Google Analytics is pretty cool, I said something about it previously. It’s Urchin, but re-released in the google family. I signed up for it the first day it was available for free, and started adding my websites to it as profiles. Well, the popularity of this service was a little more than Google expected, and they werent quite able to handle the high load of new traffic. So after a week they suspended new registrations and removed that ability to add new profiles if you already had an account. The only thing is the didnt actually remove the ability to add new profiles, all they did was comment out the link that you click to add those profiles.

So, the URL still works, you can add profiles to your heart’s content actually. Which I’m sure is a relief to some people. Thank goodness for lazy web developers! I wonder if they have an opening….

technorati tags: google, [ analytics](http://technorati.com/tag/ analytics), [ comment](http://technorati.com/tag/ comment), [ profiles](http://technorati.com/tag/ profiles)

She want’s this picture posted, because it’s a fun one of the two of us sliding down a sand dune on our backs. Apperantly facebook now allows you to add photos to an album and tag them with the people that are in them. Cool, but I’m committed to flickr now. Sorry.

McAfee didn’t add detection code until Nov. 9, and as of Nov. 15 it doesn’t remove the rootkit, only the cloaking device.

Wired News: Real Story of the Rogue Rootkit

As much as this sounds like an article about Star-Trek, it’s actually an enlightening article about the spread of the Sony CD copy protection software that opened up gaping vulnerabilities in any computer had a “protected” SONY CD in it’s drive. The story broke at the end of October. This is exactly what the anti-DRM crowd has been warning of from the beginning. And no surprise, the reaction from the big corporations who provide computer software to protect your computer against these vulnerabilites responded with an underwhelming reaction.

This Wired article fails to cover one very important aspect though. The computer anti-virus companies cannot legally remove the vulnerability from your computer because that would violate the terms of the DMCA, specifically section 1201. This law prevents the circumvention or removal of any copyright protection scheme, even if that scheme harms the computer it is run on. So, really the McAfee and Semantec have their hands tied in this regard. The much criticized DMCA opens up yet another weak spot in the rights of consumers.

technorati tags: dmca, [ sony](http://technorati.com/tag/ sony), [ rootkit](http://technorati.com/tag/ rootkit), [ DRM](http://technorati.com/tag/ DRM)

Our latest photoset on flickr is from last weekend’s trip to the Great Sand Dunes National Park with some friends. It was pretty crazy, I had no idea that sand dunes existed in colorado. They are apperantly the tallest sand dunes in North America, and we climbed to the top of the second highest dune. It was very exhausting, and quite surreal. Just a few hour away, there are miles of sand dunes surrounded by mountains over 14,000 feet tall. And we climbed around and slid down them for most of saturday. Some guy brought his snowboard along, that was really cool. Sadly I have no pictures of that because our digital camera suffered mortally from the extreme conditions. Apperantly 50 mph wind gusts with walls of very fine sand is bad for electronics, go figure. I don’t think it’s possible to clean that sand out of the lens assembly… ugh. Everyone else on the trip made the same mistake though, I wonder how many cameras fail in that harsh environment.Becca started her new job today, we’re very excited about that. Becca’s been just a wee bit nervous. Now she’s crabby after her big day.Interesting things afoot in the web analytics world. Google released Analytics yesterday. Which is really just Urchin, which they bought several months ago. The big news though is that it’s free. Yeah, freaking altruistic google. We had been using Urchin for analytics for a while now, and it’s kinda thrown us into a weird situation.

I was convinced soon after I finished my big breakfast of pancakes and eggs to take a practice GRE. This wasn’t really the best thing I had to do on a saturday morning, ninja turtles was on, but I decided to humor my wife and do it. So I finished the general test (verbal and math) in about 45 minutes. My final math score was a respectable 540, and my verbal score was 600. My dear sweet wife thinks that this score is impressive, she did take a year of graduate studies so I trust her judgement on these things. She wont tell me what her scores were though… hmmm. She is definately better than me at math, but that’s no surprise. Just so you know, the GRE is taken by college seniors looking to get accepted by graduate schools. Only about %10 of college grads take the GRE, in this segment of the population my verbal score earned me an 85 percentile rank, and the math score was a still surprising 39 percentile, considering I only took math through college algebra, and that was about 4 years ago.

I sound incredily vain saying all these things about my intelligence, this is really something that Becca wants me to put up here, apperantly she just wants to live vicariously through my verbal score. One thing I really fear is that someone will now get the idea that I should go to grad school. But luckily, despite my GRE scores, I’m certain that my 2.85 GPA will preclude me from attending any graduate schools.

Oh, and work is going really well now. So, I’m pretty happy about that.

Watch out, it’s the first public vlogcast from Tim and Becca, weclome to our world. Today we bring you the events of last night, halloween night. It’s a frightful tale of what we are really like at home. Truly, you may laugh, you may cry… mainly, I just cry.

Becca and I have been been watching a lot of TV on DVD lately. Well, DVD and downloads, we watched several seasons of Scrubs which were downloaded. And we have just started watching Lost on DVD from the the rental place.

So, if you will notice the “recent phots” link along the side, you will see that it’s still stuck on some older pictures. I don’t know how to get the stupid thing to update.

I should probably take this time to point out what Becca and I are really intrested in right now is Hiking and Camping. If you want to see what the two of us want, and what I just want, check out our/my wish list.

Here’s the greatest idea ever. You order your pizza online, but wait! There’s more. Not only is the pizza delivered as soon as you order it, you can recieve 3 at a time. When you’re done, drop the empty pizza boxes in the mail and NetPizza will send you back 3 more fresh Pizzas for only $14.99 per month! It’s genious, pure genious. You can’t have it, that’s my idea.

What is the point anyways? You build a dynamic content site, it has all of this data in the SQL Database, and it’s being pulled into XML file and then loaded into a flash app on a page. Fair enough. Only problem is there are some >100 menu’s with multiple items in each, and no admin interface was built. Some of these rows have descriptions that exceed the character limit for enterprise manager. Which means in order to update those items, I’ll have to write a SQL update statement for each one. … No, wait actually that’s all wrong, apparently updating these has always been such a pain that last time, no-one knew how to do it, and instead of updating the XML from the database, we now just pull from a static XML document and that’s the only thing that needs to be updated! Wonderful! What a waste. Sheesh!

It’s a little weird that all of a sudden people will start ditching the underground champion of browsing browsiness for this newcomer known as flock. I just started picking up a few brief mentions of this tool a few days ago. Now I’m trying it out, it uses the XMLRPC protocol to have a built in “blog this” feature. It also has built in support for del.icio.us. The idea, I suppose, is that people are tired of throwing bookmarklets into their toolbar. So now these great websites/technologies/memes that have gained popularity over the past year(s) are being integrated directly into this browser. I also see one big advantage in this piece of software is that it has the ability to just drag and drop images from your flickr account into the blog editor pane. It then generates a little thumbnail and lets you set the alignment and other things for it . It’s actually quite a nice feature, perhaps I shall start using flickr a little more often. There is also the possibility that I might start posting a little more often. But don’t count on it.

The waaaaaaaave of the future!

Here’s a test video, it’s not entire lame.

I’m going to see how videoblogging with wordpress and feedburner is goin to work. Let’s hope it’s not terrible.

OK, my test with iTunes as the subscriber worked well, feedburner seems entirely capable of managing my feed. But, now that I’m in the advanced edit screen in WordPreess I see that I have the ability to add my own enclosures to the default wordpress feed, no, scratch that, it will automatically add an enclosure whenever I link to a .mov file. Hm, this is interesting.

Sometimes I don’t think there is any way that clients can get any slower and less cooperative. Then that phone rings and there is always someone on the other end ready to prove me wrong. Dumb clients don’t surprise me anymore. It’s the tenacity of the idiots out there that surprise me.

Given a fair chance, Battlefield 2 will own your life. Just thought I would give fair warning.

Also, everyone who is interested in preserving a copy of a DVD movie that they own would be wise to check out DVD Shrink. It’s very nice for obtaining a full length high quality copy of a feauture film DVD at just the right size to fit on a 4.7gb DVD-R. Very useful indeed.