Archive for March, 2006

Great Stats

// March 23rd, 2006 // 1 Comment » // Technology Bits

Google Analytics Screen CaptureIt turns out I love stats. I’m sometimes amazed at how many different statistics I poke at on a regular basis.

Inside of WordPress I use the phenomenal bsuite. Basically this keeps track of my individual story reads, incoming search terms, as well as tagging my posts and building related story references at the bottom of each post. If you run WordPress, get bsuite, it rules.

There are more general web like stats that are often needed. For example, user browser, screen resolution, country of origin, time of day traffic, broken links, adword conversion, etc. These things are all handled superbly by Google Analytics.

Sometimes however, I want to compare my overall stance with other blogs on the net. For this I (like most) turn to Technorati. They do a great job of ranking known blogs on the internet both in general and based on certain tags or keywords. It’s good to know where you stand, but even better to have others to compare against.

Finally, my favorite site of all: Alexa. Alexa is an Amazon property which ranks the top few million websites. For the top 100,000, they provide detailed traffic analysis and graphs. While working for a major internet company, I became very familiar with Alexa as a daily tool to measure our success against our competition. Especially in internet advertising, traffic is important.

Ken recently pointed me at Pub Sub as another site to check out stats on my blog, but overall I find many of the numbers here questionable. Compare some blogs you are familiar with and I think you’ll see my complaints clearly.

If anyone has any other great stats packages or web services they know and follow, let me know. I’m always looking to feed this strange addiction.

advertising, adwords, alexa, blog, blogging, bsuite, google, google analytics, internet advertising, plugin, plugins, pubsub, statistics, technorati, web, web development, web statistics, wordpress

Iron Spidey – More On The New Outfit

// March 22nd, 2006 // 2 Comments » // My Stuff

Iron Spider-ManI just read Amazing Spider-Man #530 and there were new features to talk about in the new costume.

First off, Tony reworked a version 2.0 of this already new suit. Now it can transform appearance to look like any of his old suits, or like no suit at all. Handy for quick costume changes, this feature makes me think a lot of the black (Venom) suit. This transformation also allows him to blend into backgrounds especially effective on dark backgrounds. The final feature is a set three of arm-like appendages that spring out of the back. They refer to these as “waldoes“. These have limited fighting capabilities, but can pick up things as well as look around corners presenting the image to Spider-Man’s eye pieces.

These new features of course build on top of Version 1, which included mesh webbing that will allow gliding for short distances, heat resistant Kevlar micro-fiber that can withstand small-caliber bullets, built in fire, police, and emergency scanner, audio and visual amplification including infrared and ultra-violet, carbon filters in the mouth area to keep out toxins, and a short range GPS microwave communication system.

These changes all come at the beginning of Marvel’s newest, big event: Civil War. Civil War is based on a split among the super heroes from a proposed super hero registration act. Some are opposed, others are for it. This split is supposed to effect all kinds of things, impacting Spider-Man the most. More to come on that…

civil war, comic, comics, costume, iron man, iron spidey, marvel, new powers, spider, spider-man, spiderman, spidey, super hero, the other, tony stark, waldoes

See More Dick

// March 21st, 2006 // 8 Comments » // Technology Bits

Presentation Slide: Who's the Dick on Your site?Dick Hardt recently published a video of his newest presentation titled “Who is the Dick on your site?” This video is from his talk at ETech and was apparently the first time he gave it. Therefore, it lacked a lot of the polish of his previous talk on Identity 2.0.

He talks about a pile of technologies like OpenID and Passport explaining with great graphics how many of these work, and then basically tries to sell us on sxore. I’ve yet to dig deeply an truly try sxore out, but intend on doing so within the week. For now, I setup my account there and have installed the WordPress plugin. Check back for more on that later.

Update/Warning: If you are running a recent version of bsuite with database driven tags (currently in private alpha release), do not install sxore. Something is incompatible in the installer and will cause all your tags to be deleted.

bsuite, dick hardt, identity, identity management, identity2.0, identity20, openid, passport, sxip, sxore, wordpress

WebISO Solutions At Various Institiutions

// March 17th, 2006 // 2 Comments » // My Stuff

Recently an ad-hoc survey was circulated on the mace-dir mailing list. This survey asked a bunch of member schools what WebISO solution each was using. Here are the results:

Stanford University – Stanford Webauth
Rutgers University – CAS
University of Virginia – Pubcookie
University of Minnesota – cookieauth
Cornell – CUWebAuth
Ohio State – Shibboleth
UCB – HP’s Select Access
Brown University – Shibboleth
Penn State – Cosign
NYU – Expecting to use Sun Access Manager
Rice University – CAS
Case Western Reserve University – CAS
University of Bristol – CAS
University of Connecticut – CAS
Emory University – Netegrity Siteminder, OctetString’s Virtual Directory, and homegrown applications (pwsync)
University of Memphis – Shibboleth
Johns Hopkins – Netegrity Siteminder (But looking into Shibboleth and other technologies from Microsoft and IBM)
UChicago – Pubcookie (Looking into using Shibboleth)

As an addition, Plymouth State University uses CAS. Interestingly, at the moment CAS is far away the most common, although Shibboleth is gaining some ground. I’m sure this is because Shibboleth has the added benefit of being capable of federated SSO.

Mace-Dir is a middleware working group within Internet2. They are the most significant driving force for identity management in higher education.

sso, cas, yalecas, pubcookie, shibboleth, federated sso, single-sign on, identity, identity managment, plymouth state university, webauth, siteminder, mace-dir, internet2, middleware

Today’s Modern Hammer

// March 17th, 2006 // 4 Comments » // My Stuff

Fubar HammerThe Stanley FatMax® Xtreme™ Fubar™ Functional Utility Bar was released yesterday. As far as I’m concerned this is the new hammer. If you’ve done any construction work recently, you’ll realize how far the status of the hammer has fallen. It’s place as most important tool has slipped to the pneumatic hammer which puts out more nails, faster, more consistently, with less work for whoever is running it.

So, why are people still carrying hammers? Occasionally the pneumatic hammer misses so you have to knock a nail the rest of the way in. Or, sometimes you need to pull a nail. Or, you need to adjust a 2×4 that’s twisted. Or, you need to knock down, destroy, or rip apart a wall.

These are all the tasks the Fubar has been custom designed to be ideal for. This 4 lbs solid bar is the perfect tool to ‘F’ up beyond all recognition whatever you set it against.

fatmax, fatmax tools, fubar, functional utility bar, hammer, stanley, tool, tools

My Cat Has A Computer Virus!?!

// March 16th, 2006 // 2 Comments » // Technology Bits

Cat in ComputerIn a white paper released by the University of Amsterdam and promoted on RFIDVirus.org, an explanation of how RFID is actually vulnerable (in many cases) to simple SQL injection attacks.

How does this apply to your cat (or other pet for that matter)? Well, many veterinarians and the humane society now implant RFID chips in pets to help identify and match strays up with their original owners.

Their research group has developed a proof of concept following this basic scenario:

prankster decides to unwittingly enlist his cat in the fun. The cat has a subdermal pet ID tag, which the attacker rewrites with a virus using commercially available equipment. He then goes to a veterinarian (or the ASPCA), claims it is stray cat and asks for a cat scan. Bingo! The database is infected. Since the vet (or ASPCA) uses this database when creating tags for newly-tagged animals, these new tags can also be infected. When they are later scanned for whatever reason, that database is infected, and so on. Unlike a biological virus, which jumps from animal to animal, an RFID virus spread this way jumps from animal to database to animal. The same transmission mechanism that applies to pets also applies to RFID-tagged livestock.

Hopefully if this gets enough press, wide scale deployment of RFID can be further delayed.

rfid, privacy, virus, rfid virus, cat, cats, university of amsterdam

Synchronized Goldfish

// March 15th, 2006 // 1 Comment » // My Stuff

Initially it felt like this should totally be a hoax. But… I don’t buy into this being done with magnets like many suggest. It could be doctored video or some sort of video screen on the table and not an actual tank. However, either of these explanations seem extraordinarily weak when compared to the overwhelming evidence that says goldfish can be trained. One thing that is a myth for sure is the rumors about fish having limited memory capability.

animal, animals, fish, goldfish, swim, swimming, synchronized swimming, training, video, google video

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