I was sitting around wondering who visits this website and realized that it’s been a while since I ran some reports. I believe that knowing your audience will help you bring in more readers by understanding what technologies they use and what they are interested in.

Now how do you get to know your reader? I don’t have a solid solution to this but I do look at a couple of things on this blog.
Here’s a list of what I look at:

• The most viewed page.
• Search results that point here.
• Web browsers used.
• Operating systems used.

I have the results of the first 2 items in my blog reports. I then use Google analytics to review the web browsers and operating systems used.

Why is this important? It helps me understand what technologies are used to view this page. Unfortunately, people are still using Internet Explorer to view this page and what’s more unfortunate is that this website is not 100% Internet Explorer compatible.

Knowing the operating system is somewhat helpful for me because every once in a while I’ll write a technology tool article that helps people with things like Microsoft Office or other software. It’s good to know that I should concentrate more on Windows systems than the others.

There goes my random thought for the day. Oh, the interesting part. Chrome is becoming a more frequently used web browser. The last time I ran this report (about a year ago), Firefox was the leader in browsers.

I have 1 hour left until April 2nd and I totally forgot to write my April Fools post. Today I found Google’s April Fools joke where they took their maps and made an option to view in 8-bit mode. Any classic gamer would love this feature. I feel like I can read these maps better than the real thing.

Here are a couple of maps I found very interesting.

The Mega Millions lottery is up to $540 million and still growing for the draw to happen on March 30. If you win this lottery, the payout is somewhere around $389 million. The lottery craze swept through my office and recently my brother told me I should play.

What’s funny is that he sent me an excel spreadsheet indicating the most picked numbers in the past 25 rounds. This is where my inner nerd came in and said, “25 rounds? We should take a bigger data set and run more numbers.”

The CA Lottery website has a feature where you can download the data set of the past winners. The data dates back to the year 2000. After creating my formulas I was set to make the parameters.

The result is the following PDF, CA Lottery Picks 2012. This PDF contains the winning numbers constrained by date. Past winning numbers for 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2, years, 3 years, 5 years, 7 years, and 10 years. Adding the color coding helps to visually find the numbers most picked. There were some rules that I had to adjust for the color combinations. Between 3 months and 5 years, anything above 75% showed up as green, less than 75% and greater than 50% are in yellow, and under 50% are in red. Between 5 years and 10 years, I had to adjust the percentages where green were the ones that came up more than 90% of the time.

That change became apparent when the number of instances of the numbers started to plateau and the variation between the lowest instances to the highest number of instances tapered off.
From these numbers I generated 5 sets of numbers, showed off my spreadsheet, made deals to split the money, crossed my fingers, and purchased some tickets. We’ll see what happens tomorrow night.

References:
calottery.com

Are you Filipino? Are you going to have a wedding soon? Do you think you’ll do the money dance? Do you think you’ll do the money dance even if the answer to the last question was no? Don’t want to get stabbed with pins? I have the perfect solution for you.

iPhones have paved the way for in innovative technologies. There’s a device out there called Square which enables anyone to conduct credit card transactions for a very low fee. The fee is %2.75 per swipe. Now sure if you’re a business and you own retail store the transaction fee is lower than that but we’re talking about the ability to mobilize and remove yourself from the register.

The Square gets you paid. It sure does. What does this have to do with the traditional Filipino Money Dance? Instead of doing the traditional money dance where you pin money to the bride or groom for a dance, have the Square handy and swipe away.

Here are my problems with the traditional money dance:

1. Pins hurt – Yes they do and sometimes you don’t have a place to pin things. Also, imagine putting pins on your expensive dress.
2. No pins or using the wrong pins – Pins run out. Although, I’m an avid wedding crasher and I bring my own pins…not straight pins, safety pins. Also, someone might forget the pins.
3. No Benjamins – Guess what, you get dollar bills because people forgot or didn’t think you’ll do the dance so they didn’t hit up the ATM before heading to your wedding.

Visit Square for more information.

A new year is almost year and I’m getting reminded to update my websites with the copyright years at the bottom…you know the Copyright 2000-current year.

Instead of manually doing this ever year, I decided to put in a snippet of PHP code to cover all my bases.

Here’s the code:

<? print(Date(“Y”)); ?>

Enjoy! And Happy New Year!

About 9 years ago, my 3^rd IT job surprised me by telling me to make my own ethernet cables. Normally, I pick up a catalog and order but I guess making cables adds to my skill set.

Where to begin? Ask someone who’s done it before. I was given a hands on lesson. Then it was time to make one. I guess I’m a good fast learner because it worked.

Today, I don’t remember what wire goes where so here’s my documentation/guide on making your own.

Step 1. Cut off 1” of the outside wire to expose the smaller wires inside.

Step 2. Straighten the wires in the middle.

Step 3. Arrange the wires and work them back and forth until they stay in order on their own.

Step 4. Trim the wire.

Step 5. Insert into connector.

Step 6. Crimp.

Step 7. Test

Here’s how to arrange the wires:

References:

http://www.groundcontrol.com/galileo/ch5-ethernet.htm

WordPress 3.1.4 & Arthemia Premium are compatible. I always get scared when updating WordPress so I do a full backup of my files and the database right before hand.

At the same time, I clear out the next 3 hours just in case something goes wrong.

Mobile applications are part of what people look for in websites…in particular your website. Most websites don’t look that great on mobile phones or other devices because of the small screens. I was using Carrington Mobile for the past 3 years and I figured I should look for another solution.

I stumbled on WPtouch by BraveNewCode. Like the Carrington theme, this plugin converts your WordPress website into a cool looking webpage for mobile devices.

There are a few things I really like about this theme:

1. The pictures are adjusted to fit the width of the device.
2. It looks like an iPhone app.
3. Easy to install.
4. The default settings are great.
5. Easy to use.

References:

http://www.bravenewcode.com/

Here are some screenshots from this site using WPtouch.

I decided to increase the width of my website to 1000px. This took a while to find all the proper widths in the Arthemia CSS file but I did it. One of the things I’m looking for is a way to show more than 12 random posts at the bottom. I’ve played around with the footer code but it doesn’t seem to want to come up.

For those of you who want to modify your theme, you need to make sure you modify:
navbar.png and left_stripe

I recently had the problem where my web browser will not open up Adobe Acrobat PDF files would not open in my web browser and also had the problem where my Word 2010 would freeze my computer when creating a PDF file.

I tried:

• Reinstalling the browser.
• Reinstalling Adobe Acrobat.

In the end, the solution was to disable Enhanced Security. Open Adobe Acrobat, click on Edit, then Preferences. Go to the Advanced Security category and uncheck Enable Enhanced Security.