All posts by Alistair Lattimore

About Alistair Lattimore

My name is Alistair Lattimore, I'm in my very early 30's and live on the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. I married my high school sweet heart & we've been together for longer than I can remember. Claire and I started our family in September 2008 when Hugo was born and added a gorgeous little girl named Evie in May 2010. You can find me online in the typical hangouts, Google+, Twitter & facebook. . View all posts by Alistair Lattimore →

2011 Traffic Statistics

February 9, 2012WebsitesAlistair Lattimore

In keeping with my annual review of things and following on from my 2010 website traffic statistics, below is a quick summary of what happened during 2011.

Throughout 2010 my blog took 97,509 visits and 132,068 pageviews and for the year of 2011 108,325 visits and 140,882 pageviews. It is nice to see that my sites visitation has grown over the year, however it is a long way from the hay days of 145,000 visits when I was writing technical style posts and a mixing it with pop culture items like Australian Idol.

Breaking down the traffic sources for the year, shows a 4% increase in search engine traffic as a percentage of the whole site, up from 74% to 78%. Within the search engine space, Google continues to completely dominate, increasing by 2% to just under 96%. Despite every effort made by Microsoft, such as buying the search engine business from Yahoo! in an attempt to gain market share – it isn’t reflected in the traffic for my blog and collectively Bing & Yahoo! represent about 3.5% of my search referrals.

The most popular posts for the year were nearly identical to the past years, with the a cute Ragdoll cat photo edging its way into the list:

Ignoring posts I’d written in a previous years and isolating only 2011, a different picture arises:

Bring on 2012, with a bit of luck the landscape will have changed by then again.

Nano Quadrotors

February 6, 2012VideosAlistair Lattimore

In January 2010 I wrote about an amazing radio controlled four rotor helicopter known known as the Parrot AR.Drone, which utilised the iPhone gyroscope, touch screen and built in wifi to produce the most amazing flying toy I’d seen at the time.

Two years have passed and now the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania with development by KMel Robotics have miniturised the same basic concept to produce nano quadrotor helicopters.

As you’ll see in the video, a lot has changed and they possess some amazing built in technology, such as being able to right themselves when thrown into the air, along with clever algorithms to control moving between obstacles, flying in formation and much more.

I think this is absolutely mind blowing, least of which because they’d make an amazing toy but mainly because it represents a huge leap forward in robots and sensing, a lot like the self driving cars that Google have developed.

Amazing.

Dusty

January 23, 2012HardwareAlistair Lattimore

Intel CPU & Heat Sink Clogged With Dust I got home from work and Hugo met me in the garage like normal and he says to me:

I’m grumpy!

After checking with Claire about why he might be grumpy, it turned out it was because the computer kept freezing when he was trying to watch one of his favourite shows via ABC 4 Kids.

Claire tells me that it did it a few times and that at some point, the computer was giving her a temperature warning – which I haven’t seen since the days of overclocking CPU’s.

A quick investigation shows that the fan & heat sink for the CPU are covered in dust. The photo probably doesn’t do it justice but the heat sink is completely filled in with dust and the fan blades are coated as well.

I clean everything up with a small stiff bristle paint brush, which Claire graciously let me use and we’re back in business. Claire walks past the computer and on the way to the bedroom tells me that the computer is making a weird humming sound.

Further investigation shows that it isn’t anything usual except that the CPU fan can actually spin properly now as it isn’t being restricted by the dust between it and the heat sink and the additional weight of it caked on the underside of the fan blades.

2011 Blogging Statistics

January 22, 2012BloggingAlistair Lattimore

At the beginning of 2011, I wrote about how my 2010 blogging efforts and in keeping with that trend – below are my 2011 blogging statistics.

	POSTS	AVG. POST LENGTH	TOTAL POST LENGTH	COMMENTS	AVG. COMMENTS
2004	1	478	487	0	0.0
2005	82	1949	159835	511	12.9
2006	103	1837	189259	865	4.5
2007	127	1977	251150	229	1.3
2008	68	1597	108623	78	0.8
2009	77	2114	162804	104	0.9
2010	81	2147	173969	105	1.4
2011	58	1737	100779	144	1.5

In 2009 I had aimed for between seven and eight posts per month, which I didn’t quite make and in 2010 I thought if I had pushed myself I could average slightly over eight and break through the magic 100 posts per year marker but I still haven’t managed it yet. While my number of posts is down, along with my average post length – I am happy that the number of comments has increased slightly over previous years.

For those that are interested in doing the same, I’ve made the blogging statistics SQL script available for you to use.

30 Day Report: Drink 2 Litres Of Water Daily

January 3, 2012LifeAlistair Lattimore

For the month of November, I attempted my first 30 day challenge and it was to drink 2 litres of water daily.

I didn’t think it would have been that hard to drink 2 litres of water each day but I found it to be quite a lot of water to consume during a normal day.

What I did find was that it was really easily to consume the water in days that I attended the gym, where in some instances I’d do over three litres in a day but then over a weekend I’d do a bit less than 2 litres.

Over the course of the month I averaged 1.95 litres per day, so I didn’t reach the challenge goal. However, given that it was such a massive increase from my close to zero daily water intake, I’m actually going to chock it up as a success.

One thing that it didn’t seem to slow down was my coffee intake and I mentioned to Claire that might be one of my next challenges – no coffee or caffeine for a month, yowzer!