(click to enlarge)I did a quick survey of what people were reading on the site this month, and the results were surprising:

RSS (75% of my readers)

1. 97% of RSS readers dug Cygwin + Putty
2. 27% of RSS readers followed The programmer’s three virtues (the only quote-of-the-week above 1%)
3. 14% of RSS readers hit How much sleep is healthy on Win32?

Direct viewers (25% of all readers)

1. 25% of traffic hit my Markdown cheatsheet (50% referred from Wikipedia)
2. 20% were looking for my Calling Perl from PHP article
3. 10% of visitors read my Tweaking Ubuntu guide
4. 10% of readers wandered through my tongue-in-cheek Top 10 things Linux distros get right that Microsoft doesn’t fluff piece
5. 9% of people hit my 2 week old Flash games for kids page

Top keywords

1. 65% of all searchers were looking for “howto make ice coffee”
2. 25% of searches asked about “tuning ubuntu”

Browser/OS/Screen size

1. 60% Firefox (20% Linux)
2. 25% IE
3. 10% Safari (Mac)
4. And only 2% of readers had a 800×600 or smaller display

The moral of the story

RSS is king, based on my mostly geek readership. Writing fluff for Digg is less useful than writing useful cheat sheets and guides. Links that solve/discuss really annoying technical problems get the most clicks.

I was especially surprised at how few people were interested in Ruby or Rails, and how a page of flash games I made for my kids could get thousands of hits in a matter of weeks.

(All statistics represent unique views, and exclude traffic from my own IPs.)

Today I am wondering where Google’s going. They’re buying up all the dark fibre they can get their hands on, and are building dozens of CPU farms. It’s obvious that they could already be the next Microsoft, if there’s a profit in whatever they’re aiming at.

If Google is the next young Microsoft, then they have one distinct advantage. Not only does Google own some fine IP, they may end up owning the whole damned net. Microsoft monopolized our lives with only an OS and some powerful business arrangements. Google is aiming to become the next operating environment, and the infrastructure that it runs on. Competition may already be impossible.

The power in the network

The network is the computer of the coming generations. We can still run applications locally, but how much work can we get done these days without the Internet or at least our own local network applications? We rely on shared printers, file servers, web servers, source repositories, messaging, mail, and so on. Even though our computers are more powerful than those of the pre-Internet days, they’re less useful today without the network. Almost everything we do now relies on processing power and information outside of our control.

So if Google owns the network they really own part of the computer. Compared to Microsoft’s monopoly, the power in owning the network could embed itself far deeper in the future of computing. However Google decides computing should go, is likely how it will be. Languages, APIs, distribution models, all of these could be patterned after Google’s architecture for decades. Just think of how many applications today are still defined by windowing and APIs defined by Microsoft and Apple in the 80s.

Worse, misuse of the power of owning the nets will not only limit our choice, but it will infringe on our own freedom. Free speech is the most obvious loss, but a more subtle control of the flow of information is possible–more control than we’ve seen in any other time in history. Microsoft may be able to influence what applications we run (and lock us into them), but Google will be able to influence what people see and learn.

I like to spend my winter holiday thinking about the year, and what I didn’t do enough of. Next year, I hope to:

1. Write more. Not just web fluff and links (which is fun), but more real fiction and non-fiction. I love to write, but life and complexity just keep on getting in the way.
2. Do more creative stuff. I have an artistic side, but the geek in me naturally suppresses it. I need to learn better balance.
3. Learn more healthy habits. I love good food, I grok nutrition, and I enjoy exercise. I need a bit more of each (and less of the crap).
4. Learn Ruby/Rails well. Last year I polished my C#, Javascript, and Php skills (as well as time spent with SQL, CSS/XHTML, etc.). This year I need to at least know why Rails isn’t for me. So far I’ve only spent a dozen hours with it, which isn’t nearly enough.
5. Focus. Life is noisy. Work is noisy. Learn to deal with both: I will overcome the chaos.

One thing I like to keep in mind with resolutions is that sometimes a year isn’t enough. Life is a garden, and sometimes crops fail. The key is to keep doing healthy things, and remember that growth takes time, practice, and effort.

Yesterday’s tongue-in-cheek top 10 hit the big lists (digg and reddit). Traffic surged and the server held up well. It’s not our first tsunami, but it has easily been our largest. Some details:

• Digg count: 1400+
• Reddit points: 130+
• Total traffic: 45k reads (250k hits, 48 hours, 10x increase)
• Dreamhost ad clicks: 497 (100x increase)
• Google ad revenue: 100x increase
• RSS subscription increase: +1600 (3x increase)
• Comments: 50 local + 250 digg + 120 reddit (1000x increase)

I’ll post some graphs once today’s stats are in. Tracking Digg stats is getting old, so I’m going to work on some software instead.

So is it worth it to write inflammatory, tongue-in-cheek top10 style commentary? I think so: people were interested, and the debate was useful and entertaining. It seems that the format is a good way to summarize an experience with something, in a way that people get. And, it was fun.

My wife knows me well. We don’t subscribe to the all-out yuppymas, rather we spoil each other (and the kids) with a few small things to fuel each other’s passions. My recharge this year:

• An Amazon gift certificate. I’ve been craving some new fiction, but I’m not quite sure what yet. This makes it easy.
• A nice white board. It’s the only luxury missing in my home office, and I find schema design easier on a whiteboard than on paper. Dunno why.
• Two nice, hand-made picture frames. Now I have to be artistic again.
• Two hubris-inspired mouse pads (made from a few of last year’s shots).

That’s it. That’s all I need to spark my creativity in the new year. That, and a bit of rest.

I had a fit of inspiration on the weekend and some free time, so I took a swipe at simplifying the site. I had been toying with designs over the summer, but all of my ideas turned out boxy and busy. There’s something about the tools that suck me into piling on the partitions and tidbits.

The design and implementation are easy for me, it’s the inspiration that’s elusive. I can look at hundreds of designs, finding things here and there that I like. I’ll go away and sketch out some of the ideas, but nothing will stick. I can spend gobs of time in inspiration limbo and then one day I’ll find the one thing that tweaks me. Then there’s no stopping me.

This time I was inspired by a number of things that reminded me that it’s the writing that is important. The writing is only important if it’s read, and you can’t read it if it’s drowning in sauce. So I mocked up a whitespace-laden layout and started to play with logos.

Into logo hell …

The new layout took just under 3 hours to hash out as a Wordpress template. The logo took a bit longer. Again I lost my inspiration: I had a clean layout, but no colour or logo to anchor it. I wrote a script to render a slice of my font library in a few different colours, one of which it picked at random for the site’s banner. I couldn’t decide. Nothing seemed to fit.

But of course the logo doesn’t matter, if it’s the writing that’s important. I slept on it, and woke up to clarity. I saw the semi-randomly-selected font and instantly saw the colour and theme. It’s retro, and it’s chock full of whitespace.

WarpedVisions has been around for several years now, and traffic has grown at a fairly constant rate. Until recently of course. Since 2005, traffic has doubled twice over, and for no good reason: I’m still posting the same geekesque links and writing small snips about the geek life.

I finally bit the bullet and bought a new development machine. I spent a few weeks looking at what was available, waffling between vendors, and figuring out what I wanted. I considered getting a Mac this time around, but just couldn’t justify the $1k premium over what I could build myself. Not everyone can build a reasonable machine themselves, however, and those people should either find a pet geek or stick with the likes of Apple, Dell, and HP.

The selection process

My method for figuring out bang-for-buck is simple: I don’t let my inner consumer get the best of me. I don’t need the best video card, I don’t need a 42-channel sound board, and I don’t need 22Gb of RAM. What I need is a snappy, quiet development PC. It doesn’t need to play all of the newest games; it only needs to be fast enough to improve my productivity over the current development machines in my home office (a P3-600 XP workstation and a P4-1600 FC4 laptop).

I also wanted to make sure that the component quality was better than the last set of PCs we ordered in our office, which were from a vendor who we trusted to select the components for us. That particular vendor provided low-cost hardware, at the expense of poorly selected, low quality parts.

Based on my experience with smaller vendors, I suggest strongly against “pre-configured” machines where you don’t have the option to specify individual components. I find that most places cut costs on vital components, like power-supplies, cases, and CD/DVD drives. It’s always worth dropping a few Ghz of CPU for a quality enclosure, power supply, RAM, and other bits.

Luckily my needs are simple, and my choices vast. I spent 1/4 of what I spent in 1997 and 2/3 what I spent in 2003 on development systems, getting an ample dual core AMD AM2, 2Gb DDR2-800, 250GB storage, and a 22in LCD display. I’m very happy with the components so far: the machine is quiet, snappy, and the display is a huge improvement over my aging Trinitron CRT.

Setting it up

The machine came built and tested, with XP pre-installed. All that was left was to run the updates, add my own applications, and install Linux. Windows update and application installation took a few hours to run (and reboot, and reboot again), and the ‘nix install took about about an hour (including updates and automatix).

Installing Ubuntu

I have to say that I was really impressed with the latest Ubuntu installer. I popped in the live CD while Windows was running, and it came up with an ‘OSS Windows tools’ browser and the option to install. I ran the installer, which asked me a few questions (partitioning, etc.) and then went off to install. The base system install ran from within XP, with the remainder finishing when the system rebooted to the new desktop.

After running the system updates I ran the Automatix scripts, which install all of the 3rd-party (and non-free) applications you normally need on a machine (nvidia drivers, java, acrobat, flash, mplayer, codecs, google apps, etc.). I found it interesting that NVidia’s tools for Linux are now as good (or better) than on Windows (including UI configuration and everything), and applications like Google Earth and Picassa run as well too. I will really only be booting to XP to do software development for that platform.

Over the next few days, I’ll post some mini-reviews of Ubuntu and the various tools it provides.

I’ve been thinking this week about how I learn stuff. I spend most of my time learning, as technology never stands still (and even if it did, there’s enough knowledge to be had that I’d never find it all anyway). I love learning too, as it expands the universe of what’s possible and how to get there.

One thing that works well for me is to always be looking at how other people do things. For photography, Flickr has some incredible tools for looking at how millions of people take pictures. Some weeks I’ll spend hours pouring over recent posts, tagging the ones that I find especially interesting. Just a few months of doing it has changed the way I think about photography. The effect was unintended too, as I was only looking at the work of others.

Authors like Ray Bradbury and Stephen King call it feeding the muse. Our muse is the part of our consciousness that finds the best way to do something (and what that something is). The muse writes our stories, paints our pictures, and frames our photographs. It’s a being of sorts that needs to be fed, excercised, and used for musing regularly.

Regularly reading Flickr feeds my artistic muse. It’s a healthy diet too, as there is so much nutrition in the skilled photographers I find there. And as a result of the regular feedings and the exercise of practice, I’m starting to see photography in a completely different light. Colours and textures jump out at me now, and I don’t even need to think about exposure or depth of field, I starting to just know it by instinct. Not that I’m a pro yet, but it’s starting to feel comfortable.

Building software is similar. Designers and developers need to have healthy muses, and they need to get a lot of practice at the craft. The time I spend looking at other people’s software feeds my design sense, and I end up building much better software because of it. Not that I don’t have to think, as I have to carefully filter what I feed the muse (you can’t just feed it everything as if it were healthy), but filtering is a lot easier than rote learning.

So after months of feeding my photographer’s sense and years of feeding my developer’s sense, they start to take on a life of their own. I start to see useful paths to things. My spidey senses tingle when danger lurks, and I start to find it easier to learn. And most important, I become more comfortable with the process of doing it, which allows me to think more about what I’m creating.

Today was one of those busy days. Despite dozens of interruptions I was able to get a bunch of real work done, even if it wasn’t quite everything I had planned on doing.

I started out in the morning as I do nearly every Monday morning, wondering, wandering around my mind, wanting an answer to that persistent morning after the weekend question. What the hell was I working on last week? It always takes me at least few minutes before the caffeine caffeine sets in.

I of course know what I was working on last week, but the details elude me. Even after reviewing my careful notes (on a set of 5×7cm recipe cards), I have to let it sink in to uncover the memories obscured in the context swtiches a weekend imposes.

After unearthing my memories, I set off on my first task: to find some documentation for a piece of hardware that arrived in the mail for the second time last week. The second time! The first time the hardware arrived I was stupid enough to leave the envelope it was in within the sacred proximity of the garbage can. Somehow, in their finite wisdom, the cleaners mistook the not-in-my-garbage-can 50×75cm bubble wrap envelope as garbage. I’m not sure why they shipped a CF card in a 50cm envelope, but the wisdom of the gods of shipping (and of office cleaning) eludes us all.

As with most simple pieces of development, the details are full of questions. I install the new hardware, read the documenation (well, skimmed it), and run the test tools. The hardware works, and I think that I understand the problem. Now how to we make this work in our product?

It’s easy to find answers to the simple part of the question. I find enough examples to figure out the easy bits, which leaves me with the details. The nasty details. So what is the information going to look like from this thing? How big is it? Does the customer know what they’re going to do with the data? Of course the customer hasn’t really thought about the problem either, so I go and find someone in sales.

Our sales department puts me on a conference call with our customer, who is really a sales person for another customer. Great, an elbow. There’s no traction when dealing with an elbow, as they don’t really know anything about the problem. They just bend around it, keeping you a safe distance from the answers while trying to convince you that they actually know something. They can only connect me to someone who has a hope of answering my question, and they promise that a techie will phone me in a few days. Great, I’ll have to wait a few days for a real answer.

The sales person makes it absurdly clear that they haven’t even considered the problem yet, which lets me make most of the decisions for them. I assume that all of my questions have simple answers, and go about framing a tool to prove the point. Most of my afternoon is filled helping another project figure out where it’s going, so I don’t quite have time to finish my prototype. I’ll leave that for tomorrow.

The morning reminds me that there’s this huge gap between sales people and developers. Developers don’t usually grok the real world, as they have to fill their heads with billions of tiny details about hardware, software, and how to make it all sing. The details of technology are petty and pedantic, which leaves a mark on their personalities. Sales people are a contrast, burried in details about who’s buying what, what those people want, and how to get it to them. Developers never have to think about people, while sales people are burried in people.

And I get the best of both worlds: I’m a geek, so I get my dose of the petty and pedantic. I’m also a bridge, I manage developers to help them communicate with sales, customers, and the bosses. It’s a bit of a weird world to live in, like a purgatory where I’m stuck herding cats. But it’s all good, I got to write some software today, and I had time to hack away at some people problems too.