The following is a guest blog entry by Marcus AKA Forser.

Where to start, what to select and how to plan?

There are a lot of things you need to decide and plan when making a goal.
I have a goal and that is to buy myself a digital slr camera but that isn’t a real goal exactly since you can’t reach the goal by just having decided to buy a camera.

You need to decide what you need to do, how to do it and when you should reach the goal, and then you need to make that new, bigger goal into smaller steps of goals on the way to the big goal.

What I can’t figure out what to do to reach my goal? There are several ways to get an income but I feel that i am not good enough on neither of them to get an income from it.

Can MakeYouGoHmm readers please give me any suggestions how shall I reach my goal?

Scoble’s boss and Channel 9 leader is jumping ship from Microsoft to … Skype! Goodbye Microsoft, Hello Skype:

I recently accepted a new job and have resigned my post as Director, Platform Evangelism at Microsoft after almost 8 years with the company. I am joining Skype and the family and I will be moving to the UK. I have taken a position on the product and services team at Skype. I have decided that Microsoft and I need to go our separate ways and it is time to move to new pastures.

Skype scores a good one here. I was curious to see if Scoble had said anything and, nope, no update from him yet as of this writing. I’m sure he’ll have something to say about this. (Update: he does, Jeff Sandquist is taking over for Pryor)

Will Scoble be the next evangelist to leave Microsoft? Does this Lenn move give the Apple rumour more traction?

For those who aren’t interested in the stats, goals and internal mechanics for this blog, MakeYouGohmm, please skip reading this entry. For the rest, here’s a screenshot from third party Site Meter stats for the last year:

These Site Meter stats have been and continue to be open for review by anybody clicking the counter on the home page along the left side that currently sits at around 180,000. We have been using Site Meter since February 2004. MakeYouGoHmm opened on July 4, 2003.

First of all, thank you and welcome to all existing and new readers and subscribers!

This blog continues to grow at a steady pace. The graph above does show a dip in March, but in February we were slashdotted, so that provided an additional traffic boost and we don’t count that spike into the true numbers. We’re trending upward.

However, recently, I still was a little bit concerned when we switched blog scripts and the traffic was going backwards in a big way, like at one point falling back to late 2003 traffic levels. Fortunately, that ship turned around and the last few days we’ve had record numbers in visitors in non-spiked days (./ days excluded).

I’ve had a few people ask me why we switched scripts from Pivot to Wordpress and the general answer is flexibility and data size. Pivot uses a flatfile serialized data structure, not a database, and while it works fine up to a point, users will find that problems can and do start happening the larger the data size grows. Also, for many of the things we wanted to do moving forward, we really needed a relational database. Some of these ideas have already been implemented and several more will be coming in the future.

Next, Bob, the author of Pivot, told me that by the end of first quarter 2005 Pivot would be shipping a MySQL version but unfortunately, this didn’t happen. I’m noticing this morning that I can’t even get to the Pivot website (problem?).

Lastly — and this was sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back: we started to have some data problems where some pages being served were completely blank. I didn’t want to see users ending up at blank pages nor the SE going there so I acted swiftly and decisively. With these new bugs, add in the fact that Pivot wasn’t databased and I didn’t have the time to add the DB functionality myself, and it had me looking to move to another blog script.

Since we already had been using it on other sites, it had a MySQL database backend and tons of mods, I chose Wordpress. The first thing I found was that there was no Pivot importer, so I had to write one of those myself. If anybody else reading this needs a Pivot 1.2x to Wordpress 1.5 importer, just drop me a line or comment here and I’ll be happy to hook you up. After a few more Pivot to Wordpress import cases I will share this code back on Wordpress in the preferred place, but for my own single case import it worked great. In this case, we imported something like 1600+ messages and 800+ comments from Pivot.

So, that’s the story on why we switched from Pivot on this blog. I still think Pivot is an ok program for somebody who doesn’t have access to a database and isn’t planning on making a large number of posts in a short time. Also, we still use Pivot on a couple less updated blogs. Keep in mind, 1600 posts at an average of 10 posts a week (2 per day x 5 days a week) would take 160 weeks to reach … or over 3 years. Also, if you look at the size of the posts in this blog compared to most blogs you’ll find this blog tends to have more text. So Pivot flatfile is probably a very good solution up to 2,000-3,000 posts for an average-sized text blogger. The last thing I’ll say is the MySQL version of Pivot I’m sure is coming soon, it was just in our case we couldn’t really wait any longer and I didn’t have the time to add the database support myself. I’m not sure why the Pivot site isn’t coming up at the moment ….

In evaluating the Technorati cosmos for link love from other blogs and sources, these links in and sources have continued to grow as well, finally putting us over the 300 links mark:

Our MakeYouGoHmm reader and traffic goal is still in the distance, but we are definitely making great strides and percentage-wise are on pace as of the first quarter. Again, I thank you all greatly for reading because without you this wouldn’t be possible. If you think you know somebody that would like to read this blog, please drop them a line and tell them about it. Please remember, readers can sign up for any category, all categories, or even by keyword(s) via RSS, so they can drill down and be notified of only the information that interests them. That’s a feature I’m really excited about because it gives the readers total control. I wish every blog had this functionality. Readers who use the A9 search engine can also get a special A9 search column for MakeYouGoHmm

With summer approaching, which historically is not a great traffic time, it will be interesting to see how this impacts the traffic and readership numbers for this blog.

For those who may not have caught the resolutions/goals for 2005, the goal by the end of 2005 is to achieve at least 500 RSS subscribers and 5,000+ unique daily visitors. The red numbers along the left sidebar of the home page are charting the progress by percentage and will change colors if/when/as we get closer. Also, there I added a counter showing the number of days I’ve owned a Tablet PC. Pictured to the right you’ll see an example of the output.

Lastly, I added my picture to the About section. I’m not sure how long I’m going to keep it there. I don’t really like the idea of folks coming to the blog and the first thing they see is my ugly mug, so I might put that out and put something more interesting there in its place. My business contact information, however, I would like to keep there. It was a recent post by Scoble that motivated me to put that there. He was making the point that he tried to hook up a few bloggers with some contacts and/or business and because he couldn’t easily locate their contact information, he moved on.

Something that has surprised me about this blog is that some people are starting to identify me with this blog primarily. Recently I was at an event and instead of being introduced as “the host of Script School Radio (since May 2000)” or more commonly “the programmer behind TD Scripts.com”, instead I was introduced as “the blogger behind MakeYouGoHmm.”

Wow.

It never really dawned on me until this moment that this blog would ever be considered more noteworthy to anybody than my numerous other business ventures online. In fact, I still don’t consider it all that noteworthy for the things I’ve done, but hey, if that’s what people want to identify with me for, that’s fine with me (and hence the main reason I’ve added my business contact information). It used to link to my bio page at tdscripts.com.

Been listening to a video from the band, EL84K, coming up for today’s radio show, and it begins with an old sci-fi movie line where the alien speaks the chiling words: “particles of atomic death.” Something about that line won’t let me go. Now what does this have to do with site stats or checkpoints for the first quarter? Absolutely nothing. That sort of points out the random, fun nature of writing this blog!

Thank you for coming along and I hope we keep you hmming for many days to come!

Last night our Comcast cable connection was spotty at best — again. Wendland nails it:

Once agan, Comcast’s DNS name servers are barely working, slowing access to a crawl. It’s the seond night in a row and the third time in a week the service has experienced unspecified “server problems.” The company is very tightlipped about exactly what’s wrong, how extensive it is and when it will be back to normal - reminiscent of the public relations fiasco of a couple years ago when it minimized widespread outages and customer complaints by pretending that all its problems were being blown out of proportion.

It was so bad that our teenage son was threatening to call Comcast and complain. Personally, I enjoyed taking the night off from the internet and went to sleep early.

Anyway, there are Comcast DNS workarounds here. Might want to print that page out or save it to a local file just in case Comcast internet connectivity goes down again tonight.

Recently we bought a new desk for the home office; one of those all glass surface desks. You’ve probably seen them before. They look cool but eerily fragile. My old desk was starting to come apart at the seams, literally. My desk at our office in town is still in decent shape. Now a disclaimer: I hate putting things together.

My wife earns the honor of putting things together, bless her heart, complete with her wear around the house pr0n shirt! And check out the nearby Skittles (#2) and PSP (#3).

Ahh, looking kind of glassy.

With the equipment there it’s a bit more crowded. Sony Vaio laptop to my far right (#1) then the M1400 Tablet PC (#2) in the portrait view (my preferred display for the Tablet PC), then dual monitor 1 (#4) and 2 (#3). I stretch Windows across to the second monitor so I have more workspace. When I first started working with dual monitors it was a bit awkward, but I got used to it and now when I work on a single monitor I want to drag stuff off the screen out of habit.

Looks like I might have to upgrade to Flash MX finally and soon get back up to speed with the new Flash version of cookies called Local Shared Objects. It’s doubtful I’d ever need to use them but I like to keep up to speed on things like this just in case.

Macromedia has a smaill primer here. There is a Local Shared Objects Tutorial here:

Flash MX Shared objects are a new feature that allow you to store information on the clients machine the same way as cookies would and retrieve it at a later time … Shared objects are stored in .sol files located in the Flash player directory of the user’s profile, example: “C:/Documents and
Settings/ Administrator / ApplicationData/ Macromedia/Flash Player”, and have their own format.

I wonder how good the encryption is in these .sol files and/or optional supported encryption types. Blowfish? Triple DES? Hope it’s not only plain text or that’s a bust.

There are definitely some size restrictions:

By default, Macromedia Flash MXcan save locally persistent remote shared objects up to 100 K in size.

I’m not sure I like how it alerts the user to save sizes. They use the word “larger objects” but I see the slider goes down to 1k (and if you keep reading, the user can completely disable local saves of any size). That’s a piddily amount of information (1024 bytes) before alerting the user with a dialog box. The user can adjust the slider all the way up to 100k, but if the user has it set to the minimum than the end user experience will be interupted. It should be seamless up to say at least 10k and then prompt over that. Heck, just surfing one average webpage will add more to the user’s browser cache than 10k. Nobody really worries about 10k files any more with hard drives coming with a minimum of 20-40 GB these days.

Greg Yardley offers his opinion on LSO’s and links to how to shut them down altogether:

To anyone considering using LSOs, I recommend not bothering. It’ll be a waste of time; while these new Flash cookies aren’t as easily eraseable as the ordinary variety yet, I’m sure someone will get right on it. To see (and erase) your Local Shared Objects, click here for Macromedia’s Flash Player Settings Manager. Set the ‘global storage settings’ to ‘none’ to keep LSOs off your computer permanently

Maybe Greg’s right and this is not worth the bother. Hmm.

tags: local+shared+objects

Sure, the timer to increase storage might be tweaked way back from what it was on April 1st, but it seems like every day my Gmail account size has continued to grow. It’s currently at 2064 MB which. 2 GB, for those who don’t know the math, is 1024 x 2 = 2048 MB. It was 2061 the last time I looked. Now this is progressive.

Good news! For those using the Wipeout Pure hidden browser mod, you can now surf a special version of MakeYouGoHmm! Not every feature works, like commenting, but you can read the most recent articles and view the pictures in full. Actually the pictures look pretty darn good. Here’s another hint to save on typing: use mughd.com instead of makeyougohmm.com.

To do this I added some code to the header file to detect the PSP User Agent. The picture below shows the User-Agent that the PSP is sending:

One way you could detect the PSP BROWSER is the following code:

<?php
if(ereg(”PSP BROWSER”, $_SERVER[’HTTP_USER_AGENT’]) ) {
// load your special PSP version of your site
}
>

My rarely updated personal site, tdavids.com, which isn’t very graphically intense, actually looks pretty good on the PSP with no modification at all.

So when you get a PSP and Wipeout Pure, stop on by and read what’s new at MakeYouGoHmm!

tags: sony, psp, sonypsp

I actually used the word “available” not affordable, in my first of 34 predictions for 2005. I predicted we’d see 1 TB drives available by the start of 2006 for under $500. Looks like I might be a little early for these affordable 1 TB drives by the end of 2005, but it’s certainly coming: PCWorld:

Good news for users is that the new drives shouldn’t be substantially different from current drives in terms of mechanical performance or price.

I saw 1 TB and up hard drives at CES 2005 but the price of admission was well over $1,000. I just did some Googling and found Circuit City selling this 1TB drive for $999 ($899 after $100 mail-in rebate). Eight more months of 2005. That’s an eternity in the technology sector. We’ll see.

Just listened to the first pitch of open day MLB seasion for the Mariners! My friend was asking me how many games I thought they’d win this season. I told him 80 games which is two games under 500. Last year I thought they’d win 85 games and they did much worse than that. Still, I think they’ll do better than last season. Of course I hope the Mariners do much better and I’m especially looking forward to seeing Ichiro go on another hitting tear.

BTW the time I finished writing this Jamie Moyer, that crafty changeup pitcher, went 1-2-3 against Minnesota. Ichiro in his first at bat has already gotten his first base hit, and only needs 262 more to best his MLB leading single season hits record. If anybody can beat that record and hit .400, I’d gamble on Ichiro. Beltre send a shot to the mound and Ichiro beat out the throw to second, then Richie Sexson in his first pitch belts a three run homer. It’s 3-0 against the Twins in the bottom of the first.

The smell of fresh mown grass, garlic fries, the trains running in the background at Safeco field, spring is here … I love baseball!