is exactly the kind of stuff I wish more people would publish (and that’s partly why this log exists). This guy, Ted Green, has been selling a piece of software () that’s been in continuous development for 20 years! He the ups and downs of that incredible period (basically from the birth of the home computer up until now) Included are scans of magazine ads which were run up until 1998 (after which he switched to banner ads). I really like finding stuff like this; it can be both inspiring and sobering.

That’s right… Google has raised my ranking, so that now both my and this log score a whopping 3/10! This may not seem so amazing, but I am actually very pleased considering the low amount of traffic I’ve been getting so far.

So what’s the difference? Whereas previously I was getting an average of less than 2 search hits per day, already today in a period of less than 8 hours I have received 7 different search hits, the majority of visitors actually coming straight from Google.

If you’re interested in seeing the rank that Google assign to pages, you should try the , which also gives you handy extra features like being able to do searches within a page once loaded (far superior to MSIE "find text" dialog).

Wired on Gutenberg

And the slashdot response…

Action hero car crash kid credits novel outcome to supreme being

Well ok, that’s probably a bit rough, but the story is worth checking out [link found at boingboing].

Update on stinky SBC patent

…from Robert Cringely. He is using his position to solicit for evidence of prior art in the case of SBC vs The Rest of the World [starting with museum tour]. I disagree with his take on the story:

As I said, there are no villains here. SBC probably came across this patent and realized that it could be the basis of an Internet tax, that the company had a good chance of getting license revenues from millions of web site owners and it is hard to blame them for that. They are, after all, in business to make money.

- Robert Cringely, from http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030123.html

should never have been granted. There should be no patents on software, and there should be no patents on web design. The people who will cash in on the patents are NOT the innovators, they are companies with their own legal departments who treat IP as a commodity. Even if prior art is not found, the idea encompassed by this patent is one which is bound to emerge from any system utilizing hyperlinks. Once you get more than 2 pages linking to each other, you will get links which remain present [or static ] across pages, for example each page 1 to 5 of an online article might have links to all 4 other pages. The way I read it, this is the essence of what the patent covers.

On advertising copy for AV equipment

Two points: (a) Sticking a ™ after a word does not make that word better, it just hilights a jargon term [which is probably inherently lacking in meaning]; and (b) The guy in the photo looks like a sad wanker with no friends, which is what you’ll probably become if you spend your time drooling over advertorials like this one.

There is so much emphasis in these articles on the superior audio-visual experience; once I’ve seen a movie, I don’t remember the details of the sound and picture quality… I recall the story and the acting, and I recall the people I saw it with. [When I visit my friends, I’m glad they don’t have amazingly expensive AV gear, because then I don’t have to be impressed by it.]

If every incremental increase in AV technology really did make you happier, then by inference Edison must have been utterly miserable, since his moving pictures and wax recordings were of the poorest quality ever known.

is possible largely because of the infuriating slowness of my computer. Because of, er, cash-flow issues I am working on a 3 year old p3-550, and doing builds can take quite a while… [2 builds later]… just adding a feature to which seems bleedin obvious now that I think of it, so probably some dickhead has patented it already and of course I now owe them a cut of my stupendous annual revenue.

The feature of which I speak is the option to have a filename automatically chosen for you, instead of forcing you into that annoying procedure of picking a filename for something that is really just a quick note. It might be a snippet of code, or a few phone numbers, but if you’re anything like me then you do something lame-o like creating a new text file on the desktop and then editing and saving it, leaving you with text files littering your desktop, named "New Text File (1).txt" etc. I am experimenting with the idea of a special store folder for all such miscellanous notes, as well as the ability to quickly navigate back and forth through previous notes sorted chronologically.

The "files" paradigm is pretty much ingrained in all desktop operating systems, and it’s interesting to note how hard it can be for us boneheaded programmers to notice alternatives. Of course the new feature I was just describing still stores each note as an individual file; the point is that it relieves the user of the burden of file management.

Streams

Personally I feel that a simple email client like MS Outlook Express is the killer app, since my inbox and sent items folders also serves as a kind of journal of activities and conversations. Countless times I have dived in there to search for a piece of information that I can only dimly recall someone sending to me [or vice versa], and usually such searches are fruitful. Contrast that with just about everything currently stored within my "My Documents" folder, where I put stuff for future reference and instantly forget about it. Various people and companies are attacking this problem [the degree to which it is a "problem" will vary from person to person] and looking at concepts best characterised as "streams" and "soups". Much more organic than a desktop and filing metaphor, eh?

Aren’t web cams great?

Now instead of nobody just reading my log, nobody can watch me sitting at my computer too! I don’t think this feature’s going to last very long… [UPDATE: Nope]

Bad Posturing

I’ve spent the last few days rearranging my work area, and am now facing south rather than east. Strangely I now find myself twisting in my chair and pushing my keyboard to the left, as though my internal compass hasn’t quite made the adjustment yet. I am hoping this disorientation passes quickly, otherwise I might have to put everything back the way it was, thus losing yet another day of productivity.

Speaking of productivity, my current level of same is best characterised as NIL. Must get out of this lackadaisical rut. Jujusoft’s first birthday is coming up pretty soon [ie the jujusoft.com domain name is up for renewal], so it’s about time I lost some inertia and gained a little momentum.

( link )

…is that I get very few bona fide visitors here. Certainly not enough to justify the several hours a week I spend writing/fiddling with this log.

To the right is a plot of visitors vs time, and while it might look like over the last few weeks I have been gathering some 50 visits a day, the truth is that most of the visits are automatic, ie they are annoying little web bots crawling around looking for stuff, or checking for updates. The 2 largest spikes correspond to Google indexing my site (seems they really do scan monthly).

So what are the real figures? Actual human visitors actually viewing this site? That’s something I can work out from accesses to the background image used in the header on each page. For every browser session this image should be loaded once, and then cached for the rest of the session, so if the image gets downloaded 3 times in one day, I deduce that my site has been visited by real people exactly 3 times. You might assume that 3 is a pretty low number, and you’d be right. 3 is a pretty low number. Checking the access logs I find that in the period from 1/12/2002 - 24/1/2003 this header image has been accessed by 158 visitors. Divide 158 [visits] by 55 [days] and you’ve got just under 3 visits a day.

Well, at least I’m staying within my bandwidth allowance ;) Also to be fair, I’m very happy with the relevance of the search engine hits I’m getting. The last thing I want is hundreds of visitors who don’t actually want to be here.

User Stats

Maybe I should stick one of these doovies on here, to track site usage. The stats that this site give seem pretty logical. The actual workings of the thing seem overly complicated though. Seems to me like a straight element sourced from their server should provide most of the information required, with the referral part of the request showing the page which has the image [although this will not be enough information to work out where the user originally came from - Javascript enables a bunch of metrics about the visitors and their browsers to be sent with the web-beacon image request]. Also, using a WYSIWYG editor tends to screw up the embedded javascript code… ah, glorious HTML! I’ll have to see if it still works without the