Peterbe.com

Crazy Egg is a wicked service that allows you to measure where people click on your site. I have no idea how they do it. You basically install a piece of Javascript in your HTML code which must somehow hijack the mouseclicks or something and report this back to a Crazyegg database.

What really makes this tool shine is the Heatmap. The Overlay and List views are in comparison pretty boring and for that you might as well use standard web statistics tool for that. I'm not going to explain what the Heatmap is. Just look at the attached screenshot from a report I've made based on www.issuetrackerproduct.com

I was reading Of snakes and rubies; Or why I chose Python over Ruby which is an article comparing Python and Ruby. The blog article has loads of comments. This one I liked in particular

"For people writing good production code in PHP, I'm not trying to pile on - I know you get disrespected enough. It's possible to write well-structured sites on PHP, and lots of you do. It's just that in PHP, anyone can learn how to create spaghetti code in 10 minutes, but you have to learn a decent-sized body of knowledge to gain the ability to separate presentation from logic. By contrast, when novices get started in Rails, they're using good structure by default. They have to make an effort to screw it up."

I knew it! I've always thought it was a myth that you have to drink 8-10 glasses of water per day. This Urban Legends Reference Page proves the myth wrong.

People always say that you should drink 2 litres, 10 glasses, etc. but if my body doesn't send me enough signals that it requires water I'm not going to drink that much. Listen to your body I say, it knows how much water it needs to do the stuff it does. I'm tired of people nagging to drink masses of water, it just doesn't make sense.

The reference page also points out another very interesting fact:

"Additionally, the idea that one must specifically drink water because the diuretic effects of caffeinated drinks such as coffee, tea, and soda actually produce a net loss of fluid appears to be erroneous. The average person retains about half to two-thirds the amount of fluid taken in by consuming these types of beverages, and those who regularly consume caffeinated drinks retain even more"

Unless you're a die-hard US republican you probably don't watch Fox News and the Bill O'Reilly show. You might, like me, remember him from a part of Fahrenheit 9/11 when he tells Jeremy Glick to shut up (or was that another film?)

Bill O'Reilly is a nut. A unsympathetic right-wing nut. It's people like him that causes us europeans to disrespect and, dare I, hate the USA. I like and have an open mind about the USA but it's people like Bill O'Reilly being shown on a large national network that just makes me feel sick.

Here's a great videoclip on youtube.com where Phil Donahue has a right go at him. This is the best thing I've seen since George Galloway (my MP by the way) shredded this Sky News reporter to pieces

Dear american friends, if you want my respect back, do something to get these repulicans off the set. It's making me sick!

I've emailed three friends about RememberYourFriends asking them what they think. The response has been the same from everyone: "brilliant!", "clever idea", "could be a big success", etc. But none of them actually signed up. Why??!!

RememberYourFriends.com is a reminder app that periodically reminds you to keep in touch with your distant friends. The idea came from the fact that I needed something like this for myself and thought it could be a good excuse to try some new web app techniques. It's fully web 2.0 compliant except for the lack of a shiny web 2.0 logo.

This is the second part of the summary of the Google London Automation Test conference that I blogged about.

The conference lasted two days. Here's a brief summary of what happened on the second day which was on the same theme as the first: automated testing of software. The highlight of the day was Goranka's talk about performance testing.

I'm writing this from Googles office in London, UK where Google is hosting a conference on Automated Testing. Testing of software that is. There's been very little talking about usability testing or hardware testing. There's been a lot of talks about taking unittesting taken to the next level.

I'm going to blog again about the stuff I learn today. Below is a summary of the stuff I learnt yesterday. Just coming to see the Google office was a very interesting experience. It's very impressive. The office building is beautiful and has a nice feel to it. One of the most impressive things about this office is the free-food canteen which I've used almost excessively but nobody except my girlfriend and my kung fu teacher will minds. I'm only here for two days and they can afford it :)

This is really sad. Steven Irwin, aka. the Crocodile Hunter, has just past away. He died in a freak accident whilst swimming the reefs to film for a documantary. Apparently he was struck in the chest by a sting-ray barb

This is bad news. Especially when I found out how much more he's done for the nature other than just he's amusing TV shows. RIP Steve :(

Here's a whacky idea; in a shell script I want to convert every line of stderr into a . on the same line. I'm still a shell scripting newbie but I know that bash can be quite powerful if you know what you're doing to it.

To begin with I've written a little wrapper on cvs commit called ~/bin/cvs_commit which does the following:

#!/bin/sh
cvs commit -m "$1" | grep -v '\.bak*' | grep -v '\.pyc'

Because cvs prints all folders it recursively traverses I if it's a big tree all of that ugly stuff is print to screen via stderr. To get rid of that, I've changed my command to:

#!/bin/sh
cvs commit -m "$1" 2>> /dev/null \
| grep -v '\.bak*' | grep -v '\.pyc'

Let's improve even more...

Hilarious pun where anybody can create a Web 2.0 logo that looks like pretty much any other web 2.0 company's logo.

If you don't know what the Web 2.0 hype is, perhaps you've heard of the "dot com" hype that happened a couple of years ago. Now they're doing it again but instead of "dot com" it's "web 2.0". more info here

Losers like me who haven't been bought up by Google or Yahoo! yet hate the "web 2.0" phenomena and considers it a bad thing. Am I just jealous maybe?

A "web 2.0" buzzword cloud can be seen here if you're wondering if your IT supplier is taking you for a ride.