I started a new blog last week based on my exploits in EVE online…   really because this blog isn’t really the place for it - despite my recent mini-review, the politics and trading exploits in EVE are NOT the place on an IT blog, and I’m sure the editors here would promptly tell me off if I was to post all EVE content.

Anyhow I wanted to see how many readers I was getting, where the viewers were from etc.   Reason, purely my interest, as I want to see who’s reading my content, as a blog with no readers is surely not a blog but a journal!
I installed both Google Analytics and Feedburner on my blog.    GA to analyse the breakdown of visiting users, and Feedburner to actually track people subscribing to the RSS feed.   So I posted some content, and  publicised in a few locations, and I finally am seeing statistics.

Of the 2 services, currently I prefer Feedburner.   Google Analytics has a 24 hour delay on its statistics it seems, so thus isn’t as useful up front.   However Google Analytics does have extra detail on referrers to name just one item, which I’m sure in time I’ll find interesting - however it doesn’t give the immediacy Feedburner does.

Feedburner for example shows me who is reading the RSS and when, from where, and is instant updating- for example today I know I had 2 visitors from Denmark, though the majority of my readers are in the USA.

So… my question to you guys out there is:    Is there a feedburner like real time analysis platform for web hits - thats invisible on the page like GA is?

I totally agree with the Conservative policy mooted in this Register article.

Being a member of an IT security team you realise that user-education and actions are what invariably lead to data loss… and a problem with users is their apathy and reluctance to change.

If you tell a user to do data transfer in this “secure” manner - you’re safe, If you use your old process you risk going to jail. I think this one change would focus their minds quite well..

Users in large companies sometimes do try and hide behind the “process” shield, instead of challenging a potentially risky insecure data request from a client/partner in many cases…

For example I still see users internally who are unaware that email is by nature an insecure medium - of course unless a secure pgp or s/mime link is setup in advance of the email being sent…

Thankfully we now have technology in place to spot and stop many such instances from occurring now (in email at least), with the email’s in question being redirected to compliance instead of the end-recipient so they can be educated as to proper data transfer methods. Of course the technology isn’t perfect, user education is the main thing here, and legislation and personal responsibilty for loss is the good thing.

So, hats off to the conservatives - a step in the right direction.

I’ve posted about this before in comments to this post, but I think it deserves a seperate update post:

1 month and a few weeks in, I’m finding the iPhone 3G battery life to still be sufficient for what I use my phone for. There is, however, noticible difference in battery left at end of day if I don’t micromanage (ie turn off/on) the relevant chipsets on the phone. My major gripe is there is no Office/Work/etc profiles to control what is turned on… Doing it manually can be a pain. Right now I have the below setup:

At home: Need Bluetooth, Wifi on, and 3g off (non 3g area)

At office/travelling on train: Need Wifi off, BT off, 3g on

In car: BT on, 3g off, wifi off

Providing I change settings as above, in my usage - yesterday I got (starting coming off charge at 6:30am):

1. 1.5-2 hours of mp3 playback (during half of this was also surfing web on train (mix of 2g/3g)
2. 1 hour of websurfing and email (I have 2 email accounts, one push, one checking hourly) via 3g
3. One 2 hour phone call (2g)

At end of day (midnight), I still had ~ 40% of the battery free and  I realised this isn’t that bad.  Without micromanaging the battery the day before, I had 5% (an estimate) - with an almost identical usage pattern.

In comparison my old Nokia N73 (also 3g) could only handle 2 hours of intensive web surfing/video use - a few more hours if only being used for mp3 playback… and it had a FAR smaller screen. The N73 also ran out of battery with a just being on standby and a 3 hour call in fact…

I think peoples expectations with the iPhone are that it’ll perform the same as their old phone and this is the problem. On their old phone they didn’t spend a minimum 2 hours of the day websurfing, emailing etc (and it has a smaller screen!).   They were, in many cases just using it for calls. My experience on Three with the N73 made me know that a 3g phone with very intensive use does need 2 charges a day. This surprisingly isn’t the case with iPhone for me - at least right now.

My only problem is I may have to get a Morphie and a second plug-in charger to keep me going in the future if I continue increasing my phone usage every day.

iPhone 3G users - have you come to same conclusion as me - in that the battery life issue is mainly due to increased usage of a converged device - not the phone having awful battery life?   Does yours last the day without the micromanagement I do?

Well, after many years with zero anti-spam technologies (and manual deletion of ~ 200 items a day) I decided it was time to move my mail host and implement anti-spam technologies.

Now I already have a home SAMBA server, running Debian, which also acts as a mini desktop. I decided to use this as my mail volume isn’t huge… I get ~20 valid emails a day, ~200-500 spams depending on the day of week really.

SpamAssassin looked to be the premier anti-spam solution out there for Linux, and I selected a Debian EXIM integration. Took a while to learn exim, but I’m now mostly impressed with the configuration. I’ve used dovecot as a IMAP server. All these are the standard Debian stable packages……

Basic procedure for me was I installed the packages - then I followed this guide and got a basic system up and running… and moved a “test” domain name to point inbound SMTP at the box so I could then fully test all the options and tune the anti-spam.

Tricks the above guide missed:

Using CPAN (perl -m CPAN -e shell) to install Net::DNS. Without this vital step Spamassassin missed out on ALL DNS tests, which are quite good for scoring.

Bayesian filtering.

• Set this up to use a system wide database, in a folder you control with world read/write access. The default isn’t right.
• You may wish to increase the default size of the bayes database. I increased mine 10 times.
• It seems to require 200 spams and 200 non-spams to be learnt before its operational - at first I did not realise this. I fed Bayes a folder of 2000 spams, and let it read my (already filtered of spam) archive of personal mails as non-spam (3400 items). This trained the spam filter quite well.. I used a variation of this script
• If you run sa-learn with -D for debug it does tend to show faults in your SA config.
• Increasing score of BAYES_99 for me at least results in better results.
• I’ve set up learn as spam folders in my mailfile, which is learnt and deleted every 6 hours (ie mails making it through SA I drag to this folder).

Setting SpamAssassin up is NOT easy, and requires a lot of tinkering to get runnign as you want (hence my playing with a test domain). Once complete however, its an brilliant system in my opinion at least.

Now its up and running, only 4 spams have hit my mailbox (though I’m still storing all spam - aim is to not store very high scoring spams in future, and only store “uncertain” results. Though right now, with ~5000 spams not hitting my mailbox I’m a happy bunny.

SpamAssassin is also available as a windows version I believe. For Exchange users with nothing else it may be worth a look.

Quick post:

I updated last night to the new 2.0.1 iphone software… and it fixes a few of the bugs in 2.0.0 - namely the browser/other apps crashing regularly and randomly (this isn’t a huge issue in browser as it restarts and usually goes back to page you are looking at) - but since installation, this morning, I had zero crashes in one hour of surfing on the train to work.

So overall, I’d say if you have an iPhone, you want to install 2.0.1 asap.

After day one of Cuil, I’m not super impressed

Half the UK day the site was down due to lack of capacity… guys if you want to beat Google you need to allow us to actually search… after all the primary reason people use Google is its search is quick, pretty accurate.. and seemingly always available.

Cuil, however, well, not so good on day one.   Several searches I ran came up with no results (on my name for example, which is very common - what are the chances of Google not knowing about a Dan Jones (at least one!))…. this may have been teething problems, but isn’t a good start.

In positives however, when I did try other searches, the results were slightly more accurate than Google.     The problem overall from my day one experience is the engine either comes back with good results… or nothing.

I’ll continue playing with Cuil today, and report my findings, but overall I’m having to stick with Google right now…

Do you like Cuil?

Recently (well 9 months ago) I started playing Eve Online for 3-4 months.   I stopped for various reasons at the time, lack of my time being the main one - and I have recently found myself playing again in a new light for past month…

For those uninitiated, EVE is a funny game, though its player driven economy is what really has interested my in my current fixation upon the game.

Unlike many games your experience isn’t determined by how many enemies you kill and a grind.   You train skills, and this continues when you are offline.    Basically the longer you have played the better you are.    But this does not mean (after a few months) you will not be able to contribute - new players join all the time, and the gains from training higher skill levels take longer for little additional benefit, meaning a newer player doesn’t need take long to get good.    That said, you will find it takes 3-6 months to learn the game - its complicated in a good way.

To explain EVE in detail would be really quite complicated, but in short the below is a description of those ingame dynamics that attracted me to it:

• One group of players, the miners, pretty much produce most of the minerals that can be used in the game to create item.    They mine asteroids, then refine them into minerals, which are the “building blocks” of the game.
• Another group, the Industrialists, take minerals, and use them to build items using “Blueprints”, which they purchase from the market.    There are 2 classes of item - Tech 1, for which you can buy a blueprint.   Tech 2 (better version), which you need to copy then research a blueprint (which is an expensive/time consuming thing to do).
• You then have “mission runners” - these are players focused on flying their spacecraft in PvE engagements (that is player vs computer generated opponents).   They earn money from bounties, and from goods dropped in the shells of the ships defeated.     These can be reprocessed to minerals or sold.
• You also have PvP, player vs player, where you can sign up with one of the 4 races in the game to fight other races in a galactic battle for supremacy - this is new
• But, making things more interesting, there are Corporations and Alliances.    Now these corporations and Alliances can “own” space in the majority of unoccupied (ie non central sectors of thegame).   In unoccupied space, there is no law, so any ship can fight any other ship… This leads to massive battles for supremancy.

Now onto my experiences - I actually run 2 characters in game (on 2 monitors, in true geek style).     One is industrial, one PvE currently- this to save on time, and make the most of the resources collected in PvE to the best of my ability (making the bad items into saleable ones)…

The industrial side of the game I’m really enjoying - making a mini-empire of equipment I buy low, and sell high - as well as equipment I manufacture then sell for whatever the local markets will bear.    The way EVE works is there are trading hubs (Jita, Rens) where everythign is pretty competitive, but people don’t want to take 30-60mins in real life to fly their ship to Jita to go collect items sometimes, so the local markets are fiercly competitive for items manufactured and sold locally, as well as items imported.      Getting more complex, some items are only sold in certain places, so money can be made taking these “rarer” items, and distributing around the game world, for a mark up you understand.

PvE is something else, its tricky, not just a click fest.  I’ve been playing with tactics and lost 5 ships in past 4 weeks due to not getting away quick enough when I bit off more than I could chew.    I’ll post more about this in future, but its the industry side I’m concentrating on right now.

Anyhow, I highly suggest you try this game, its a free download, with 14 day free trial available from the main game site above.

A tip though… with current exchange rates its cheaper to buy the game via  Shatteredcrystal/another time card vendor who uses USD as its currency.     As its €19.99 first month.. €14.99 thereafter, and the same in dollars - a shattered crystal GTC for 60 days (paid in dollars) makes sense for me, worked out at under £9 a month for me last time I done it - which is better than the direct EVE costs - and makes it one of the cheaper mmo’s.

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I’ve had my iPhone since day 2 integrated with both me.com for bookmarks, contacts, email and calender, as well as to my work caldender via a test ActiveSync server @ work.

I must admit the fact that the iPhone can connect to two “push” services at once is mighty handy - and the fact that in calender’s combined view you can clearly see what appointments are work, which are personal… etc.   This all cleverly without having to load all your appointments into the one work calender.    You see, I’ve always tried to not use the Outlook caldender at work for personal items (the boss can see this!), instead relying on an old fashioned paper calender system my girlfriend manages - combined with an electronic diary at home in Outlook that I manage - and we kind of manage to keep in sync.   The problem is when I’m at work as I don’t carry the home Outlook with me.    With the fact I’m forgetful double bookings therefore result.   As the nice iPhone system allows me to have the home calender at work it’s proven to be very useful… without compromising my office calender’s functionality and filling it with friend’s birthdays, social events in evening etc.

Overall  the calender support is great and is the best calender of any of the mobile devices I’ve had in last 4 years..  the navigation is what makes a calender and Apple have got it spot on.

Email - not so great. I’ve been getting duplicates on my me.com address (I’ve forwarded/redirected my main email onto the me.com address. Bascially with regard to folder filing (which is essential) - sometimes filing a completed email to say Personal on the iPhone works fine - but on the me.com webmail I end with a copy BOTH in inbox, and in personal at this point. I move the former, and have 2 of the same email in same folder.

Push however is great, and a few of my friends are emailing now instead of sms’ing as they realise I get it just as quick and its far cheaper.

Bookmarks are what I’m starting to wonder how I done without. I have a sizeable list of security bookmarks at work, all folderised, and nice. At home it was less organised - so pre me.com I had to move it all into a “Home” folder, and categorise. Now I have work, home, and laptop all nicely synced bookmark wise - even though I run a diff primary browser at home (Safari, vs IE in office due to internal apps needing IE).    If I bookmark an item of interest in the evening, its on the work PC in the morning.   Can’t beat that.

Contacts, well I’ve had synced contacts between phone, Outlook etc for years - couldn’t live with a phone that doesn’t do it. Doing it over air does help a little as I don’t need to cable to work pc, home pc etc to do it.

So, me.com over with, the iPhone itself:

Following this link on battery life, you can see my response here as a comment, so I won’t comment on battery life except to say its plenty for my usage currently. With very heavy use it would need charging during the day I imagine, and its certainally not as good battery life as the new blackberries.

Being critical, when running many apps, it sometimes needs a hard reboot- I’ve had to do this twice since Friday - some of the appstore apps may not be quality goods.. Also slingplayer for iphone would be nice if they can get around to launching it.   Also Apple - where’s a2dp so I can not have to connect headphones for mp3 listening?

But apart from all that, its actually exceeding my expectations overall - the keyboard and user interface really set it apart from my Nokia/other phones in the past - its quicker to use and more stable on heavy use than they were. Also I’ve never considered looking up information on the web while on a call with a Nokia - something I’ve done several times on the iPhone since I’ve had it!

The multitasking beats my old N73 hands down - the best example I can give is on the N73 I couldn’t surf the web and listen to a mp3 simultaneously on the train, the mp3 would just keep breaking up as the page loaded. I can on a iPhone.

I just want to say from my experience the linked register article has it spot on one day 1 iPhone launch here in Ipswich via the O2 store.   That said I will still describe iPhone day as occured for myself.

I was no 1 in the queue, having woken earlier than expected.    I’m the kind of person that once awake just stays, so decided to make it down to the store with my mp3 player, arriving at 5:55 am.   2nd person arrived 5 mins later, followed by quite a few more at 6:30.    We got free coffee, orange juice and doughnuts while we waited (from 6:25 ish onward) and I have to admit it was quite a experience - very friendly launch.

All quite organised tickets handed out based on place in queue, and 1st 6 people got a 16Gb (me included), rest getting 8Gb’s (well those who realised that 8Gb was all on offer and available and decided to stay - virtually everyone wanted a 16Gb!).   50% new contracts, 50% upgrades.     By 7:30am all places in queue were filled - ie the store had ran out.   Judging by queue, the Ipswich o2 store I used had ~24-30 iphones, 6 of which were 16Gb’s.

The problems occurred once store opened.   O2’s internal system could not cope with the new contracts flowing nor the upgrades… the system kept dieing.     O2’s internal IT really does need a kick for not checking their internal systems could cope with the demand after the fiasco on Monday…     The manager of the store handled this very well though with little drama, helpfully going to contingency (paper system) for new contracts, and agreed to hold back stock for queue members upgrading (who have a ticket entitling them to a iphone later today/tmrw) - as they can’t do that without the systems in place.

I got a iphone 16Gb, have activated in itunes, but still currently have no cell service (presumably due to the manual activiation needing to be followed up instore later).    Wifi’s working well and overall very happy with the new phone - (even though its effectively a 16Gb touch now!).

me.com is also currently down so I can’t proceed in setting up contact/phone sync to that.

Overall impressions and a review of iPhone and me.com to follow next week, but the camaraderie and fun had during the wait for the iphone made the buying experience fun….

I’ve decided, I’m getting one (as mentioned in last blog post).

What swung the decision for me is the fact you can get 16Gb storage on a phone for mp3’s - with the size of my collection this will allow a decent amount of music for all occasions. + room for some movies and applications.

Note that in the past I was critical of the iphone (even I believe on this blog 18 months ago), but the 3 crucial things lacking then have been fixed

1. GPS
2. 3g/HSDPA!
3. 3rd party Applications

With these fixed I can’t resist getting one. Super monkey ball looks great - and excited about possibilty of GPS. Only thing I can fault really is the camera and lack of user replaceable battery. The touch interface I had tried on the old iPhone and although I think it’ll take some getting used to, I think I’ll grow to like. Also the excellent Cloud/Btopenzone roaming deal should be commented on as it should greatly increase data speeds in a lot of places I visit (liverpool street/city area for one). This doesn’t change my perception overall that Wifi will be surplanted by 3g cards where it is overpriced - coffee shops being a prime example.

I think the critical thing for Apple in terms of revenue generation on the iPhone will be MobileMe as this will allow full sync from PC to Mac, to iPhone for a very reasonable sum (in fact for less than I pay now for less email storage on another host…). If Apple get this right then it certainally will make me switch email hosts… cant’ wait for the upcoming trial. I have 2 PC’s, 2 laptops at home now - one is a work laptop admittedly so lets exclude that - however email sync is always painful between the 3 - I use imap currently… but I have no caldender/contacts sync, which this will fix at long last. This is a longstanding gripe of mine - exchange for the masses is finally here I hope!

Now I just need to prepare for the small queue (I do live in a small part of suffolk so not expecting a huge queue). I just hope they do have a 16Gb in store if I join the queue at 7:45am… if not I’ll just wait a few days/weeks until they do have stock. I’m not queuing at the crack of dawn - this isn’t that important to me!

Are you queuing?