Posts from May 24, 2006

I went to see the Da Vinci Code last night.

Unfortunately, I didnt actually get to see the film as there was a massive protest organised by the Catholic Church outside the cinema.

Back in 1995, I was a software engineer for Ingres, working on the OS/2 port. A merchant bank had a serious, intermittent, non-reproducible problem and Computer Associates kindly bought me a ticket to New York to go and help them.

The ticket was an open return. I thought 'That's nice. That's so I can extend my stay for a lovely weekend city break with my wife'. The truth was that it was an open return as I was staying onsite until the problem was resolved [ PH was right. I am naive ]

I duly took a black briefcase with a magnetic tape with the complete source code, an umbrella and a bowler hat. The tape was slightly too big for the briefcase and it was a struggle to shut it. Halfway through the flight, I decided to read some of the background to the long standing issue. The briefcase wouldn't open. It was jammed. I was petrified that US Customs were going to ask me to open it. Thankfully, they didn't.

When I arrived at the plush offices of the prestigious merchant bank, I was greeted like royalty. The client was very impressed that an 'engineer all the way from London' had come to visit them. They offered me tea, coffee or water and looked perplexed when I said 'Err - have you got a Swiss Army Knife ?'. A suitable tool was produced and they looked on in amazement as I butchered the lock and held the mag tape aloft. Come to think of it, I didn't have a laptop so I must have compiled the Ingres product on their server.

My other memories of this trip are going to a cinema in Times Square to watch 'Pulp Fiction' in an effort to stay awake and beat jet lag. Somehow, this seemed to enhance the cinematic experience further.

Then I called home, trying to find out the United score against Crystal Palace. People kept telling me 'Oh you haven't heard about Cantona. God it was absolutely unbelievable. He was sent off, leapt into the crowd and attacked a Palace fan with a Kung Fu kick'. I didn't believe a word of it and never got to find out the actual score (1-1) until I returned home.

And the actual bug - it was a one liner. A race condition introduced by a misplaced #ifdef.

The more observant among you will have noticed the addition of a StatCounter button to the sidebar.

The available StatCounter metrics are quite basic as the hosted Wordpress blog is limited to the HTML (not the Javascript) version of the tracking code. So advanced features like path analysis and keywords are not available but the reports do include domain information, breakdown of unique and returning visitors, visit length, pages per visit and browser metrics.

Combined with the statistics on the WordPress dashboard which do include the referrer and search engine, you get a pretty complete picture of traffic. The StatCounter reports also go back indefinitely compared to the 30 days on WordPress.

It would be neat if WordPress could open up more of the Google Analytics functionality so all the reports were under one roof.

Guess what. Most people glance at one page and stay for less than a second.