February 2008 archive

Leap Post

I remember in 2000 there was some residual Y2K dread that things might have gone leftwards on February 29th, because of the funny business around years divisible by 100 not being leap years except when divisible by 400. If we would have been a bit faster on the learning curve, that would have created a slightly different flavor to the Y1.9K bug.

Hard to believe this is already the second leap year since 2000.

And here I am like so many other people, posting today for no other reason than to post on a leap day.

I’ll give you three semi-random items:

Lost is so freaking cool. Great science fiction storytelling on the tube. I loved last night’s episode, “The Constant.”
I’m this close to booking a flight out to Boston for the FSF annual associate …

2007 Traffic Stats for ‘Moving to Freedom’

This overlaps with the one year stats posted back in July 2007, but I’d like to switch to calendar year accounting, so there you go.

There are some numbers from last year that can serve as the 2006 traffic stats, although they include some traffic from January 2007 since I generated them for the six month anniversary of the site. If you think the 2007 numbers are humble, check out 2006. :-)

Once again, these statistics are provided by Google Analytics.

Visitors

Daily:

On the vertical axis, the middle bar is 500 visitors and the top is 1,000. The jump in February is thanks to Google searches for my “how to” articles about encryption and VNC, and increased image search hits.

Totals:

164,504Visits
145,760Absolute Unique Visitors
…

Corporate I/T in a Nutshell

I wouldn’t know anything about this from my past experience:

From past experience, I’ve observed a trend where these companies (whether it’s Oracle, SAP, or you name it) make big promises, a company “bites” (knowing that the problems outlined really ARE big issues they’d LOVE to solve), and then the vendor proceeds to bleed millions of dollars out of their new customer.

Eventually, something is constructed/customized that accomplishes SOME of the original goals, but does so in a rather clunky, bug-infested manner, while other items on the “want list” get bumped to “future stages of implementation” (which often never really get completed, because they’re too costly and complicated).

By this time, upper level management is forced to cost-justify the monstrosity, so they do their best to keep their jobs (and pride) by praising the software as a

…

Are you seeing double?

Are you a subscriber to this blog, and if so, do you sometimes see duplicate posts in the feed?

To keep an eye on things, I subscribe through Google Reader and the FeedBurner email subscription service. I haven’t seen any duplicates, but loyal reader Paul S. wrote me yesterday to say he sometimes gets multiple posts.

I hope this isn’t a widespread problem, and wonder if it might be related to my posting procedure:

Think of a possible post topic.
Procrastinate starting on it for days, weeks, or months.
Finally, write something.
Become anxious to publish it.
Publish it before thoroughly proofing it.
Quickly make some minor changes immediately after publishing it.
Not long after that, wonder if I should have used additional keywords to snag more search …

Tomboy: Bulk import files with the D-Bus interface and Python

Last month I mentioned I wanted to import a bunch of notes from my old PIM into Tomboy, but expected a lot of copying and pasting busywork since I didn’t know how to do a mass import. Fortunately, a real live Tomboy developer dropped by to clue me in on the D-Bus interface with which I could use Python to script something up. (Thanks, Sandy!)

Having a starting point, my first search turned up a great Ars Technica article by Ryan Paul that gave me all the information I needed: “Using the Tomboy D-Bus interface.” Read it for an explanation of what DBus is about, and some good tips for using Tomboy’s API.

With this post I’m just going to focus on …

Your blog’s ‘about’ page might get you a job at Google

Or maybe just an email from a Google recruiter that doesn’t ultimately lead anywhere, but is still kind of fun to get.

What about you?

Do you have an “about” page for your blog or web site? I hope so, because if I happen across your site, I’d like to learn something about you. Find out what we might have in common or why I might be interested in hearing what you have to say. Without an about page or something that gives me an idea of what you’re about, I’m less likely to hang around and become a repeat visitor. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, so my advice is: if you’re trying to build up a readership, share a thing or two about yourself.

What about that …