Monthly Archives: January 2010

Medibank International Sydney Winner

January 17, 2010SportAlistair Lattimore

The Medibank Internatioanl in Sydney was held this week from the 10 January to the 16 January and had a fantastic turn out of the top players in the world.

From the womens side of the competition, Dinara Safina, Elena Dementieva, Serina Williams, Jelena Jankovic and Australians Sam Stosur and wildcard Casey Dellacqua. The mens players with lights shining on their names were Marcos Baghdatis, Richard Gasquet, Tomas Berdych and Australians Lleyton Hewitt and Peter Luczak.

The womens Medibank International final was between world number one Serena Williams (USA) and Elena Dementieva (RUS). It was expected to be a close match, with Dementieva beating Williams in a previous encounter however Serena Williams was rightfully the favourite for the match. As the match unfolded, there was fantastic baseline hitting from both of the women and it appeared that Williams was being unsettled by the great movement of Dementieva and ability to continually run the balls down and put them back into play. This resulted in Williams pressing harder and harder, which ultimately lead to errors which when coupled with her below par movement due to a leg injury she was carrying meant the Medibank International winner was Elena Dementieva in 6-3 6-2.

Medibank International mens final was between Marcos Baghdatis and Richard Gasquet. Both players have had a great run into the final, being pushed along the way – making sure the were hitting the ball cleanly for the final. Baghdatis came out with all guns blazing in the first set and his angles, depth of shots and pace were enough to push Gasquet well behind the baseline, at times 3-4 metres even during rallies. The first set was over before it began and it looked as though Baghdatis was going to steamroll Gasquet when at the beginning of the second set, there was a rain interruption for a little over an hour. When play resumed, Gasquet was a change man – hitting the ball more aggressively, standing up to the baseline more regularly and hitting some of the most spectacular topspin backhands the game has seen. Baghdatis was a slow starter in the second set, letting Gasquet get away for a 4-1 lead and it looked as though we were in for a three set thriller for the Medibank International final. Baghdatis persisted and finally got his rhythm back and managed to take claw his way back into the match. After forcing his way into a tie break in the second set, Marcos Baghdatis was annouced the Medibank International Winner 6-4 7-6.

Both finals were good to watch, however I think the free hitting in the first set by Baghdatis and subsequently Gasquet in the second made it a more enjoyable final to watch – especially when combined with the serve volley and all court action the two were creating every at least once a game.

I can’t wait for the Australian Open for 2010 to start on Monday night.

Optimising Dan Brown

January 11, 2010BooksAlistair Lattimore

The team I work with at Mantra Group have a bit of a ritual regarding birthdays, everyone puts in a small amount of money and we organise some cake and a present for the birthday person. My birthday of course doesn’t fall during the work year, so when I joined the marketing department at the start of the year and was introduced to all of these new rituals – I thought I stood a reasonable chance of missing out on some level. However, I was very pleasantly surprised when I had a belated birthday when we returned to work after Christmas.

I asked for a gift voucher and I was lucky enough to receive a $70 voucher for Borders books. Even more fortuitous, only days after receiving the gift voucher – Borders had an enormous sale – the more books you buy, the heavier the discount. I scampered off to the technical section of Borders, followed by the crime section and came away with:

Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer by Bryan Eisenberg & John Quarto-vonTivadar
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
Angels & Demons by Dan Brown

All up I spent about $60 of my voucher and considering Always Be Testing was $55 – it makes the two Dan Brown novels and absolute bargain. If anyone is looking for a new book to read, I recommend getting down to Borders and taking them up on their sale offer – 40% off for three books is hard to pass up!

Parrott AR.Drone, The Ultimate iPhone/iPod Accessory

January 9, 2010HardwareAlistair Lattimore

Parrott have just released the Parrott AR.Drone, a four bladed helicopter or quadricopter, which is controlled by an iPhone or iPod Touch. They utilise the motion sensitive nature of the Apple products to make controlling it intuitive, with the connection handled through WiFi. It gets better though, much much better – the AR.Drone has two video camera’s, one is used by the quadricopter to aid in flight, the second streams in real time straight into the iPhone or iPod Touch.

No pricing has been released for it yet but if they can manage to make it even passingly affordable, I can’t even begin to imagine how many of them they are going to sell. While everyone thought that micro-helicopters and planes about the size of a deck of cards were incredible – the AR.Drone and its derivatives are taking that to a whole new level.

WordPress Upgrade

January 7, 2010Blogging, SoftwareAlistair Lattimore

The WordPress development team released the next major update for the popular blogging platform, version 2.9 on the 19th December 2009 – code named Carmen. With it came over 500 bug fixes and enhacements from version 2.8.6 which was the previous latest build available.

When the WordPress team release a minor revision, moving from 2.8 into the 2.9 version space I like to wait until the next point release has been made before upgrading. Normally a raft of very subtle issues will arise when it hits the community and millions of people are using it instead of only tens of thousands.

On the 4th January 2010, WordPress devlopment team released version 2.91. after going through a beta and a release candidate which included about 25 bug fixes and enhancements over the initial 2.9 release.

Instead of doing a standard upgrade, which involves me taking a databae backup, unpacking the WordPress source and uploading it – I instead opted for a completely clean installation. This time around, I still took the backup (good practice) but instead of just uploading the source code – I deleted everything first and then uploaded a fresh copy of WordPress – which mean no extraneous files laying around.

At the same time I’ve gone back to the standard WordPress theme for a short period of time and installed a raft of very popular WordPress plugins to make things run a little more smoothly. In the next few days, I’ll be moving back to my old theme and will update my own WordPress plugins to make sure they work with the latest version of WordPress.

2009 Traffic Statistics

January 5, 2010Blogging, WebsitesAlistair Lattimore

Following on from my 2008 web statistics, below is a summary of what traffic the site took in 2009.

In 2006 the site took about 95,000 visitors, increasing to 145,000 and declining to 135,000 respectively in 2007 and 2008. In 2009 the site took 106,930 visitors over the entire year which resulted in 136,525 pageviews. It’ll come as no surprise that from a traffic driving potential, a lot fewer people are interested in reading about my personal ramblings compared to technical style posts that I used to post.

While last year saw a couple posts catch a moderate amount of attention and punch through the metronomic rise and fall in traffic each day, in 2009 none of my posts really got any traction within the greater internet. Not surprisingly traffic did start to decline towards the end of the year, however I’m happy that it wasn’t obliterated like it was last year when I moved web servers within the same host.

The traffic breakdown, just like in 2008 shows the complete dominance that Google has within the web search market. Yahoo! are still the first non-Google search engine and is still delivering approximately 2.5% of the traffic the they were in 2008. The latest addition to the web search ecosystem is Microsoft’s Bing, which sits at position five. Of course, that isn’t a fair comparison since they haven’t been around for the entire year. If you count Bing, Live and MSN together they drove about 1750 visits for the year putting them in at fourth however by the end of May 2010 I expect Bing to have delivered 2000 visits – narrowing the gap against Yahoo!.

The most popular posts for the year were similar to 2006, 2007 and 2008 but with a few newcomers:

Removing those posts from the top of the list since they clearly dominate, changes things a little:

However still none from 2009 were showing up in the list. Isolating the posts written in 2009 and the landscape is vastly different:

I find it telling that my two gripes about the quality of the Applie iTunes account sign up process are within the list. You’d assume a company with a market capitalisation of nearly USD$200 billion would have such a visible component of their business highly polished but it just goes to show everyone has their problems. Having a home phone plan comparison post residing at position three is just more evidence that the consumer is becoming more savvy by researching online, even when purchasing offline.

Onward and upward for 2010!