20 Jul
2007

Happy Housewarming

Last weekend we combined good friends, plenty of drink, a barbecue and a surprising spell of good weather to make a house warming party! We started mid afternoon and people dropped as their schedules permitted which worked really well1 . The barbecue was perfect and in fact we had two rounds – one where we fed people their tea, and another one at about 9pm where a few more people turned up and I also remembered I forgot we had marshmallows – they’re more fun after dark anyway.

The next morning I found myself cooking breakfast for eight people, most of whom has stayed the night, so all in all it was a successful weekend!! Big thanks to everyone that made it, we both had a great time and it was wonderful to see so many people wishing us well. Having hostessed quite so much I now feel more like the house is ours so thanks to you all :)

1 I completely failed to take a single photo, sorry!

19 Jul
2007

Open Office Font Shortcuts

When typing a long document the other day with sore hands, I looked up the keyboard shortcuts for applying headings in Open Office. Here’s a quick few:

._ Font Shortcut
Heading1 Ctrl + 1
Heading2 Ctrl + 2
Heading3 Ctrl + 3
Body Text Ctrl + 0
18 Jul
2007

Bash Idle Timeout

I’ve set an idle timeout on the development server at work in an attempt to cut down the number of sessions that have been left logged in on unattended PCs. It was really easy to set up!

You can set this in /etc/profile but I realised that ours just includes a file /etc/bash.bashrc so I added my line to that:


# set the idle timeout - logs you out after an hour
TMOUT=3600

New sessions logged in after this will automatically log themselves out after one hour of continuous inactivity.

10 Jul
2007

Garden Goodness

You’ve probably seen the garden photos we took already, but last weekend, it underwent rather a change. Here’s the updated version:

You can’t really see on this photo, but I now have flowers in my garden :) Here’s a better shot:

The two on the left are Hydrangeas, one is a cutting from Mum’s plant and the other was a gift from Enid. Mum and I went to the garden centre and bought the others – the big purple one is a buddleia which butterflies will like. The others I’m not sure but they’re pretty!!

Planting plants is easy, all you do is:

  1. Dig a hole
  2. Put potting compost in it
  3. Add ‘fairy dust’ (slow release fertiliser granules)
  4. Get the plant out of its pot (this is the hard bit)
  5. Put the plant in the hole and pat the earth you dug out to make the hole around the plant.

We also planted lettuce seeds, but there’s nothing to show you of those just yet …

02 Jul
2007

Strawberry Summer

Back in October, our first house sale fell through and our plans were rather up in the air. On my next visit home I was marched onto the patio by my father who pointed out the strawberry pot and strawberry plants that would have formed my housewarming present.

Eight months on and we’re in our new home and the strawberries are here too. Yesterday, I had strawberries for my tea :)

Thanks Dad!

02 Jul
2007

New Look Google Analytics: The Dashboard

Google Analytics have been migrating their users to a new interface over the last few weeks. I like analytics (something to do with an unhealthy fetish for statistics I think) so I’ve been pretty impatient waiting for my mail to come through. Anyway its here and I’ve been migrated – woohoo!

I thought it would be cool to blog about some of the functionality that is available in analytics … until I sat down to do it and realised what a very long blog post that would be. So here’s the first installment.

The dashboard

The first thing you see when you view a site’s stats in analytics is the dahsboard, and its quite a change:

The strangest thing I find about this is the changed date range – I’m accustomed to seeing my site stats on a per-week basis rather than the four weeks that it now seems to like to show. Its cool though and gives a better overall picture of what is happening, especially for people like me that often only drop in and even then not necessarily weekly!

There are so many options from this screen that I’m literally going to mention a few and save the rest for another day, making this my new mini series of blog posts1. To start with lets take a look under that temptingly clickable date range:

You can use either of these interfaces to pick your date range, which is really nice. The timeline one has grabbable side controls, so you can slide or stretch that range as you like.

Also note the compare control on the right hand side of the box … I used this with a week’s date range selected, and it projects last weeks data onto this weeks (although both date ranges can be altered) – look!

Its a nice touch and each point on that graph is hoverable, showing the exact number that has been plotted. Its possible to display all sorts of metrics against time from this one screen, look at that “visit” button on the top right?

Hidden in there is a treasure trove of options just waiting for you to drop in and get new perspectives on your traffic trends:

This simple section of the new interface kept me entertained for quite a while (although as I said, I do like statistics so am easily entertained by this type of thing), its slick and its easy to use and the flash does add a lot. I’ve found its buggy under Linux, although that might be more to do with the flash implementation than anything else, however it is a bit disappointing. I managed to borrow the MacBook though and that was much more stable (and hence the screenshots are raken in safari!).

I do like the new interface and I’ll be writing more about some other aspects of it in the future, if there’s anything you have found particularly useful or would like to know more about, add a comment and let me know.

02 Jul
2007

Can Your Husband Cook?

How many women cook the main meal of the day, on autopilot, knowing that the man in their life “can’t cook”? It seems to be a pretty regular thing. I think men are better cooks than they are given credit for – most of them are pretty motivated since they like food!

I think that we are confusing two skills here:

  • the ability to create nutritious and tasty food
  • the ability to feed a family when you come in the house hungry and uninspired after a long day at work.

The two are totally different skills, and they’re not linked! What kind of a cook are you?

02 Jul
2007

Little Guest Room

I promise house stories, and then I disappear for weeks, I know! Anyway, I’m back with some more house photos. Do you remember an attic photo from the first day in the house?

Well, its the little guest room now, and has had a few visitors already – I hope Chris, Cait and Rob enjoyed their stays!

02 Jul
2007

The Internet Has Landed

We bought a house, as I may have mentioned before. For anyone who doesn’t know us, I’m an internet geek living with an even geekier internet geek. The internal networks have been up since about ten days in, but its taken til today (more than five weeks) to get the internet connected to the house. It sounds daft to put the internal networks up but the nabaztag works and we’ve also got an internet radio that can stream music off the internal server which is great as the radio reception in the basement kitchen is rubbish. Anyway, back to my internet story:

We started off by ringing BT. They would need to send someone to test the line but wouldn’t need access to the house. So that duly happened, but we didn’t get a phone line. They rang to say they needed access to the house to reconnect us, and could come any time between 9am and 6pm, Monday to Friday, and would give us a 5-hour window in which to expect them. We can’t take time off really and can only work remotely if we have internet. Very annoying.

The problem arose because the house wasn’t previously supplied by this company, so we rang the current suppliers, a cable company. They would happily connect us immediately and we didn’t really care so long as we got internet so we tried to move forward with that. Only the cable people couldn’t connect a new account at our address as the previous owner hadn’t cancelled his account which is registered at this address. Its not even his house any more but until he cancels his account, we can’t have one.

So back to BT. Kevin eventually managed to do some remote paperwork from here one morning last week and a BT engineer came and connected the line. Today, the ADSL got connected and started working … so I’m on the sofa, with the laptop :)

Usually if I write more than one blog entry at a time then I stagger them, but tonight I’m just going to blog and blog! This place has been getting very neglected as I’ve been offline and sooooooo busy at work. Watch this space …