Categories
Geek

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)
Categories
Uncategorized

"My Eyes are Nailed, But Still I See"

My friend, writer-of-creepy-tales and ghoulie-rocker Brett Alexander Savory, has a new novella which he co-authored: My Eyes are Nailed But Still I See, published by Delirium Books. Here’s the blurb from its page:

Johnson Milhone’s mind is a world unto

itself—maybe several worlds. Therapy doesn’t penetrate, but nails do.

Leather doesn’t sew easily, and pigs don’t talk—but don’t tell Johnson.

Enter a world where spiders stalk sentient stuffed animals that may or

may not be carved from the flesh of family members who may or may not

be psychotic killers, slaves, and sadistic torturers. Find new uses for

lime green Jell-O and lose it as a viable dessert. Find new darkness in

Poe’s Pit and the Pendulum

and dine at the best table at the Fear Factory. Learn why you should only keep toothpicks

in the drawer if you really trust your mother, or your brother, and never—ever—fish in Scotland at Midnight. My

Eyes Are Nailed, But Still I See is the culmination of an odyssey through a warped young

mind that leads one way, and then another, through gruesome imagery and psychotic

delusion to an ultimate truth you will never see coming.

(Hey, Brett! I think you should make “Never fish in Scotland at midnight” T-shirts!)

Brett has a deal with Delirium Press: if 200 or more copies get sold,

they’ll do a trade paperback run next year, which means the book will

stay in print. Since I like supporting my friends’ creative efforts and

enjoy a good creepy read to boot, I’m placing an order and also

plugging it here.

If you’d like a closer look at the book, the authors have provided an excerpt that you can download [PDF, 40K].

Categories
Uncategorized

Talibell Canada [Updated]

Update: Be sure to read the comments after reading the article, especially this one! — Joey

Joan at FreakGirlSpew (the blog also known as Freak Girl’s Pew) got an ad in her snail mail from Bell Canada. The ad, shown below, showcases the parental content filtering for Bell’s DSL service:

Photo: Bell Canada content-filtering ad.

(For the moment, let’s ignore the argument about whether it’s a good

idea to filter the internet to protect your kids.)

The text of the ad reads “You’ll do anything to protect your kids from

inappropriate content”, beside a photo showing a book with the

inappropriate content x-acto’d out. As you can see, the book isn’t

anything along the lines of The Hustler Anthology: Three Decades of Crotch or even Madonna’s Sex, but a biology

textbook.

Who’s Bell Canada’s ad agency, Ashcroft and Associates? Taliban Promotions?

If knowledge about the human body is to be considered “inappropriate”,

we’re all in deep trouble. If you’re a parent who freaks out over some

anatomy pictures in textbooks, I can say with reasonable certainty that

your kid will grow up to be one screwed-up puppy — I dated such people.

If you care to send Bell Canada an opinion, here are the email addresses to hit:

Remember, you’re more likely to get some kind of response if you spellcheck and use good grammar and etiquette.

Categories
Uncategorized

In "The Farm" and "IndieGameDev"

And now, some links to entries in the blogs I’m paid to write:

In IndieGameDev:

  • Chicks and Joysticks: a white paper on women and gaming written by the Electronic and Leisure Software Producers’ Association.
  • Valil.Chess: an implementation of chess using Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Beta.
  • I Want NPCs in my Chili: How non-player characters add spice to a game.

In The Farm:

Categories
In the News

It’s Funny Because It’s True

Overheard at the coffee shop: “Sean Penn became his Team America puppet at the Oscars!”

Categories
It Happened to Me

Jet

Funny airplane moment: just after boarding the flight to Boston, a girl

in the row behind me asked her father: “Where’d they get this tiny

little plane, Dad? eBay?”

Since I fly to Boston to see Wendy about once every six weeks (she does

the same, and overlapping our flights lets us see each other every

three weeks), I try and find the least expensive flight possible, which

is usually American Eagle, the wing of American Airlines that provides regional services. This past weekend’s flight, before taxes, was CDN$179 (CDN$279 after taxes).

American Eagle uses ERJ jets, manufactured by Brazil’s Embraer. I’m always kind of disappointed that Embraer Jets don’t automatically play Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66’s Mais Que Nada [Windows Media sample / RealPlayer sample] when you board, but that’s like wishing that Seattle-based Boeing’s jets played Seattle-based Sir Mixx-a-Lott’s Baby Got Back [Windows Media sample / RealPlayer sample] or Airbuses played Plastic Bertrand’s Ca Plane Pour Moi [Windows Media sample / RealPlayer sample].

(Get it? “Ca plane”? On a plane? Oh, never mind.)

This is actually a US Airways regional jet, but I

believe it’s an Embraer Regional Jet. I took this photo while flying to

DC in 2000.

Categories
Uncategorized

A Blog About the OTHER Accordion City

[via Geeks, Guitars and Guinness] Metroblogging has added the city of my birth, Manila, to its roster. Go on and read about that wonderful, chaotic, glorious mess that is my hometown.

(A pity it’s not hosted on Blogware, but some other, lesser blogging tool.)

You can find more on Manila in its Wikipedia entry and the Philippines in its Wikipedia entry and its CIA World Factbook entry.