificate. But I keep on wondering how big an idiot you need to be in order to give them your e-mail…

Way I see it this is ideal e-mail gathering site. All that site operator needs to do is to save each e-mail that gets checked. After you get an e-mail, just increase counter on main page and tell user whatever. Most users either will not check or are not able to. Easiest way to collect accounts if you ask me…

Even if we assume that this site is legitimate (and that is huge stretch) what do you gain by checking your mail there or (in case of chronic stupidity) subscribing to their service. They let you know whether your e-mail is in some database. And what will you do with that information? Get new account? If you intend to do so, save yourself trouble and get new account each day. You will be safe.

P.S. Site can be found at www dot hacknotifier dot com. I do not want to link to them.

Real Thing Indeed

I arrived to USA on a Lufthansa’s flight from Frankfurt. While flight was normal in every way possible - whether it is lousy choice of movies, sadistic headset or bad food - there was one thing I actually enjoyed tremendously.

We got real knife and fork for our meals!

Yes, someone from Lufthansa figured that not everybody flying is terrorist and they gave us proper stainless steel knife. Words cannot describe enjoyment of using proper silverware (stainlessware?) instead of plastic rubbish. And it wasn’t some flimsy dull knife either. It was proper heavy and sharp piece of metal. Yes, food was still not great, but at least I could cut through it like a human being.

Thanks Lufthansa.

Yet Another State

In one of previous posts I said that next post will be from Irving.

However, plans change. After a night in Irving my wife and I drove all the way to the small town of Herndon, Virginia. And this will be place we call home for (hopefully) a few months at least.

P.S. There will be few more non-computer related posts while I settle into routine here. I promise that I will be back to programming soon. :)

Microsoft's Skype

It is now an old news that Microsoft bought Skype. Such a big purchase usually takes time and product is almost on hold for that time. That is why I was surprised with big change new version brought.

Skype Home window is finally gone! That bastard offspring of facebook integration does not appear on startup anymore. Yes, you can show it again if you are feeling mazohistic but you might as well saw off your foot and get same level of enjoyment.

I have no idea whether this was Microsoft initiated change or not but it is definitely step in right direction.

Irving

If everything goes fine, next post you’ll see will be from Irving, Texas. My previous trip to USA landed me in Redmond WA and I felt like I was in Europe (if you disregard automatic gear changer and bad beer).

From what I hear Texas is totally different experience. Bigger cars, bigger steaks and bad beer (ok, some things are constant in USA :)). In any case, I am looking forward to spend few months immersed in land of Chuck Norris.

I just pray that my weird sense of humor won’t land me in any trouble. :)

[For future reference: It all ended up with me landing in Dallas and then driving to Virginia…]

Kindle 4

All e-book lovers rejoice, new Kindles are upon us.

My two beefs with Kindle were annoying keyboard that serves no e-book purpose whatsoever (unless you are scribbling teenager) and lack of touch screen. Both things are now fixed at surprising $99. More than a fair deal in my opinion (and that is not the cheapest version).

Will I buy it? Probably won’t. My old Kindle 2 works perfectly and, as much I hate to say it, I grew fond of it’s dents and scratches. But, as soon as I manage to kill it, I have new device to buy. :)

Sometime Analysis Is Required

Chrome browser is usually pretty decent piece of software and I cannot recall any real trouble with it. Before this one.

I decided to install some Chrome Applications bug installation kept failing in worst possible manner - nothing happened. It would just go from “Add to Chrome” to “Installing…” and then back to “Add to Chrome”. I was silently ignored. And that happened for all applications that I attempted to install. Applications that were previously installed kept working but there was no new applications for me.

After some time I found culprit. For some reason known only to Google, application install would fail if it could not reach Google Analytics. On my system access to Analytics was broken on purpose. As soon as I allowed DNS to resolve it’s IP address, applications managed to get installed once again.

Wording

I was in airplane few days ago and we were late (of course). After some twenty minutes of waiting captain told us what happened:

Sorry for wait but airplane in front of us managed to hit some birds during takeoff. We are still waiting for someone to pick up remains.

At that moment you could see difference between frequent travelers and some lady that was there for the first time. Most of travelers made no notice of this announcement, some of them were smiling and few were even laughing (unsurprisingly I was in last group).

Lady was scared. What she probably heard was that we are waiting for someone to pick up remains of airplane in front of us. In any case airplane got rolling and some gentlemen siting next to her took some time explaining exact situation so rest of flight went fine.

This only shows that understanding message highly depends on personal context and that care should be exercised in choosing exact wording. Whether it is airplane announcement or critical error text that users might see.