We bought a new camera yesterday. Kevin has a good digital camera but its quite big and now quite old. He saw that Jessop’s was having a sale so we went and looked … we’ve now got a fujifilm finepix F650 [1]. Its quite small and quite powerful with simple enough interface for me to easily use it but enough override to keep Kevin happy too!

It has an internal lithium battery and takes XD cards as its memory. On the whole its got everything we wanted and has the biggest, nicest screen I’ve seen in a while. Its easy to set the flash settings and it has both macro and super-macro modes (useful for taking closeups of stitch patterns). There are also some presets for using it in different modes – like fireworks, sunset, flower, landscape and so on, including a museum mode where it turns off the keytones! There are also some presets for whitebalance which seem to really help with colour temperature when I photograph knitting without the flash.

The photographs that appear over the next few days were taken with the new toy, let me know what you reckon!

¹ I know that link is to amazon but I can’t find either Jessop’s or the manufacturer’s page

Like the technical wizard that I am I’ve just spent 48 hours (almost) with all email to my lornajane.net domain getting lost in the ether somewhere. The story is one of those silly bureaucratic ones which I won’t repeat here because my hosting company, flump , have been all-round great for the six years I’ve been with them and their support people have got me sorted out politely and relatively quickly.

So, if you’ve been emailing me and I’ve been ignoring you, can you send it again please?

Following our PHPThrowdown experience I saw on their website that they have mugs on CafePress. For ages I have wanted the “code like a girl” mug from CafePress having read Kathy Sierra’s article of the same name.

Well the order arrived today: One PHP Throwdown 2007 mug and one code like a girl mug

I might have accidentally ordered a little something extra as well

… I wonder how that happened!

I’ve just stumbled across Scott Carpenter’s site Moving to Freedom site and it reminded me something I meant to write about.

Some time ago, my little sister entered Further Education and needed her own computer. So I tarted up my desktop, reinstalled it, and dumped it in her bedroom with a wireless connection to the broadband. It wasn’t a new machine (bits were 8 years old!) and that was 18 months ago.

At Christmas I had to take the thing apart, dust some parts, drop other parts and coax it back into working… but it seemed OK. Last week it just died completely. So I went to my parents’ last weekend to try to breathe more life into it. But the hard drive was dead … I have another spare machine but I couldn’t lay my hands on a Windows license (not because I’m disorganised, I’ve been living out of boxes for a year).

Installing Linux

So I installed Linux. I downloaded a Kubuntu Live CD image and after half an hour of swearing at Windows managed to burn the image onto the CD correctly. I should point out at this stage that although I’m a very content Linux user, I don’t install or administrate it. So I put the live CD in, showed off a few odds and ends and asked my sister what she needed her PC to be able to do. Her wishlist is:

1. Edit Office Documents. She knows about Open Office and says she will be able to work it
2. Surf the internet.
3. Use her ipod nano in an iTunes-a-like way
4. Use Windows Messenger Live or equivalent

I had a quick google on the ipod front, I have an alternative gadget specifically because I use Linux, but apparently it can be done so I toddled off to install Kubuntu for the first time. I have no idea what I did on the first attempt but it froze part way through (possibly from the effort of reformatting the hard disk). The second time though it was quite successful and then the fun began.

Getting software

My Linux experience is quite patchy and also I’m a very command-line-happy user so I’ll get new stuff with an “apt-get” command and not worry about it. This isn’t going to work for my perfectly computer-literate but not geeky sister! After some grappling with the Adept Installer and realising I had to uncomment a config file to get the universe and multiverse repositories added, we were flying. She’s now got Firefox and a handful of games in addition to Kopete and the Open Office that Kubuntu installs with by default.

The wireless card

I had no idea (because I’ve never done it) that there was such contention with drivers for wireless cards. It took me two attempts and a couple of late-night phone calls to my sysadmin (thanks, Kevin!) to get it working. Apparently the key thing is to use pcils to see the card listed and grab its model number, then feed that into google along with the word ndiswrapper and hope you find some instructions on what to do next.

Moving forward.

Now its up and working I have to say I really hope she takes to the new set up. At the moment she’s without an iTunes-a-like (as she’s waiting for me to research it for her) unless she surprises me and sorts it out herself, and the monitor won’t go for a better resolution than 800 × 600 which is annoying. I’ve got The Linux Equivalent Project bookmarked and am trying to figure out which of the chat clients will give her the closest experience to what she is used to (the main requirement seems to be the emoticons!) and also what is going to be the easiest for her to use with the ipod nano.

I am enchanted with the idea that a normal person could just sit at a Linux machine and perform their usual functions without too much hassle. If she rises to the occasion then not only will she have saved a fortune in software costs, now and for the future, but I hope she’ll also embrace the idea that she is rewarding the community that worked so hard to create these products, rather than the corporate giants who would bring evil on the world.

Has anyone had any similar experiences of bringing their own software and beliefs to others? (Cait, do post and let us know how you are getting on!)

I have written about Google Analytics before, once or twice but I haven’t managed to put across the sheer volume of information. Today I had a look back at 2006 (the first year for this site) and looked at how it went. I thought I could share the main points with you and show you round a corner of analytics in the process.

On The Front

On the front page there are four views. Here they are in turn with a little bit about each:

This view usually shows a one-week breakdown so you can clearly see how many of both page views and visits there were in each day. Viewing the data for a whole year is completely different and for the first time I started to see how much the traffic levels have changed over the year. The first post on this site is dated 18th Jan although you wouldn’t guess that from the graph.

New vs Returning is another picture that looks completely different now. It usually shows about three quarters new visitors but for a few months back at the start there were a few people producing all my traffic so I’m pleased at how its evening out. I have no idea what proportion of new to returning visitors is “good” for a website but it looks OK to me.

I love the geo overlay picture, special mention to Lig who is the reason for the small blob in the pacific with no visible landmass below it! The map as a whole shows who my visitors are, English speakers and Europeans for the most part. My goal for 2007 is to get some blobs on that map for South America!

Referring sources. Also very weird because this looks quite different to usual. FairyJo what are you doing there?? My referrer list usually shows either phpwomen.org or dotjay but one is new and one only has posts on it sporadically. I’m completely confused how I get so much traffic from del.icio.us and I have no idea if that’s a good thing or how I might build on that.

Search Terms

My top search terms are a source of constant amusement to me, although the increase in traffic has moved me away from the world of bizarre search terms that only bring one visitor. I refuse to cite those there in case I boost my rankings for bizarre search terms :)

For 2006 my top search terms were:

1. slow cooker recipes
2. lornajane
3. crochet
4. microwave cheese sauce
5. cheese sauce

Considering I started this site as a place to keep track of technical things that I needed to write down but would then immediately lose in the next house or server move (we’ve had more than our fair share of both), my visitors are clearly more interested in food.

Moving Forward

So, the choice now for increased traffic is whether to learn and then write about some more slow cooker recipes, or whether to be a bit more focussed on the technical areas I cover and get the links to this site into my signature on the various sites I join in with.

Or then again, maybe I’ll stick with my original plan and write what occurs to me as it happens! Hope that was interesting to everyone, suggestions for new direction and demands for more information about the Google Analytics tool are most welcome.

In the summer, I bought a nabaztag for Kevin as his birthday present. Within a couple of weeks he had figured out how to intercept its web requests and replace them with instructions of his own. The little creature has five lights – one under his feet, three across his tummy and one on his nose. He also has moveable ears (he can waggle them but you can also grab them and move them around) and a speaker.

We called the rabbit Naz for short, as Nabaztag is a long name for a little guy. We both enjoyed writing little programs which loaded different colours onto the LEDs and moved his ears around and stuff. Remember that this relationship kind of grew out of Kevin teaching me assembler at University!

So on Friday, after a hectic day, I got home and “Naz” was in the middle of the floor and Kevin was playing with him, doing some more on the proxy he wrote and whatever. I started telling him about my day, all the while thinking how shiny Naz had got, wondering if something had happened to him. Mid-sentence I cast my eyes across the room and saw the other nabaztag sitting on the ironing board!!

Yes, we have a new Nabaztag. He’s a newer model and works differently to the old one. His name is Tag and he’s shiny. Maybe I’ll post some photos of them, what do you reckon?

Kevin’s proxy and the little programs he’s written so far are at nabaztag.magicmonkey.org, I’ll write a bit more about the whole project another day.

I fell across this article describing how Drew McLellan implemented the Technorati Link Count Widget onto his textpattern blog. I’d like to do this some day (not that I get a great deal of traffic, particularly not technorati traffic) but if it starts to appear in my stats then I will know where to go for instructions!

Over at the Well Designed URLs Blog they’ve started a movement to tag all urls-that-suck on del.icio.us and they will later rank the top ten sites with utterly rubbish URLs. I think this is a great idea and will be adding my own as I come across them.

Since my recent struggle with Joomla! Pretty URLs I have been wondering whether it was really worth the effort. Suffice it to say that I am now convinced.

You can see how I’m getting on at del.icio.us/lornajane/urls-that-suck. Does anyone have any recommendations?