Blogversitary : part two

Almost forgot… I’m running this blog for two years now. It started out with a simple post, and it’s grown to 315 posts! So with this post a small shout to all the readers & fellow bloggers!

Sidenotes
Running a blog for two years gathers up some spam too;

71,562 spams caught, 496 legitimate comments, and an overall accuracy rate of 99.847%.

Or utilizes a bit of bandwith;

on average this blog uses 1,5 to 2 Gigabyte of traffic on a monthly basis, where a lot of the presentations are even stored on other servers.

It’s what people want, not what they need

We often think that we need to provide products that people need. But actually we need to provide people with products that they want! In essence people only need food & water…

When you take a look at this picture; do you think the person needs this bike or wants this bike? What do you think he wants? You’d might say that he needs the 21 gear model made out of full carbon. Wrong, he wants the experience of riding thru the above scenario. It doesn’t matter for him if the gear shift is 0,1sec slower, or if he has 21 or 28 gears… So a sales person should relate to the experience he wants and not the product he needs for this experience! What if he would have gotten the following sales talk:

This bike weighs less then the 1 pound which is about half of other bikes. With it’s 28 gears you’ll be able to go up the hill much smoother!

What he just “sold” was the Full carbon model with 28 gears, yet the packaging was different…

You only live once

I have a very economic mentality. But my girlfriend has learned me that one also has to live. I always said that I’m working to live, and I don’t live to work. Yet I often fail to put those words into actions. Or is that because I just love the sector I work in? 🙂

Anyways, I bought myself a new “toy”. One shouldn’t refer to a motorcycle as a toy. But as the model I bought ‘only’ has a 125cc, I tend to see it as a toy bike compared to the big players.

It’s an Aprilia RS 125; a two-stroke 125cc engine, but limited to 11kW. As this allows me to ride it within Belgian borders without the need for a specific motorcycle license.

You shouldn’t blog so much!

I almost forgot… last weekend this blog celebrated it’s one year anniversary!!! 😉

Sometimes frequent readers ask me the question : “Why do you blog?”

Green Linux thru CPU Frequency Scaling

Being “Green” is being helpful towards the environment, but also to your electricity bills… The most commonly used techniques to reduce the power usage of a computer device are :

• Turning off your monitor/screen/tv when not used.
• Turning off the hard disks when they aren’t used
• CPU Frequency Scaling

For the last bit, you’ll have to check if you motherboard/cpu supports this… Most will probably support this, apart from the “really” old. The motherboard (& CPU) of my HTPC (MythTV) is capable of using AMD’s Cool’n’Quiet. I followed the following guide on the Ubuntu Forum, and used the “powersave” algorithm. It reduced my CPU frequency to 1000, where I must admit that I don’t notice anything on my combined MythTV frontend/backend. Next up is measuring the actual power usage, but I need to obtain a measuring device for that… 😉

Extra
For an interesting readup on the same topic; check MythTV NZ, ThinkWiki’s How to reduce power consumption, …

Simple Drupal Ajax Forms (version 0.2)

The following code is a follow-up of the previous article. The code below can be used as stand-alone, without the download of the framework, AND is capable of doing multiple requests at the same time. This was something the previous code was unable to do (due to framework limitations).

function printAjaxJs() {
  $output='function getHTTPObject() { var xmlhttp; if (!xmlhttp && typeof XMLHttpRequest != 'undefined') { try { xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest(); } catch (e) { xmlhttp = false; } } return xmlhttp;}';
  drupal_add_js($output,'inline');
}
function printAjaxFunction($function,$page) {
  $http="http".$function;
  $handle=$function."handleHttpResponse";
  $output.="function ".$handle."() { if (".$http.".readyState == 4) { if (subject_id != '') { document.getElementById(subject_id).innerHTML = ".$http.".responseText; } } }";
  $output.='var '.$http.' = getHTTPObject();';
  $output.='function '.$function.'(div_id,content_id) {';
  $output.='subject_id = div_id;';
  $output.='content = document.getElementById(content_id).value;';
  $output.=$http.'.open("GET", "'.$page.'" + content, true);';
  $output.=$http.'.onreadystatechange = '.$handle.';';
  $output.=$http.'.send(null);';
  $output.='}';
  drupal_add_js($output,'inline');
}

Back!

I’m back after a week of sunshine and 30° plus in the Turkish region Antalya. As a fully rested person, I’ve resumed my working tasks today. Or maybe I should but it rephrase this by adding “tried to”, as there is a lot of commotion about the latest news within NSN Herentals.
In addition, today I’ll be attending (my) first session of the new academy year of the post graduate course at Honim (Wenk) in Brussels.

eBay scamming

After two and a halve months I brought myself to the conclusion that I’m not going to see the object I bought (for the moment, an “expensive imaginary” wii) or the money I paid for it. Was I naif to believe friends who told me that their was protection from eBay, maybe, … One thing is sure, I learned a great deal from this experience:

• If you don’t receive (notice about) the shipping within one week, file a dispute indicating that the object was not received.
• When in doubt, don’t wait to long to file a complaint. You can file a complaint (with eBay) after 10 days, but you have to do it within 60 days. I believed in the other guys story for too long, and I got passed the 60 days.
• Do NOT do transactions without paypal or wiretransfer. They aren’t “supported” by eBay, and they will just waive your claim away.
• Always do insured shipping, never go for economy class. Apparently the postal offices have a lot of thieves within their ranks.

Those may be obvious to the eBay veterans, but it wasn’t to me (as an eBay newbie) until this situation. What I can say is be aware of the risks when dealing on eBay. Not everyone is as fair as yourself. Here I have to say that (apparently) some nationalities have a tendency to be more a scammer. These statements are mine personally, and I’m aware that I’m judging a lot of people who might not deserve this. Yet… I never had any issues with English, German, Dutch or Flemish people. On the two occasions where I had problems, it were both French speaking persons. Once the object was broken (Wallon person), and this time I failed to receive anything (French person – Gérard Loriot – Limeil Brevannes).

To close this, I leave you with a helpful link on the matter. It can be found at here, credits to AuctionBytes.

New theme

I know, yet again… The priamos one wasn’t ideal. The dkblog was nice, but had image probs. The priamos wasn’t as clear as I wanted it to be. When posting code (like with the ant), it showed up totally wrong sometimes. So here we have a new one. How long will it last? 😉

What is a bounce rate?

As I’m “playing” with the Google Analytics lately, I found myself wondering what the mysterious item called “bounce rate” was. So after a bit of googling, I found a good article about it.

Summary

In a nutshell bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave “instantly”. Thought about from a customer perspective rather than I came, I saw, I conquered, the action is I came, I saw, Yuck, I am out of here.
…
Bounce rate measure quality of traffic you are acquiring, and if it is the right traffic then it helps you hone in on where/how your website is failing your website visitors.
Definition:
It is usually measured in two ways:
* The percentage of website visitors who see just one page on your site.
* The percentage of website visitors who stay on the site for a small amount of time (usually five seconds or less).