Archive for March 4th, 2006

Samuel on radio in Los Angeles?

Yes you read the title correctly, but no I can’t confirm that it will happen.

I intend on giving Leo Laporte a call in the morning for his Saturday “KFI Tech Guy” show (11am Saturday L.A. time, 7pm Saturday GMT, 6am Sunday Canberra time). I intend on making use of Skype for the call which, due to the fact it is a US free call number, will be a free call on Skype with the “Skype Out” service (the Skype service which lets you call standard telephone numbers extremely cheaply…no more expensive international calls). I intend on calling as close to 6am Canberra time as possible.

I have two topics to raise with Leo, but I won’t be divulging them yet, I would much rather keep them a secret until the morning.

If you’re awake and want to hear, just go to http://kfi640.com and click the “Listen Live” link. If I am able to get through, which I should be able to, then I will inform you when Leo has released the episode as a podcast (minus the ads, news and traffic), which he seems to do a few weeks after the show airs.

Samuel

March 4th, 2006 at 11:05pm

Spybot Exonerated

Those of you who regularly read through the comments on this site may remember that near the end of the popup fiasco, the subject of adware and spyware came up, and in the comments in this post, a comment was made by John B1_B5 about Spybot Search and Destroy.

You have to be careful of “Spybot” because it will work ok in the beginning, but after awhile, it sneakily starts acting as an “undercover agent” to allow ’specific’ spyware onto your machine .

Needless to say, this caused me some concern as I have been using Spybot for some time, and have even promoted it, if it is letting in spyware then it has half the computer industry fooled. So I conducted some research, but didn’t turn up anything for a while, until I stumbled upon a quote from Leo Laporte on his radio show, from Sunday February 5, 2006, somewhere around the 34 minute mark.

There are, and this is a really shameful thing, but there are people who camp out on similar names. If you go to “safernetworking.org”, not “safer-networking.org” for instance, just slightly mistyped, it’ll look like Spybot but it’s really not, it’s spyware. So these spyware guys are just nasty, they’ll do every trick in the book including pose as an anti-spyware program.

I did a bit of further research into this, including checking the non-hyphenated domain name, and lo and behold, Leo is correct. It would appear that some spyware creators are “cashing in” on the popularity of Spybot Search & Destroy by registering a very similar (and probably more commonly thought of) domain name, and putting spyware on there which pretends to be spyware. This fake Spybot exhibits the behaviour that John B1_B5 pointed out.

I brought this to the attention of John this afternoon, and he said

It’s quite possible I downloaded the fake one

I can understand that, I could have done the same thing if I wasn’t familiar with the look of the real Spybot website or was slightly inattentive.

So, to summarise, Spybot Search & Destroy is a legitimate and safe anti-spyware application, which should be downloaded from http://safer-networking.org (the website with the dash!).

Samuel

March 4th, 2006 at 10:53pm

2CC’s New Computer and News Intro

2CC have a new computer! They’ve had it for a bit over a week now, and I must say that it is sounding good. It doesn’t die like the old one used to do in the middle of the night, it is capable of crossfading (long overdue) and can understand a station ID pulse coming in while it is playing something else (usually a music return) and act upon it.

This is something us night owls are very happy about as it means we don’t have the same ad break 5000 times in a row from the emergency tape any more.

The computer did have a few teething issues, and it was entertaining to listen to the local presenters telling it off, and the overnight programs were fun where it would skip the first ad in an ad break by starting two ads at the same time fading the first ad out under the second ad, funny, but cringe inducing.

In related news, 2CC have moved the spoken intro on the news theme forward a bit, this is probably related to an issue I raised a few months ago when 2UE moved into their new studios with new equipment and the overnight news intro pulse started arriving a second late. As the spoken intro was designed to finish just as the network newsreaders are scheduled to start the news (7 seconds past the hour), any delay caused a clash between the newsreader and the voiceover, by moving the voiceover forward a little bit this issue has been resolved.

Overall I would have to say the overnight broadcast quality of 2CC has improved considerably, as has the daytime quality, this change is indeed better than a holiday.

I wonder what they did with the old system and if it is for sale? The software it was running would make a good collectors item, unfortunately I can’t say any more about that for risk of breaching a confidentiality agreement.

Samuel

4 comments March 4th, 2006 at 04:57pm

Blog View Stats for February

Here we are again, with another look at the Blog View Stats for the previous month. I always enjoy this overview of the month, and I think it is really quite fascinating. Before I continue I must apoligise for the rather slow week we’ve just had here on Samuel’s Blog, I’ve been a bit busy and not really had any incentive to write an awful lot this week…we should have more in the next week.

I like the layout of last month’s stats that I’m sticking with that as a template, I will probably clean up the Samuel’s Persiflage stats next month as they will quicly become a mess if I continue to format them in this manner.

Anyway, on with the stats!

The Webstat reports for February can be found here

There were 18,327 page views in February, down from 20,002+ in January, and 5,025 visitors, down from 5,299+ in January.

There were 7,386 views of the front page on all of its URLs.

The most popular articles were:

Google remained the most popular search engine, followed by Yahoo, and MSN….no surprises there!

The search keywords were again mostly various combinations and misspellings of my name. “schnappi video” came in 91 times for some reason. Among the odd keywords were

  • mikes-johns
  • smoothwallsamuel@gmail.com password
  • “To initiate the process for resetting the password for your”
  • channel 9 free cricket to watch
  • ready presentation
  • the first time i saw the cow
  • summary of the day after tommorow
  • woman for stuart bocking
  • phil-ricky
  • bunnings belconnen window
  • Tianjin to Wenzhou
  • Where is my schoolbag?
  • netherlands law 2CC
  • taking listeners beyond the ad break
  • practice conversation in the restuarant
  • what is the function of dettol?
  • ç‡ƒæ²¹é™„åŠ è´¹ extra

Internet Explorer was the most popular browser with 65.36% of the readership, Firefox was next with 30.52%, and by Safari on 2.81%. It would appear that the gains by firefox were at the cost of all other browsers.

Windows was the most popular Operating System with 87.36% of the readership, followed by Mac with 10.78%, and Linux with 1.82%. It looks like a few people jumped from Windows to Mac, and Mac recorded it’s first double digit percentage. I was surprised to find good old fashioned UNIX with 4 page views and OS/2 with 1 page view, it’s amazing what people will use from time to time.

Australia, The US and The UK topped the Countries, with 88.53%, 3.26% and 2.72% of the readership respectively.

The most popular files for the month were:

The top referring sites for the month were:

Samuel’s Persiflage Statistics
The RSS feed was downloaded 815 times, down from 1661 in January, which was up from 150 in December 2005 making a total of 2626.
Episode 3 (February 2006) was downloaded 120 times, 81 downloads of the high quality version and 39 of the low quality version.
Episode 2 (January 2006) was downloaded 98 times, down from 144 in January, and making a total of 242.
Episode 1 (December 2005) was downloaded 64 times, down from 291 in January, which was up from 80 in December, and making a total of 435.

Bandwidth
February 2006 9,280MB
January 2006: 14,240MB
December 2005: 14,010MB
November 2005: 2,870MB
October 2005: 657.85MB
September 2005: 519.89MB
August 2005: 82.93MB

Samuel

March 4th, 2006 at 09:43am


Calendar

March 2006
S M T W T F S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031  

Posts by Month

Posts by Category

Login/Logout


Blix Theme by Sebastian Schmieg and modified for Samuel's Blog by Samuel Gordon-Stewart.
Printing CSS with the help of Martin Pot's guide to Web Page Printability With CSS.
Icons by Kevin Potts.
Powered by WordPress.
Log in