Archive for February, 2007

I added Google AdSense to my blog in December of 2005.  As I said back then, I was curious how it would work for me.

I had no expectation when I started of making any real money.  My exact words back then were “… I’d be surprised if AdSense generates more than a buck or two a month for me”.  How prophetic…

To date, Google’s AdSense has generated $19.05 in revenue: that’s pretty much a buck or two a month.  For the curious, Google won’t pay out a red cent to you until your revenue tops $100, so the almost-$20 my site has “earned” in the past year isn’t even sitting in my wallet.  Five years from now, though, I’ll be rolling in the cash!

More interesting to me than the revenue is looking at the statistics Google Analytics generates.  About 90% of the visits to my site are first time visits; only 10% of the visitors come back a second time.  Hmmm: something to be said for having compelling content, I guess.  80% of the visits to my site come via Google searches: I think the sitemap feature, which keeps Google indexes of my site current, is helpful in that regard. 

What is the most “popular” content on my site?  A post I made entitled “The man with exploding arms” has been at the top of the hit parade pretty much since I first posted it.   Don’t ask me why.  Second or third place is usually something about Teresa Noreen,  and similarly usually one of my “techie” posts (currently my Vista posts are generating some traffic).  To be clear, a “highly rated” post on my site only generates about 300 clicks a month: the top five are all in the 100-400 visits per month range.

Is my site generating more traffic now than a year ago?  Unfortunately, I don’t have a full year of data yet.  Comparing two dissimilar months (E.G.: September to February) is generally not very helpful: different times of the year generate different amounts of traffic.  However, I compared May 2006 to February 2007 : if that’s any indicator, it looks like total unique visitors is up from about 50 per day “then” to about 150 per day “now”. 

Statistics are fun!  Okay, I’m weird…

I’m upgrading the version of Wordpress (the software that runs this blog) on my server.  This is a periodically necessary process in order to keep up with security updates. 

Some site features may temporarily disappear during the upgrade, and should re-appear once the upgrade is complete.  It is also likely that there will be some problems during the upgrade process. 

Please bear with me as I complete this- thanks!

UPDATE: In theory, the upgrade is complete and all of the site functions are restored to normal.

Irene is going in for her second hip surgery next week.  I’ll be working from home for a while as she recovers and gets mobile.  In preparation for this, I’m taking *this* week off to re-organize my office and take care of a few other things around the house to make things ready for Robo-Irene.

I’ve let my office go, basically stacking junk on top of junk for over a year.  To get things under control is a major project, and starts with (incredibly) making things even messier.  First I need to sort and discard things in order to make space to achieve some organization.  One of my objectives is to clear a space for a new “game console desk” I want to set up.  I have this idea it would be neat to have a monitor and an Xbox 360 in my office for gaming.  Another objective is to make my work space a bit more functional: the layout of a couple pieces of furniture (the filing cabinet and a “trunk” I have) are less than ideal.

Stage one is complete- I’ve emptied the trunk, cleared out the cabinet, and shifted them around.  In the process, I’ve created one full curb-side bag of garbage, a similarly full bag of cardboard, and a half full bag of recyclable paper.  I have also displaced about 30 miscellaneous computer game and software boxes, and collected another box full of various cordless and cellular phone parts.  And I generated a discard pile of antiquated technology: joyless joysticks, hopeless hard drives, pathetic processors, crappy CD ROMs, cantankerous keyboards, and moribund mice.  I also have a bunch of 35 mm film and a decent but very old Canon 35 mm film camera that I’ll likely never use again.  And as a real blast from the past- a Polaroid “instant” film camera, I’m guessing one of the last ones they made.  And an unopened package of film for it.

One interesting and unexpected “collection”: I seem to have about half a dozen of those little clip-on “wrist wrest” attachments.  Apparently every keyboard I’ve ever bought has one, and I never use them- if I want a wrist wrest, I use one of those gel pad rests.  I wonder how many discarded keyboard wrist wrests exist in various landfills?

I managed to cut a trail back to my computer keyboard to write this post.  I’m going to have some lunch now and then see if I can cut through some of the software boxes and organize the CDs/DVDs they contain.  Stage 2, hopefully starting tomorrow, will be to shut down my computers and “re-do” all the wiring.  With two kittens in the house we’ve had a couple of “unexpected power shutdowns” as they’ve discovered various ways to turn off the powerbars…and the wires themselves are very vulnerable.  I’d like to keep as much of that stuff out away from inquisitive little paws and teeth as I can.

On Thursday I decided to install some driver updates for Vista.  ATI has a new video driver, version 7.2.  I had this crazy idea that this might solve my problem with putting the computer in standby mode.  The rest of what happened is proof that, despite having a moderately high intelligence, I’m often rather stupid…

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Our kittens are growing up…Nimbus goes tomorrow to have his “bits” removed.  

It’s a comparatively minor operation for the male cats, with very little risk.  It’s also essential if you consider yourself an even remotely responsible pet owner. 

Mind you, I’m sure he’ll have a few things to say about my “minor” comment tomorrow evening…

Update: Nimbus is safe and sound, and seems none the worse for wear…

Vista has a fancy utility program to help manage photographs and videos called “Windows Photo Gallery”.  It has a bunch of nice features like the ability to tag images, and to automatically categorize them by date.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked properly since I migrated to Windows.  Every time I tried to use it, it came up with nothing except for the pictures in the “Public” (\Users\Public\Public Pictures) folder.  When I tried to add my own pictures folder (\Users\Kelly\Pictures), it failed with an error saying (paraphrasing): “Cannot add this directory: it or its parent are hidden or system folders- please use the Pictures folder”.

I eventually came to the conclusion that this was a permissions problem (d’uh).  And I then came to the even more profound conclusion that this was a result of me using the “Windows Easy Transfer” utility, which transfers files from your previous Windows machine to your new system.  What I surmise happened is this: when I use Windows Easy Transfer, it transfer my user files (E.G.: my pictures) and attempts to retain the old Windows XP permissions.  In XP, a user’s home directory has different (odd) permissions compared to Vista. 

Sure enough, when I looked at \Users\Kelly (right click=> properties), it was marked as “hidden” and with some of its contents “read only”.  Irritatingly, the “hidden” permission was greyed out- meaning I couldn’t change it.  Sigh.  After some pondering, I deselected “read only”, and said “this folder only” (I.E.: not recursive).  I was then able deselect hidden. 

After this, I was then able to re-launch Windows Photo Gallery, and chose File-> Add Folder to Gallery successfully.  Moral of this story: Windows Easy Transfer transfers easily, but appears to do (or arguably not do) some rather unfortunate things with file permissions that will come back later to bite you.

I keep making headway regarding outstanding problems with my migration to Vista.  It appears that I’ve overcome the problem with EQ2Map Updater. 

• Apparently, some of the files in the map directory for EQ2Maps (E.G.: C:\Program Files (x86)\Sony\EverQuest II\UI\EQ2MAP) are/became read only.  I removed the read only property
• and then EQ2Map Update stopped freezing and generated a big ugly error message.  I’d paste it here, but I’ve not been able to re-create it.  I made the error message go away by stopping my anti-virus program, Avast, which also seems to be having some problems with Vista (see below)

The odd thing is this: I turned on Avast again, and EQ2Maps still works.  I’m puzzled by this behavior.  I like Avast: it has been a great AV program under Windows XP X64, and I expected great things from it under Vista based on their website.   But what I’m seeing is very odd.

I disabled Avast’s Web Shield a couple of days ago when I noticed some websites weren’t loading.  There are some postings in Avast’s forum about this behaviour, but no real responses thus far.   To further confuse matters, I re-enabled Web Shield earlier today, thinking that perhaps the autotuning correction I made yesterday might have an impact on Avast’s behavior.  Sure enough, the websites that were consistently failing with WebShield previously were working fine now WebShield enabled and autotuning turned off.

I’m going to try rebooting.  If everything still works, I’ll assume there is some voodoo taking place involving Avast WebShield, Vista’s autotuning, and strange evil spirits…

I’ve been having some “odd” email problems since installing Vista.  One of my email accounts (Telus) fails (times out) with an error 0×800CCC19 whenever there is an email in my inbox longer than about one or two kilobytes.  If I use my email service’s web interface and delete any such messages, the connection works fine. 

I tried the obvious things, such as disabling my anti-virus program and increasing the time out value in Windows Mail.  I then launched my trusty Google search, and found this forum thread on the topic.  The thread included the usual advice, but one post stood out:

 Jake  (Msg. 5) Posted: Tue Feb 06, 2007 4:03 pm
Post subject: Re: Receiving Mail [Login to view extended thread Info.]
 

There is a fix floating around that goes like this.
This is very step-by-step, so bear with me.     

1. Go to the Vista start menu and type cmd
2. The search results will display a program titled cmd
3. Right-click on the link and select “Run as administrator”
4. type “netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled” without the
quotatioin marks
5. Test your POP account and see if you can now download the files.
6. If nothing changes, reenable the autotuning feature by typing “netsh 

I followed the instructions exactly, and voila- email worked!  I’ll have to do some more research later on what “global autotuning” does, and why it is causing my email session to fail.   Thanks, “Jake”, whoever you are!   

UPDATE: I found a good description of what Vista’s “autotuning” is about, and why it might be causing problems.  Basically, autotuning is a negotiation between the client and the server regarding network packet size, and the problem arises when the process agrees to a large packet size but where some part of the negotiation gets blocked by an intermediate router/network device.  Apparently, turning it off doesn’t have a significant performance impact in most situations.  Now I’ll have to investigate my router to see if it might be causing problems with the negotiation….

I’ve installed Vista with the “new” ATI drivers that support OpenGL.  The process has been less “fun” than I’d like thus far, and I don’t yet have my favorite games working.  Here are a few of the little problems I’ve encountered

• Vista doesn’t include support for file system backups made with Windows XP/2000.  You have to download an optional piece of software to add this support.  For a moment, as I looked at the “this file type is not recognized” error message when I tried to access my backups, I was a wee bit worried
• I’m still experiencing problems with having my computer recover properly from Standby mode.  After upgrading to the latest BIOS for my ASUS M2R32, at least I was able to restart from standby.  Unfortunately, my display is horribly corrupted after such a restart, suggesting there is something not-quite-right with the Jan 29/V7.1 ATI Vista drivers
• The embedded ADI sound card on my motherboard didn’t work initially, and the drivers from my Asus install CD simply failed to install.  I downloaded beta drivers from Asus that seem to be working now
• Once I got audio working, I discovered that perhaps I was premature in assuming that it wasn’t working to begin with.  Something is different with the supported audio output from the SoundMax- to get adequate volume, I had to disconnect the digital connector and use analog wiring

Once I figured out the basics, I started installing/testing my games

• EverQuest 2 works! I was able to successfully log in and wander around a bit; I have sound and working graphics, so it’s looking good
• EverQuest didn’t work initially- it failed while it was trying to patch Launchpad, then again when it tried to patch the game itself.  I ultimately “corrected” this by taking/forcing ownership with full rights on the EverQuest directories (I.E.: I right-clicked the Sony directory, selected Security tab, Advanced, then selected the Owner tab, made myself the owner of the directories, then back to Permissions to grant myself full rights)
• I *suspect* that I may have caused this problem myself.  I installed EQ2, then over-wrote the directories from my backup thinking this would reduce the amount of updating necessary.  I believe that all this did was change the directory/file permissions…and when I finally got EQ2 to launch, it went out and did a full (2+ hour @ 3 Mbps) update anyway.
• EQ2Map Updater does not work :(  At least not on my machine
• Second Life does not work; it installs, but crashes at the main login / status screen.  Apparently, NVidia card owners are working fine with Vista + Second Life, but ATI cards are causing the Second Life client to crash.  Presumably something wrong with ATI’s OpenGL implementation- not surprising, really, since the first release ever of OpenGL support from ATI was in the most recent (January 29th) driver set- no beta, straight to release- smart move, ATI.
• Vanguard works without a hitch- but I applied the same ownership changes to the Vanguard directories that I did for the EQ2 directories.  See also the note above re: I’m likely at fault for the permissions problem

ATI released their “production” Vista driver on January 29th. And it apparently has native OpenGL support, at least according to this extract from the release notes:

This release of Catalyst® introduces the following new features:

• Blu-ray and HD-DVD playback
• CrossFire™ support under Vista
• Native OpenGL Vista support
• Catalyst™ Install Manager for Vista
• New Catalyst™ Control Center

This looks very promising. Unfortunately, I’m away from home at the moment and likely won’t have a chance to try this out for a couple of weeks. I’m still shaking my head, though, about ATI waiting until pretty much the day of release for Vista before making these features available for folks to test out.