Serenity Impressions

(No spoilers at all).

It's very rare for Australia to get a movie release before the rest of the world, so when it turns out that the movie in question is the long awaited FireFly movie, Serenity, then it's pens down, popcorn up.

As FireFly is long gone with small hope of resurrection, Whedon doesn't mess around when it comes to making dramatic changes to the FireFly universe, and through this Serenity manages to avoid the 'it's like a long episode' feeling that plagues such movies. Fans will find it a fitting 'end' to the series, while newcomers will get their money's worth in drama. It's not going to turn sci-fi haters around, and it's not the next Star Wars, it's just a great non-stop rollercoaster of a movie that you'll enjoy every minute of. Highly recommended.

On a side note, this was one of the first showings in Australia and the theatre was packed - suprisingly though, people dressed like Australian software engineers (it's a distinctive look) made up only half of the audience, with groups of young girls and middle-aged couples making up the rest. Super neat.

Referrer Time

Since I do love information presentation, one thing I've always had fun doing is generating the stats reports for my various sites. After many iterations over the years, the following suits me best - 95% of the use I get out of the system is from the indented referrer lists.

Main Screen

Here you can see a short summary of the activity on all of my sites - next to the site name you can see 'hits in past 24 hours (unique hits in past 24 hours) - total hits'. The important bit is the indented list of referrers - the previous 10 referrers are listed and indented according to how long ago the hit was made. These blocks of text let me see how busy my sites without reading anything onscreen - you can see that bodytag.org is getting a lot more hits than glenmurphy.com because its 'last 10 referrers' is squished to the left. On the right you can see the page that was viewed by that visitor. Controls at the top of the page let me choose whether I want to see referrals from all sites not my own, all sites including mine, or all hits regardless of whether a referral was included (see this in the third image). Note that the indenting stops at about the 12 hour mark (poor riot.com.au).

Details Screen

Viewing the details for a site will show a longer list of referrers, as well as some more traditional bar charts.

'All hits' Details Screen

This just shows what happens when I choose 'view all hits' - you can see what looks like a single user 31 minutes ago clicking on all the menu items.

And that's that. I'm not going to pretend that they're the most user-friendly or immediately comprehensible reports, but they give me all the information I need and are usable even squinting through a hangover.

The main page is a PHP script that takes around 30 seconds to generate - hits are logged into and extracted from MySQL databases (each site has its own), though I suppose I could change it to parse Apache log files. There's also a smaller version that fits into my Windows taskbar as a toolbar.

Is this thing on?

So I woke up this mornin', and I can't remember the rest of the song, or even what it sounds like. There goes yet another almighty segue.

glenmurphy.com and this blog has been redesigned after I realised this morning that it was very hard for people who don't know me to figure out exactly what it is I do. Maybe that was part of the charm, but I think the new design is a bit more user-friendly (though I'll miss you, rolling transition text of cheap thrills).

The blog navigation could use some work, specifically around viewing individual posts and the archives (and how it's not exactly clear that you're on a sub-page), but I'm generally happy with how it all worked out.

Mm, now that I think about it, this update hasn't been tested on Safari at all. Oopsie daisy.

Update: MacIE It seems to work just fine in Safari. MacIE is another matter, but I'm willing to let that slide.

Now we play the waiting game .. we wait until I realise that gummi neon is a terrible choice and that the roly poly thing was much better. Ahhhhh, nothing like holiday induced stupidity.

Update Update: The server's working again! Woohoo!

Geolove

So you can probably tell that I have a mega soft spot for Google Earth - years ago I spent a lot of brainpower on the whole annotated reality thing, and all I have to show for it are geocode.net/.org registrations, and a whole slew of project folders. But now Google Earth's network link does it better than I could've imagined, so these days I sort of sit at the computer with dad and dribble over the latest data layers instead.

Today we blew our stacks when we found Placeopedia, a Google Maps / Earth 'interface' to Wikipedia (KML link described on the 'data' page), then giggled with glee as we added live Australian weather radar and not-so-live global cloud coverage.

On a related note, if your interest is more upwards, you'd probably like Celestia - it's like Google Earth for the universe. Just make sure you go to max stars visible, then auto-magnitude and star shape set to 'disc' .. then zoom out biglots. Heavenly.

The sad thing is, I used to be a Keyhole subscriber before Google bought them and turned it into Google Earth, even back then it had KML, but I never put two and two together and foresaw this greatness. I'm so lame.

Visa application interview on Monday. Exciting!

/back

The Whitsundays Islands were great. We spent three days on Daydream Island, and aside from some overzealous activities coordinators and the family-oriented beach-movie selection (The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants , Herbie: Fully Loaded) it was perfect. The weather was a near-constant 29C and Lauren didn't go insane from not being busy.

I also went without Pepsi Max and email for the three days - it's the first time I've done either of those things since about 1997. Probably explains why I had so many naps, come to think of it.

P.S The view from the plane flying in was very much like this Afterburner teaser image (note to future: linked site will probably change soon).

Sketchup Google Earth Plugin

Sketchup, a 3d modelling package I adore a great deal (mostly for its crazily great interface - these days I rarely have any need for 3D modelling), has a Google Earth plugin available. I smell the augmented earth coming yet another small step closer.

/away

If anyone calls, I'm in the Whitsunday Islands celebrating the end of Lauren's PhD. Wahoooo!

Duct Tape Update

I have just posted a long-overdue update to Duct Tape to allow it to work with Doom 1.3 and the expansion pack.

.. I think; I don't actually have Doom3 installed anymore, but apparently the fix works. This is yet another well-tested release brought to you by Glen.