Obligatory stats post
by Tim Faircloth on Nov 20, 2007, 4:51 pm
Since I’ve been downgraded from “The Real Deal” to “New Ego Blogger” according to the does my website suck chart, I thought I may as well embrace the idea and talk a little bit about my stats as reported by Google Analytics and Feed Burner. I’d also like to give a few shout-outs along the way.
Hard numbers: I get between 20 and 60 hits per week, depending on what kind of posts I make. I’ve yet to hit 20 hits in one day, though I came close once when Daniel Miessler linked to one of my posts. According to Feed Burner, I currently have 4 rss subscribers, mostly using Google Reader, though at one point I had as many as 8 (man, that was the big time). The average user spends about 2-5 minutes on my site, and new visitors are about even with returning visitors.
Sources: Recently, my sources have been fairly balanced between direct access, search engines, and referrals. In the earlier life of this site, direct traffic dominated the rankings, but now direct traffic is the smallest source of traffic. Weird. My biggest referrer lately is Edd Morgan. HOWDY THERE, EDD! I’ve also received a few referrals from Daniel Miessler and Dennis Ledford, though their hits are sporadic at best. At one time, Fuze Technologies passed a lot of hits my way, but I was only linked there for a few weeks.
Geography: Thanks to Edd over in the UK, it looks like the fine folks over there have taken a liking to me. HELLO, NEW(ish) UK VISITORS! In the past week, I’ve had more people from around Salisbury hit my site than good ol’ boys from Georgia. As you can imagine, most of my hits are still from the US, but I’ve also gotten a little love from Northern Europe, Australia, Russia, Canada, and even a few hits from Nigeria. Perhaps that last one would explain the sudden influx of 419 spam I had a few weeks ago.
Popular posts: I can’t find any real trends here, but a few posts seem to be really popular. The whole “Ten Thousand Boxes” series (introduced, revisited, revisited again) was fairly popular, as was Does my web page suck?. The popular posts are all over the board as far as subject matter goes.
Browsers: Firefox dominates this category — over any time range, at least half (usually more like 60%) of my visitors were using it. Internet Explorer and Safari are pretty much neck and neck, but someday I’d like to see Internet Explorer disappear to a tiny sliver on the pie chart.
Operating Systems: Mostly Windows users (usually 60-70%), but that’s not surprising. Mac beats out Linux 2 to 1 most of the time, which makes me wonder why I hardly ever see Camino users.
Well, that doesn’t exactly cover everything, but I think it gives a good snapshot of my web traffic.
Ten thousand boxes (revisited again)
by Tim Faircloth on Nov 16, 2007, 5:05 pm
If you’re not sure what the ten thousand boxes riddle is, you may want to check out my other two posts:
Ten thousand boxes — A riddle is posed and I try to use my faulty knowledge of probabilities to logic out how many boxes I would open.
Ten thousand boxes (revisited) — I admit that my probability work isn’t quite up to par and try again. It doesn’t work. In the comments, Daniel Miessler inspires me to write a program to simulate the situation.
So, here’s my program, written in perl. It may not be the most elegant code in the world, but it gets the job done. I used the built-in “rand()” function, but soon I’ll update it to use a “Truly Random” function to get more accurate results.
I made two assumptions during coding: 1) each box is chosen at random; the boxes weren’t opened in any specific sequence and 2) each victim was dumb enough to continue opening boxes until he found the death trap.
I also must note that it’s horribly inefficient (big 0 = n^m, where n is the number of boxes and m is the number of victims). It takes several seconds to get through 1000 victims.
So here’s my output from a sample run, using 1000 victims:
Victims: 1000 Boxes: 10000 -- Boxes opened Victims Range % Running % ------------ ------- ------- --------- 0 to 1000: 46 4.6% 4.6% 1000 to 2000: 54 5.4% 10% 2000 to 3000: 57 5.7% 15.7% 3000 to 4000: 50 5% 20.7% 4000 to 5000: 73 7.3% 28% 5000 to 6000: 78 7.8% 35.8% 6000 to 7000: 88 8.8% 44.6% 7000 to 8000: 106 10.6% 55.2% 8000 to 9000: 137 13.7% 68.9% 9000 to 10000: 301 30.1% 99% exactly 10000: 10 1% 100% -- Average prize per victim: $6719781
Watch this post! I’ll probably put up some output after I get the truly random function working (and stylize the “pre” blocks. ugh!).
Ten thousand boxes (revisited)
by Tim Faircloth on Nov 13, 2007, 3:52 pm
I got an email from my dad today concerning the riddle of ten thousand boxes. As his comment states, I’ve apparently failed to factor in what I’d like to call the “cumulative probability”.
It goes like this: After I’ve opened 9,990 of the boxes, I only have a 10% chance of getting killed by the next box… but my probability of dying after opening 9,990 boxes is actually much greater. By opening 9,990 boxes, I’ve accumulated the probability of death from all of those boxes.
In the spreadsheet I made out, it looks like the odds of death are staggeringly higher — over 100% after you open box 140. That can’t be right (even if you ignore the fact that it’s impossible to have a probability greater than 100%).
I dunno. Maybe I’m still doing it wrong. It seems like you would only have a 50% chance of death when opening half the boxes.
My new phone
by Tim Faircloth on Nov 5, 2007, 1:14 pm
Earlier this month, my “new every 2” plan came up with Verizon, so I upgraded to the RAZR2 V9m. I’ve had some time to explore the new phone and I have to say I rather enjoy it. I thought I’d give you all a little review.
First off, a few things I really like about the phone:
Smaller, but bigger - It’s actually not that much smaller than its predecessor (a little skinnier maybe), but both the outside and inside screens are larger.
Bluetooth Transfer - That’s right, a Verizon phone with non-crippled bluetooth. I can actually transfer files using bluetooth, which was a major hurdle with my old V3c. Since I don’t have to spend $0.25 per picture to move them to my computer, I may use the camera a little more, which leads me to my next point
Improved Camera - The built-in camera is 2.0 megapixel, and I have to say that it’s a pretty decent camera for a cellphone camera. Too bad it doesn’t have a flash. I can also capture 30 seconds of video now, an improvement on the 15 I could capture with my old phone.
Micro SD Card Slot - I can add up to 2 GB of storage for music and pictures and such.
Music player - It plays music, and even came with a sample song, Guitar by Prince. The sound isn’t too bad (for a phone), but I probably won’t use it too much for a few reasons: 1) I have an iPod, 2) To get music on the phone you have to sync over a cable (no bluetooth) with Windows Media Player, and 3) I only have, at most, 2GB (+50 MB internal storage) to store my mp3s.
It Runs Linux - Well, at least the original model does. Verizon puts its own OS on it.
But of course, there are a few bad things about it:
Durability - I’ve dropped it in the dirt once from a height of about two inches, and when I picked it up it had a few scratches down the front of it. I’m told Turtle Wax will get those out, but still. Also, the battery cover doesn’t seem as stable — it’s one of those slide-in-place covers. The cover on my V3c seemed solid once it clicked in place. While the cover on this phone doesn’t seem to move (I’ve only accidentally removed it once), it just doesn’t seem as secure.
Interface issues - the touch-screen buttons on the front don’t work… at all. If I have it on vibrate and I set an alarm with a sound, the alarm won’t go off (I can’t even preview the sounds when I’m setting the alarm). The bluetooth doesn’t turn off automatically after a period of inactivity. Oh, and there are a few customization problems. For example, I can turn off the reminder tone for voice mail or text/picture messages, but not for a missed call.
SD Card Access - I like having the ability to put in a Micro SD card, but I have to take the battery out to get to it properly.
Proprietary Data Connection - My V3c had a standard mini usb port so I could connect it to my computer using the same cable I use for my digital camera… but this one has a “Micro USB” port on it (which is no smaller) and requires a $10 adapter to plug up to my computer. What gives?
Sync to Windows Media Player - What if I don’t have a Windows machine? What if I hate media player? why can’t I just transfer mp3s over bluetooth?
Oh well. At least it comes with an EMU to stereo miniplug adapter so I can use a standard set of earphones.
Read any good comics lately?
by Tim Faircloth on Nov 5, 2007, 10:38 am
Remember, remember the fifth of November…
I shall remember by reading my copy of V for Vendetta, which has a personalized illustration by David Lloyd on the inside front cover. He used crayons. Isn’t that cool?
Does my web page suck?
by Tim Faircloth on Nov 2, 2007, 9:59 am
According to this flow chart, I’m “the real deal”. Let’s run down the list, shall we?
Does the website url contain about.com, x-something, top-x, or experts-exchange? - nope.
Is there more advertising than content? - I’ve only got one line of advertising on (publicly viewable) pages, and several lines of content, so no.
Do the links have that retarded hover preview thing? - nope. I’ve successfully passed by “Brain rot”.
Is the domain name a clever misspelling of something? - technically no, but “slashback” is a section on Slashdot. I’d say at this point I’ve successfully passed by “Web 2.0 fluff”, but some don’t think so; if that’s the case, see my answer for the next question.
Does the layout contain at least one gradient, reflection, or saturated color? - nope… not yet anyway. I only answered this one because one could argue that my domain name is a clever misspelling of something.
Does the layout make your eyes bleed or your brain drip out of your ears? - No. I have more color sense than whoever designed the website for our local watering hole, Pat’s Place.
Does the author have a thing for a single technology or tool? - While I do have a special place in my heart for certain technologies (Apple computers, Linux stuff, certain web comics) and I do often make posts about something I think is cool, I don’t use my blog to evangelize the wonders of any specific product or company. I’ll have to say no here. I’ve successfully passed “Fanboy site”.
Does the site have a picture of a cat? - I don’t think so. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve made posts about the cats I once owned, though. Still, no pictures, so the answer to this question is no.
Is there a picture of the author? - Nope, and if there were it wouldn’t make you want to hurl (at least I’d hope not). I’ve successfully passed “Newb ego blogger”.
Would Kottke, Doctorow, Gruber, 37s, or anyone semi-cool link to it? - I have been tossed a link by Daniel Miessler. I’ve also picked up referrals (probably from people clicking my name on a comment) from several other blogs and cool sites. I think that’s at least “semi-cool”, so that would put me past “/dev/null” and into “The real deal”. Of course I’m sure some of you will disagree, so I’ll follow the “no” path.
It isn’t from Digg, Slashdot, or Reddit is it? - Nope. As far as I know, I’ve never had anything from this site posted on any social site.
So there you have it. My site is the real deal.