Andrew Ferguson
Rejecting Your Reality and Substituting My Own Since 1986
Subscribe to RSS FeedThe Droid
I’ve had my current phone, an LG VX8300 for over two years now. It basically does what I need it to, make and receive phone calls and text messages. But I’ve been itching for more.
I’ve watched as the iPhone was introduced[1], reintroduced[2], and re-reintroduced[3]. I also watched as AT&T’s network and lack of infrastructure continues to collapse under the pressure.
Last Christmas, I watched as Verizon rolled out the Blackberry Storm, hoping that this would be the device that would rival the iPhone; it wasn’t.
I watched as Google released the Android operating system and T-Mobile, of all companies, grabbed the G1. Amazing, I thought.
Well, now the day could be mine to have and everyone else’s turn to watch. Verizon is launching the Droid. And I’m thinking, “This could be cool.”
It does pretty much everything I’d want it to, including being awesome. In particular, it has WiFi and Bluetooth, a decent screen, replaceable battery, and the latest Android operating system – codename: Eclair[4]. Mmmm, doughnuuuut.
What else: 16GB of internal memory with expansion support, 256MB RAM, and support for running multiple applications at once.
The Android app market should also be pretty well stocked, and I’m probably savvy enough to write any app myself that I can’t find. So like I said, “This could be cool.”
I hope they get this right.
Tags: Android, Blackberry, cellphone, Eclair, G1, Google, iPhone, LG VX8300, storm, T-Mobile, Verizon
Internet Explorer Exploit. Update Now.
There’s a very super serious absolutely critical patch for Internet Explorer that you need to download right away. I usually (never?) blog about this type of thing, but this exploit is a rather serious exploit (they disabled Internet Explorer on all of our campus computers, which they’ve never done before). Anyway, Microsoft issued a patch today and I’m pleading with you to go and download it:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms08-078.mspx\
Alternatively, you may consider downloading and using:
Mozilla Firefox: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Google Chrome: http://www.google.com/chrome
If you already use Firefox or Chrome, you still should install the patch, just in case.
If you’re using a Mac, you’re okay and don’t need to do anything.
Read more at http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/microsoft-issues-critical-update-for-its-browser/
Tags: Chrome, exploit, Firefox, Google, Internet Explorer, Mac, Microsoft, Mozilla, patch
2007 Year-End Zeitgeist
Google is publishing their Zeitgeist, so I thought I’d get mine done too.
Here are the top ten search key phrases for 20071:
- countdown timer
- andrew ferguson
- andrew
- posted
- wordpress countdown
- countdown timers
- blockquote cite
- count down timer
- wordpress countdown plugin
- boeing
Top five identified web crawlers for 20071:
- Yahoo Slurp
- MSNBot
- Googlebot
- Ask
- MSNBot-media
Top three identifiable operating systems for 2007:
- Windows 69.1%
- Macintosh 6.9%
- Linux 1.9%
Top seven identifiable Internet browsers for 2007:
- MS Internet Explorer 41.6 %
- Firefox 31.0%
- Mozilla 3.7%
- Safari 3.0%
- Opera 1.9%
- Netscape 0.7%
- Camino 0.2%
Bandwidth: 37.67 GB of data served
Page hits: 776,512
Average monthly views2: 7633
1 as measured by AWStats for the entire andrewferguson.net domain
2 as measured by WordPress.com on the andrewferguson.net blog only for the months of May to November
Tags: awstats, bandwidth, Google, monthly views, page hits, stats, year end, zeitgeist
Google Chart API
I typically don’t blog about new Google stuff, especially APIs (application programming interfaces). However, this one is particularly cool because it allowed me to easily finish up a project that I had shelved for several months (maybe years? I’ll just call it ‘a while back’).
A while back, I had this idea to chart monthly blog frequency. I had found some code that did a pretty bang up job of making graphs using just PHP. However, it wasn’t the sleek looking graph I was hoping for. I had bookmarked a few sites that had Macromedia Flash applications that you could just drop the data into, but I never got around to playing with them.
Finally, Google introduced the Google Chart API. In a nut shell, I can easily create graphs such as:
This chart shows my blogging frequency for the month of November. The code I’m using on the back end is pretty crappy (I literally just patched some code I already had) and it can only handle a single month at a time.
Technical details to follow…
Continue reading Google Chart API…
Tags: API, chart, Google, Google Chart API, graph, mySQL, PHP, plugin, Wordpress
Stay Up To Date on Comments
As I work on planning my upcoming trip abroad, there’s been some great discussion and feedback in the comments. Those of you who are super-savy WordPress users might know about the sort-of-secret Comment RSS feed that you can subscribe to, however most people don’t.
So I figure I’d make it super easy for everyone and provide the RSS URL for those using RSS Readers (such as Google Reader) and an email sign up in case you’re not ready to make the plunge into the RSS realm.
RSS URL: http://feeds.andrewferguson.net/afdn_comments
Email Signup: Subscribe to Comments for Andrew Ferguson dot NET by Email
Note: The email list is run by FeedBurner (aka Google) and is the same organization that I use to send out the regular AFdN updates.
Tags: comments, FeedBurner, Google, Google Reader, RSS, Travel the World, Wordpress