Big Eggy (with a view!)

Ali and I went camping on Australia Day weekend to Bear Gully in the Cape Liptrap Coastal Park. It was fun, though the weather was at all times either sunny and windy, or rainy and windy which was less fun. It is certainly no surprise to me that they want to build a wind farm there! (much to the opposition of the locals and some species of airborne local fawna).

After eating one (albiet fairly tasty) lamb chop dinner in refuge of the car, we are now resolved to equip ourselves with a tarp and four poles. At least that will help with the rain.

Speaking of fawna, we were privledged to see an echidna walking along a log (as opposed to just sitting there pretending not to exist), and a fur seal playing in the water.

One of the highlights was a “Big Eggy” breakfast enjoyed overlooking the Bear Gully beach. This consists of a traditional Eggy in a Basket, served with bacon, tomatoes, mushrooms, and coffee. Yum!

Ten minutes after this breakfast it pissed down raining, 2 minutes after that it was sunny again.

This just in

Landing on the south base possible.

In other news:
Bug found in BF2142.

2006 in web-stats

I was looking over 2006′s apache logs, here’s some stuff I found (I would have prefixed that with “interesting”, but that’s probably subjective).

• http://go.to/willswebpage amazingly still works
• this is a cool image! How was it made, and why didn’t it win?
• Firefox vs IE — OS X vs Windows:
  omegadelta: 22.6 % vs 68.2 % -- 1.8 % vs 92.8 %
  tanksoftware: 25.5 % vs 60.6 % -- 2.8 % vs 85 % (even Linux gets a rating at 4.1 %)
  pangarcade: 13.8 % vs 81.5 % -- 1.5 % vs 95.9 %
• Almost everyone who visits OmegaDelta searches for a Red Alert related term.
• More visitors are from America than all other countries combined (about 60% US, next highest country generally the EU on about 6%).
• Google is *very* popular (on pangarcade, 86.8 % of search referrals, followed by Yahoo on 7.3 % and MSN on 3.5 %). I remember the days when google wasn’t a verb, and Yahoo was king.
• TankSoftware’s greatest hit is by far Gallery Mage. In fact, by looking at the update log stats¹, Gallery Mage has been run at least² 45,245 times since v2.4.1! There are at least 1,542 unique users who have run Gallery Mage more than ten times.
• Despite the previous statistic, donations to Gallery Mage have not yet been able to fund a slab of Boags.
• 25484 visitors⁴ made 38387 visits, and viewed³ 101717 pages on OmegaDelta (2.64 pages/visit)
• 32803 visitors made 40104 visitors viewed 234065 pages on Pang Arcade (5.83 pages/visit)
• 40913 visitors made 52172 non-unique visitors viewed 113889 pages on Tank Software (2.18 pages/visit)
• strange search terms (on OmegaDelta) include pigsforsale, and iraqi explosion statistics

¹ Since version 2.4.1, Gallery Mage checks for updates every 5 times it is run, enabled by default
² Not everyone has an always-on internet connection
³ Values do not include hits from Spiders such as the Googlebot
⁴ Total unique visitors per month for the year. A visitor visiting in multiple months may be counted multiple times.

Very Cool

Very Cool !

Spam Advice

I spent a little time on the holidays solving my spam problem so that I can actually use email again in ’07. Here’s a few things that I learnt:

WordPress 2.0 comes with a very cool plugin *by default* named Akismet. You can turn it on in the admin page, the only other step is signing up for an “API” login to WordPress. It good enough that I now accept comments to OmegaDelta from people who have not commented before (previously they were held for moderation). WordPress is very well designed, such that upgrading to WordPress 2.0 from 1.5 if needed requires hardly any effort – and no changes to the template (wish I could say the same about phpBB!). So I strongly recommend doing this.

Email was a little more annoying as I had so much spam to delete first. With that done, I settled on a solution using GMail as my email server. Fortunately this doesn’t mean I now have to use a gmail address (not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I just like ‘owning’ my addresses). I simply forwarded my current address to my GMail account, setup POP on GMail so I could continue checking my email from my mail client, and configered GMail so that it can send emails from my non-Gmail address – even when I’m using the web client. All rather impressive, particuarly that last point. Plus GMail’s spam filters are very good, and even better: the spam is not downloaded through POP, so I can just leave it there to get auto-deleted, or manually removed without having to download it all first (may sound trivial – but when you get thousands per week it does take a while to download).

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone had a good holiday and a fun new years. I most certainly did.