Archive for March, 2010

Google Code University

22 Mar 2010 at 23:18

Terry Moore

Awesome, How To, Internet, Programming, Technical

No Comment

Have you ever wanted to learn how to program?  Ever wanted to learn how program for free?  Have you ever wanted to learn how to program from worlds largest on-line search provider?  Well now you can!

Google Code University is a free site that has on-line courses to teach you how to  program in many different programing languages.  It include on-line video lectures, written material, and code examples.  Currently I am taking the Python class so I am sure you will see some Python projects on this site soon.

60% of Americans engaging in couch potato multitasking

22 Mar 2010 at 14:36

Terry Moore

Health, Internet, Technical

No Comment

That translates to about 3.5 hours of overlapping TV/Internet time per month for the average American consumer, according to Nielsen’s data from the fourth quarter of 2009. Nearly 59 percent of consumers reported doing this at least once a month as well, up from 57.5 percent in 2008. That’s a lot of people spreading their attention across multiple screens, which is why so many shows are beginning to advertise live online polls, chats, and more during the course of broadcast. People aren’t just hitting up those websites after the show is over—they’re hitting them up as the show is going on.

Glad to see that I am not the only one.

Read more

Trace Watch iPhone Plugin (TWiPP)

22 Mar 2010 at 14:30

Terry Moore

iPhone, Mobile, Programming, Trace Watch

No Comment


Click here for the *UPDATED VERSION*

Ever since I have configured my website to use Google Analytics I have become a bit of a statistics nut.  I find myself checking every free moment I get and while I don’t get a lot of traffic it is always nice to see when someone does visit my site.

The other day I discovered another way to fill my website statistics fix by installing an application called Trace Watch.  Trace Watch is similar to Google Analytics but it gives you real time stats and a few alternate ways to see the data that I have not discovered with Google Analytics.

So I was out and about the other day doing shopping with my wife  and I decided to check my Trace Watch web stats from my iPhone.  While I could connect to the stats site it was a little cumbersome to see just the basic information that I craved; hit counts and visitor counts.  I though it would be nice if there was an iPhone app for this.  I did a few searches of Apple’s App Store which came up empty.  I then did some Google searches to see if there was any available plug-ins and it also came up empty.  So I decided to try my hand at writing one.

I knew that I didn’t want to download and install Apples SDK so I started to look for information about how to create web apps for the iPhone, which lead me to this: iUI.  Its a java-script/CSS library that mimics the iPhone look and behavior.  I also found the Trace Watch API documentation on their site.  So now that I had both pieces to the puzzle I was off and here is the outcome.

Installation is a snap and there isn’t any configuration changes that need to take place in either the plug-in or the Trace Watch application.  This app currently is only made to get some basic information from Trace Watch and will not be a complete iPhone GUI replacement for the main Trace Watch application.

Installation Instructions:

*UPDATED VERSION*

Step 1:

Download the plug-in zip file: Trace Watch iPhone Plugin (180)

Step 2:
Extract the zip file to a temporary directory

Step 3:
Upload the extract directory name “m” to the root of your Trace Watch installation folder (assuming /twatch)

Step 4:
Browse to this site via your iPhone:  http://<yoursite>/twatch/m

Here are some screen shots of the application:

TWIPP

Home Screen

TWIPP

Statistics Screen

EDIT: Both the misspelling of Visitors and the Average Page Views per Visitor has been fixed in the attached zip file.  I will update the screen shots soon

TWIPP

Breakdown of Hits per Hour

More features are coming soon but I wanted to get quick version 0.1 out to get people’s opinions and feedback to see if this was worth continue to pursue.  So please any feedback, good or bad, is appreciated. Either via email at motersho@gmail.com or as a comment on this page.

Also I have not tested this on any other mobile browser so I don’t know how it will behave but I have a feeling it will not work too well seeing that it doesn’t behave very well in Firefox.

Download: Trace Watch iPhone Plugin (140)

Update: (08/01/2010):
The latest version now support multiple websites.

Fix Minimize/Maximize/Close Button Order in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

08 Mar 2010 at 22:13

Terry Moore

Gnome, How To, Linux, Technical, Ubuntu

17 Comments

For some unknown reason the developers of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx swapped the order of the minimize and maximize buttons.  Here is how to change it back to normal order.

In Gnome hit Alt-F2 to open up the run box.  Once opened type gconf-editor

Once gconf-editor is open navigate to the apps -> metacity -> general and change
button_layout to :minimize,maximize,close

That’s it.
Update: (2010-05-12)

Even easier way and cooler because its done on the command line is to open up a terminal and while logged in as your user account

Type this:

gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout ":minimize,maximize,close"

Update: Thanks to the comment from LMB you can use this command to add the menu icon on the left side of the menu bar.

gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

A picture is worth more than a 1000 words

03 Mar 2010 at 00:26

Terry Moore

Awesome, Technical

No Comment

A picture is worth a thousand words. Well, actually, if it’s a VGA picture with 24bit color depth, then it’s 640x480x24bits = 7,372,800 bits = 921,600 bytes. If each byte is one character, assuming an average word length of 8 (with a space after each word), we get about 115,200 words. So our ancestors were off by two orders of magnitude. Maybe they were assuming 200×150 images? Whatever

Quote from here