Posted at 11:22 am on November 16th, 2008 by Ron in Cool | 2 Comments »
So I got to Washington Dulles airport about 5 hours before my flight back to SFO last week, and the Virgin America rep was kind enough to suggest I pay a visit to the new Smithsonian National Air and Space museum, just a short shuttle ride from the public side of the airport.
As a pilot, I found myself in aviation heaven, and spent about 3 hours wandering around taking snapshots with my new Canon G10. Here’s my favorite shot, of the space shuttle Enterprise… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted at 7:40 pm on July 13th, 2008 by Ron in Cool, Funny | No Comments »
Google is returning 404s on basic searches for the last 10 minutes, like the one shown. Friends, the apocalypse is near.
UPDATE: Hmmmm, still broken on Safari and Webkit, but good on Firefox. Something more interesting going on, probably with latest build of Webkit or my iPhone upgrade today. Weird.
Posted at 5:07 pm on October 18th, 2007 by Ron in Funny, SEM | No Comments »
I googled “adwords” today, and noticed this gem in the right column:
Deliciously ironic, no? Mind Valley indeed. But perhaps they’re on to something here — put three grammatical errors in one AdWord ad that touts your AdWords expertise, and get free attention from bloggers! Let’s see the landing page: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted at 9:54 pm on September 17th, 2007 by Ron in Fatherhood | 2 Comments »
We celebrated Colson’s 100th Day today, and took a picture of him in a kimono given to us by Kaori’s mother:
The 100th Day is a traditional milestone in Japanese culture, marking both the lucky number 100 and the age at which infants are taken out into public. For a few more pictures, see the photo set on Flickr.
Posted at 3:13 pm on August 10th, 2007 by Ron in Statsaholic | 1 Comment »
I made some changes on Statsaholic today, adding Compete and Quantcast graphs (two very cool companies, who have generously given me permission to hotlink their graph images). It’s nice to see both graphs side-by-side:
The two companies use slightly different representations of data on their respective graphs–Compete shows monthly unique visitors on the Y axis, while Quantcast shows daily uniques. They differ also in the color scheme, unfortunately, with Compete using blue, red and green for the first, second and third domain, and Quantcast using blue, green and red. It’d be nice to have some config options for these items, but the comparisons are still useful I think.
If a domain is a “quantified publisher” on Quantcast, you’ll see a breakdown of U.S. and Global traffic on the Quantcast chart, and you can trust those numbers more since they’re a direct measurement of site traffic. Otherwise, Quantcast numbers are U.S. only.
Statsaholic still gets crazy traffic, currently over 1 million page views from 550,000 uniques/month and rising. Funny how little hobby sites can just take off.
Posted at 5:01 pm on June 11th, 2007 by Ron in Fatherhood | 12 Comments »
Kaori and I had a busy weekend–32 hours of labor followed on Saturday, June 9 by a c-section and this 8 lb 2 oz beautiful new person christened Colson Garrett Hornbaker:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted at 12:57 pm on May 15th, 2007 by Ron in Cool, JavaScript, Mapping | 2 Comments »
From the Poly9 guys in Quebec comes FreeEarth, which is, to my knowledge, the first practical example of running a Google Earth-like app in a web browser. It’s a very early version, and they plan to add more zoom levels and tilts, but wow - very impressive first effort. An added bonus is a simple JavaScript API, so I’m testing an embed here: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted at 5:44 pm on April 16th, 2007 by Ron in Statsaholic | 4 Comments »
Thanks to a conference blog post by David Berkowitz, I now have a pretty good idea what Jeff Bezos thinks about the Alexaholic/Statsaholic situation. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted at 5:43 pm on April 5th, 2007 by Ron in Statsaholic | 1 Comment »
Om writes:
A lot of good things happened, innovation blossomed, but now we are entering a more pragmatic phase, where the large players like Google and Amazon who distributed the API elixir are taking control back.
Google My Maps is a case in point, where the company is competing with its “users.” Don’t worry – it won’t be the last time you will see Mountain View adopt tactics that in the past were associated with Microsoft. Keeping that $145 billion market capitalization intact is a bitch!
Google is not alone, as one of my readers points out. Michael Arrington has been following the feud between Amazon-owned Alexa.com and Alexaholic (or whatever it is being called this week.) In the end Alexaholic/Statsaholic features ended up becoming part of Alexa.com offering. Why let a little seemingly parasitic service live if you can make ad dollars off those page views?
See the full article at Web 2.0: End of Innocence. This whole ordeal certainly has erased whatever innocence I had about mashups, APIs, and the seemingly benign nature of large web companies.
