Fnord.

iPhone blogging…

Anna, from about 10 to 13 weeks. Age approximate, but the pictures are from Aug 26th to Sep 21st 2007. Quite cute, eh?

It’s surprisingly hard to tell how many visitors a site has. Blog spam (as of today, Akismet has caught over 100k on this insignificant site alone, amazing!), search engine bots, various badly-coded web crawlers, hacked windows boxes trying canned breakin scripts, etc, etc… you get the idea. There’s so much noise in the logs that you just can’t tell.

I’ve tried a couple of programs that parse the server logs (Analog and Webalizer), as well as modify-the-PHP-to-call-Javascript solutions like Google Analytics and BDP Referral Tracker. None of ‘em really got the job done well.

So today I’ve spent $30 of my WatchReport funds on Mint. It gets a great review from John Gruber, demo looks great (there’s even a CSS file for viewing stats on my iPhone, bonus!) and the price is right. It’s added to the header for WordPress, so we’ll see how it goes.

You shouldn’t see any difference at all, though it should be faster because, unlike Analytics, it’s all hosted locally and doesn’t need to go offsite at any point. Nice, that.

Killing time at the mall.

Via Gizmodo, news of the Navizon application that locates your approximate location using cell towers, ESSIDs from Wi-Fi and user-contributed coordinates.

This is a workaround for the fact that the iPhone has no GPS or cell-tower localization, which reduces the usefulness of the Google Maps application. Navizon integrates with Maps, and is usually close enough to be useful. I’ve managed a fix or two and am super pleased to have it available. Nice!

Update 10/12/07: It’s commercial code. My copy just expired. I’m a little pissed that I had no warning it was demise-ware, this is very weak of them. Deleted.

1. Via AppTapp,
   1. Apollo IM. Very flaky, AIM only, deleted. UPDATE: see below
   2. MobileChat. AIM-only, and flaky.
2. Web-based. These run via Safari, but because of that I don’t think they can notify you if they’re in the background.
   1. Meebo - looks pretty good
   2. BeeJive - looks very good
   3. Mundu - looks pretty good, here is a recommend.

Of course, there are the main sites like http://webmessenger.yahoo.com/ and similar from other services. However, none of those are multi-protocol, which I really need to have.

I’m trying BeeJive now, I really have to sort out the pile of various IM logins I have these days!

If you go web-based, you can use iPhoneApper to make a launcher that goes directly to a given URL. Neat trick.

Page updates

• 9/21: Added Mundu review link.
• 9/23: Apollo v1.0 is out, now does AIM/ICQ/MSN. However, it also seems to burn battery.
• 9/28/07: Amazingly, the 1.1.1 firmware didn’t include an IM program, which surprised me. Anyway, currently using Apollo, which for all its faults can at least ping me when its in the background.
• 10/12/07: MobileChat is now multi-protocol, but seems to only allow one login at a time. I still get errors on my dot-mac account, but AIM and gtalk and MSN work for me.

Or do you just think you know?

Me, I know. Check this out:

That, my friends, is a Tempus LX CDMA stratum-one network time server. A network time server addresses a problem near and dear to my heart, namely keeping a set of computers time-synchronized. Like many interesting problems, it’s much harder than it sounds. This toys costs just under five thousand dollars, and it’s cheap compared to some others.

The backstory is amusing, too. A few years ago, I wrote a whitepaper on network time synchronization, which was geared towards the problem of distributed data streaming. Some time earlier this year, Tempus (vendor) found it via Google and offered a free server if they were added to the whitepaper!

By that time, I had switched groups, but my colleagues agreed and voila! Hardware, with attendant donation paperwork. Can I bring home the bacon or what? This is the first time my NEESit tech writing has been so directly praised, and I’m as proud as can be.

Of course, we don’t really need one of these. UCSD and SDSC have their own NTP servers, as does any large network. So right now its sitting in my office, and when I have time I’ll rack it with the Sun just for grins. What a cool toy!

For you time nerds out there, and wavelets folk - unlike most others, this one doesn’t look for GPS signals. It uses the CDMA cellular network (e.g. Verizon) which requires very accurate clock sync to do handoff and spreading functions. So, without even a cellular account, it can sync deep inside buildings with just the included cheap 5/7ths whip antenna. Damned clever, that. I’m impressed, and I’d say that even if they hadn’t bought and paid for my integrity.

Via TupleShop, a nifty tool for watching and searching network traffic on the fly, the logically-named ngrep. Here’s a screenshot of it in action, where I watch HTTP traffic as I load up the main blog page:

 If you need it, it’s very cool. If not, please go about your business, nothing to see here.

This one has it all. And I do mean all.

Everything you ever didn’t know that you needed to know about a jobsearch - from research to resume to interviews to new-job-skills, the works. A collected series of solicited essays from experts around the web. Kind of reminds me of what a college job placement service could do for students if motivated and staffed right.

Hope you like it, Terri!

Yes, I am clearing out my to-do list of postings today, why?

Anyway, Lifehacker tells us that the following are now free from ABC:

Fat March, Brothers & Sisters, Ugly Betty, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy, Men in Trees, American Inventor, The Nine, Lost, According to Jim, Shaq’s Big Challenge, The Fashionista Diaries, Voicemail, Six Degrees, October Road, Daybreak, What About Brian, Knights of Prosperity, and The Bronx is Burning.

Most of those are, as usual, deeply and profoundly pointless, but hey! If one floats your boat it’s now easier to find than ever before.