On The Farm:
- Hosting PHP Applications with IBM’s Version of Apache
- GoF Patterns in Python
- “We Had to Code Uphill! BOTH WAYS!”
And on IndieGameDev:
Categories
Category: Geek
They’ve been keeping me quite busy here at “Dos Vacas” — so busy, in fact, that I asked ol’ Boss Ross if it would be a problem if I put The Farm and IndieGameDev
on hiatus until, say, April. Ross looked at me if I’d suggested that we
get the department all cross-dressed, liquored up and into a nice
friendly round of Russian Roulette:
That’s me, Darryl Green and Ross Rader, all liquored up,
cross-dressed and ready to get our gun on. Or maybe it’s how Dave Winer
imagines the “White Males: Threat or Menace?” panel at Bloghercon would
be like.
So I spent some time this morning following the Getting Things Done
method of looking at upcoming tasks, which is pretty nicely captured in
this infographic from an entry in MarkTAW.com…
…and after a little thought decided, yeah, I can do those blogs and these projects reasonably.
The Farm has today’s posts up, and I’ll get to IndieGameDev a little later today.
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The Best Simpsons "Couch Gag" Ever
Update:
Had to take the file down temporarily as Blogware’s servers were
getting overloaded (we’re getting a bigger, faster one soon). I’ll let
you know as soon as I’ve found a new home for the video.
If you have BitTorrent on your machine, someone’s got a .torrent of the file at
http://chalco.dyndns.org/get/torrents/Simpsons_Couch.torrent.
has a saying that’s one of my favourites: “Eventually, everything
connects”, a statement that harkens back to an earlier saying by the
Buddhists: “When you slice a blade of grass, you shake the universe”.
One of Charles Eames’ best-known works is the film he created with his wife Ray, Powers of 10,
the classic 1977 film that looks at the relative size of things
from microscopic to the edges of the known universe. Your
mathematical education is not complete unless you’ve seen this film.
My friend Chris Turner, author of Planet Simpson,
has a philosophy similar to Eames’: eventually, everything connects to
The Simpsons. More proof for this hypothesis appeared recently when the
Simpsons showed its best “couch gag” (the gag at the end of the title
sequence where they gather on the couch), in which they pay homage to Powers of 10.
It’s brilliant and you must watch it [10.3 MB QuickTime movie, enclosure]. I’ll post as soon as I’ve found a new home for the video!
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Browser Stats
Boss Ross pointed in Tucows’ internal “Research and Innovation” mailing list to this Jason Kottke article on the stats for browsers used to visit his site in February. Jason reports that the breakdown looks like this:
- Mozilla: 45%
- Internet Explorer: 31%
- Everything else: 24%
In an update, Jason noted that he may have accidentally lumped in
Apple’s Safari browser with the Mozilla ones. For those of you who are
familiar with all that hoo-hah about user-agent strings, he forgot to
note that Safari’s user-agent string has “Apple WebKit” and “KHTML”
while Mozilla -based browser strings have “Gecko”.
Jason points to the stats of Boing Boing, one of the 800-pound gorillas of the blogosphere, which break down as follows:
- Internet Explorer: 36.8%
- Firefox: 36.7%
- Safari: 8.4%
- Unknown: 7.7%
- Mozilla: 4.3%
- Netscape: 1.6%
My gut feeling is that the less technically-oriented sites are visited
by less technically-oriented people, who would tend to use the default
browser on the dominant operatin system: Internet Explorer. I also
suspect that more technically-oriented people would tend to visit more
technically-oriented sites and would tend to use a Mozilla-based
browser like Firefox.
Here’s the browser breakdown for The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century for February 2005. These numbers are based on the first page of results reported by the tool I use to create this blog, Blogware.
The majority of my readers use Internet Explorer, which has an over
2-to-1 lead over the next browser, Firefox. I suspect that these stats
may be reversed in The Farm, the programmer weblog that I write for Tucows.
| Browser | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Microsoft Internet Explorer | 57%
(678601 hits) |
| Mozilla Firefox | 25%
(303033 hits) |
| Apple Safari | 5%
(61560 hits) |
| Yahoo Slurp
(The bot that feeds data to Yahoo’s search engine) |
5%
(58312 hits) |
| Googlebot
(The bot that feeds data to Google) |
4%
(46665 hits) |
| Konqueror
(Linux browser) |
3%
(36443 hits) |
| Pluck
(Web aggregation service) |
1%
(14529 hits) |
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Signs of Life at IndieGameDev
Yup, new articles (finally!) posted to one of the blogs I get paid to
write, IndieGameDev, a blog for independent game developers. There are
three articles today:
- Digger: A “Boulderdash”-Style Game Implemented in .NET
- The Women’s Game Conference, which takes place in Austin, Texas on October 26th – 27th
- The cheapest book on game authoring for Mac OS X you’ll ever find: Cocoa Game Programming Workshop — US$9.95
IKEA has a cute little artifical intelligence program, Anna, who will gladly try to help meet your strangely-named disposable Swedish furniture needs.
Honorary GTABlogger Davezilla had some other Swedish needs (I’ll bet they were strangely-named, too), and he compiled this animation which chronicles his conversation with Anna.
In case you’re not familiar with the term, here’s the Wikipedia entry for “Turing Test”.
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Chris Pirillo Wants to Save You Five Bucks!
offering a $5 coupon for interested purchasers of the FeedDemon
RSS/Atom reader for Windows. Download this FeedDemon from here
and use this promo code to save $5: CPN05GNOME.
Some of FeedDemon’s features:
- Pre-configured with dozens of popular feeds, so you can start
using it right away
- Newspaper displays news items
from dozens of sites in a single web page for easy reading
- Watches collect news items containing specific
words or phrases,
alerting you to items of interest so you don’t have to look for them
- News Bins store your favorite news items for
future reference
- Integration with Feedster and
other popular RSS search engines
- Built-in tabbed
browser for surfing the web within FeedDemon
- Supports all versions of RSS and Atom 0.3
- Imports/exports feed lists from OPML
- Easy to use for beginners, yet powerful enough to
please the most sophisticated news junkie
- FeedDemon is a native Windows application, so it
runs fast and does NOT require the bulky .NET runtime.