Great news this morning, Mighty Ape New Zealand’s Best Online Store has swung its way across the ditch to launch in Australia.
Visit the jungle and check out their massive grand opening sale.
They also have a very active community on Facebook and Twitter.
It is time to go Ape!
Since installing Google Analytics I have been checking my webstats on a near daily basis. However, because of my lack of blogging over the last few weeks I have also been monitoring the stats less. Today I learnt my lesson that maybe I should maintain a daily watch. Over the last few days (yesterday in particular) there has been a dramatic spike in the number of visits to my site despite no new blog posts being added.
Looking at the data in more detail it appears a lot of traffic is being generated out of China by a site called qq829.com
Looking into this some more there is this thread on a lot of traffic appearing from China and on the Google Analytics forum.
Furthermore both HubPages and Symantic have information on the Trojan that is causing the problem.
At this stage it does not appear that my website has been infected with Malware or compromised in anyway, however, please ensure that your antivirus software is up to date as this particular Trojan could be costing you a lot of traffic and could potentially cause other problems.
Furthermore I have now blocked traffic originating from the qq829 website, other people are blocking all of China but at this stage I am not considering it.
If you are facing similar weird problems with bursts of traffic to your site you can block the qq829 website by adding these lines to your .htaccess file.
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^qq829" TOBLOCK=1 SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^cnzz" TOBLOCK=1 <FilesMatch "(.*)"> Order Allow,Deny Allow from all Deny from env=TOBLOCK </FilesMatch> deny from 219.232.240.0/20 deny from 203.171.224.0/20
It appears I have so many Chinese friends or something like that on Facebook that I am being served chinese ads.
Can anyone tell me what this says: 這是一款耐玩的戰爭策略遊戲 and 三國，中華民族最輝煌的戰爭時代！百年經典，今日為您呈現！“三國風雲”，Facebook會員點入即玩！
Google Translate gives me This is a war strategy game playable, Three countries, the Chinese nation’s most brilliant era of war! Century classic, today for you show! “Three situation”, Facebook members point into the play!
Surely there should be something more relevant to advertise to me.
Over the last month blogging about Tsunamis and Linux has seen my blog stats skyrocket.
The data:
Raw Visitors: 6,114 (note this includes robots, crawlers etc)
Raw Pageviews: 17,374 (note this includes robots, crawlers etc)
Google Analytics Visitors Count: 2,257
Google Analytics Pageview Count: 3,303
RSS Feed Visitors Count: 2,771
Combined RSS + Google Visitors Count: 5,028
This is up a total of 800 visitors from the month before.
Visitor Locations From Google Analytics:
2,257 visits came from 83 countries/territories
2,257 visits came from 652 cities
Most Popular Posts:
Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx First Impressions
Word 2007 crashing on Windows 7 or won’t open documents
Getting ATI Radeon HD Drivers to work in Ubuntu 10.04 Beta 1
These instructions will hopefully help those who are testing the Beta over the next few days to get full hardware acceleration from their graphics cards.
These instructions are based off Ubuntu’s guide here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonHD and I can only comment on my set up, I cannot guarantee that they will work for anyone else.
Firstly make sure that you graphics card is not already working properly, in a terminal type:
glxinfo | grep “renderer string”
If you see “software rasterizing” as the output then the drivers are NOT working right, if you see something else then they most likely are.
First prepare your system for installing the new drivers, do this by removing the old drivers and making sure you have the right libraries installed:
sudo sh /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh
If the file cannot be found then it is good, just means the driver was never installed in the first place.
sudo apt-get purge xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx-amdcccle fglrx-kernel-source xorg-driver-fglrx-dev
Package not found errors here are also really good.
sudo apt-get --reinstall install libgl1-mesa-glx xserver-xorg-core
Make sure that the reinstall of these two packages completes properly. (Note: the reinstall flag has two – before it not one, some web browsers render the double dash as a single long dash).
Next you need to install a new Kernel, Ubuntu 10.04 will ship with 2.6.32 but at a minimum (at the moment) you need 2.6.33, this is simple to do though:
cd ~/
mkdir kerneldebs
cd kerneldebs/
wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.33/linux-headers-2.6.33-020633-generic_2.6.33-020633_amd64.deb http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.33/linux-headers-2.6.33-020633_2.6.33-020633_all.deb http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.33/linux-image-2.6.33-020633-generic_2.6.33-020633_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i linux*
Now reboot and make sure that you boot into the new kernel and not the old one.
Add the following address to your systems software sources:
ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
Reload the sources list when prompted, then go to update manager, check for new updates, install all the new updates that are listed. Once installed reboot your system.
Now try “glxinfo | grep “renderer string” again and hopefully it will no longer display software raster and instead something a lot more promising.
Sometime in the next 24 hours Beta 1 of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx will be released to the world. This version of Ubuntu is different from the previous few versions for two key reasons the first is that it is a long term support release and as such will be [hopefully] more stable and more complete than other versions over the past year. The second change is in the user interface with a step away from the established brown “human” theme to a new theme that looks very Mac OS like.
For the last two days I have been running the daily build of the AMD64 release candidate for 10.04 Beta 1. So far I am very impressed with it. For the past year I have been running 9.04 as the 9.10 release in October of last year broke support for my laptop’s wireless drivers and would cause frequent lock ups. I am pleased to report that those crashes are a thing of the past in 10.04.
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
In the past I have completely hated tracking cookies and the way in which ad websites track your browsing habits across multiple pages, sites and visits. However, as the web has developed tracking cookies have become more and more the accepted norm to the point now where I accept most cookies and have even installed them onto my website to track visitor movements in the form of Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a very powerful tool for being able to analyse your visitor numbers and browsing habits. Over the last six months I have been using the data collected to shape my blog posts in such away to attract more visitors but also retain the regular ones I have with things of interest and stop posting about those things that the data suggests people are not interested in. The main change in topic area as a result of this has seen me blog less about politics – leaving that to the heavy weights of Kiwiblog, No Minister, Frogblog and others. In place of these blog subjects I have been focussing more on computers, science, religion and general news related topics. This has seen the number of posts made decrease slightly but an increase in the number of comments made and a steady level of site visitors and a large rise in the number of visitors to the site’s RSS feed.
Below are the main highlights of the Google Analytics data from September to February, please note the visitor numbers are only those hitting the main site (as Google Analytics does not track RSS hits), Google Analytics also filters out bots, spiders and other automatic crawlers and aggregators so this is some of the best data I have on actual true human visitors to the site.
Visitors plotted by week
Breaking down the visitors by city is a really nice way to see how the blog is having a worldwide reach. Sure the vast majority of my visits come from New Zealand, but the data also shows many visits (in order from most visits) from London, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Singapore, Dublin, Perth, New York, Manchester, Los Angeles and more than 1,700 other cities around the world.
The breakdown of visitors by web browser makes for good reading especially as Firefox is beating Internet Explorer.
When you then add in the operating system into the mix Internet Explorer and Windows comes back to the top though.
The search keywords is one of my main sources for determining what topics I should blog on, as you see no politics related searches here:
So that’s it, I use Google Analytics to “spy” on visitors and but will happily share most of the data with you. The only thing I have excluded from this round up is the list of the most popular blog posts – but they are listed in the sidebar anyway (updated monthly). It will be interesting to see in another six months what has changed. In particular if changes in my personal life (moving countries) will affect my blogging and in turn affect my visitor numbers and trending.
I have had this issue with a number of mice and a number of different computers now. Some older USB mice will not work when you plug them into Windows Vista. What happens is a dialog appears saying installing software and then fails saying unknown device.
The fix for this as I just found out this morning is quite simple:
Simple. And Windows had the drivers to make it work all along! Sometimes Windows does some really simple things wrong and as a result is just so frustrating. It is a mouse it should just work!
This video is a little silly at the start but later on does well to explain the inside workings of how someone can break into your computer when you do not have up to date security updates and anti-virus installed.
All morning I have been frustrated by the internet connection at my parents place keeps disconnecting. I have been trying to find a pattern to the disconnections but so far the only thing I can spot is disconnections under high load – particularly when using BitTorrent or updating Ubuntu. The graph below is taken from BitTorrent it shows the contstant disconnections over a 55 minute period downloading a 500mb file. In particular 17 disconnections over the final 25 minute period.
The screenshots below are from Ubuntu and show it attempting to download updates. Unlike BitTorrent when the connection drops the entire update fails until you press the cancel button and then manually start the download again after the connection has been restored. Here we have 11 disconnections while downloading 180mb of data. It appears that the data is coming in roughly 25mb bursts between disconnections.
Thanks to @orcon through twitter they are investigating the matter, however, I am not the only one suffering these disconnection issues since connecting to the Orcon+ Network.
This is the orcon log of all our connections this morning during a 3 hour period.
