Alden Bates' Weblog

The other day I spotted this at the bottom of a technorati page:

Which made me wonder exactly how Marisa Miller's bottom qualifies as a technology story.

As Google has the data for 2007 up, we can now look at the Google Trends graph for Doctor Who last year:

Comparing it with 2006's graph, it looks like there's a fairly consistant pattern emerging - queries roughly double once the show starts playing, spiking when the finale is aired, then in December there's another spike when the obligatory Christmas special airs.

Stacking all three years together, we can see that queries increased over 2006, though the difference between the Last of the Time Lords and Doomsday spikes is not as pronounced as the difference between Doomsday and The Parting of the Ways. I expect this trend will continue over 2008, though it will be interesting to see what effect decreasing output to 3 specials will have in 2009.

Continue reading "Doctor Who + Google Trends III"

People keep finding the DiscCon entry for "Real Time" using the search text "What Star Trek race has exceptional hearing?" This, as it turns out, is actually a question from a "geek test". Why are you people cheating by googling the answer?! You can't expect to get an accurate result if you cheat!

Now, ordinarily I'd say Ferengi, because with ears that size... but then I'm sure Spock mentioned having exceptional hearing several times in the original series (followed by Dr McCoy making a racially-insensitive crack about his pointy ears). Also, Borg probably have cybernetically-enhanced hearing. Plus Jem'Hadar are probably bred with genetically-enhanced senses. And then there are the Hynerians who - no, wait, they're from Farscape.

Glad I could help!

On Mintshot, an ISP named Slingshot has an auction titled "Flick your ISP", which gets you a 12 month package. Possibly a bit of an odd name until you see the graphic they use to represent the auction:

Interesting choice of font... :)

I got an email from Whitcoulls this week with the following graphic in it:

Pop quiz: do they mean Sunday the 23rd or Monday the 24th?

Also, why does Amazon send me emails advertising the specials in their toys and games section when they know my delivery address is outside the US, and they only ship toys nationally? It's not nice to taunt.

Around about a year ago, I wrote about Google trends, and posted a graph showing the trend for the search term "Doctor Who", and mapping it to the screenings of the show. I thought it might be interesting to revisit that now that the data for 2006 is in. Here's 2005 again for comparison:

The positions of the episode screenings are approximate, since Google only marks down as far as the months. You might also notice that the end-of-series spike seems to be a lot bigger than on the graph I posted last year. What's up with that, Google?

Here's 2006:

Interestingly there's a huge peak right when "Army of Ghosts" was screening, though if you compare the two graphs, it looks like there were less searches for series 2. However this is entirely due to the fact that Google doesn't label their Y axis. If you look at the combined graph for 2005/2006, you can see the line's a lot higher for most of series 2 than it was for series 1, with the "Army of Ghosts" peak almost twice as high as series 1 got.

Unfortunately Google Trends only has search data up to February this year, so no series 3 indicators yet...

Actual text from the Network Solutions whois page: [screenshot]

Announcing a great NEW feature for WHOIS users -- you can now start a WHOIS query directly in your browser!

Use the format: www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jsp?domain=netsol.com and you'll come directly to our results page. Stay tuned for more useful features coming soon to WHOIS!!!

So... typing a URL manually into your browser is a "great NEW feature"? Man, the boffins at Mozilla are going to be fuming that they didn't think of THAT one....

I've been missing a few emails (mostly from mailing lists) sent to my gmail account. Now, at the bottom of the page whenever I access my gmail account is something like "You are currently using 33 MB (1%) of your 2831 MB." so you'd assume by that that there isn't a problem with disk space, however Yahoo groups says that the emails have been bouncing with the following error:
Remote host said: 552 5.2.2 User over quota 26si6202460aga [RCPT_TO]

There's a Gmail help center but I couldn't find anything relevant (even searching for "over quota" didn't help). I've reported it to Gmail support, so we'll see what happens...

Mind you, it looks like this is a common problem. Yahoo blogged that they're working on it with Google, but that was several days ago now...

The latest Google Webmaster Central blog entry A Quick Word About Googlebombs announces that Google has solved the whole Googlebomb problem, which was typified most famously by the "Miserable failure" bomb. And sure enough, miserable failure doesn't work any more.

However, French Military Victories still does, at least for now. :)

...in the Xtra Broadband sucking department:

Xtra! Taking the "Broad" and the "Band" out of "Broadband"!

Results "1 - 100 of about 87"? You printed 100 right there! You know there's more than 87! WTF?

Xtra are so great, right now their DNS server is buggered. I can't resolve any domain names at all. To even post this, I had to get someone overseas to do a dnslookup on DNS Stuff so I could stick it in my hosts file, and then use DNS stuff to lookup the IP address for Tetrap.com. Worst ISP ever.

Edit: I stuck some public DNS servers into the router and can surf the net again!

Google launched Google Trends today, allowing you to see the popularity of particular searches over time. If there are relevant news items it displays a position on the graph, as you can see on their results for V for Vendetta.

Unfortunately in the case of "Doctor Who", there aren't any, and for Doctor Who they don't match up well with what's going on in the graph. I've therefore taken the liberty of marking on the graph below the screening dates of Series 1 to make it more obvious what's happening where:

The first pre-series spike is, of course, the leaking of Rose onto the Internet. There's another high peak when the episode actually airs, then it tapers off a bit with spikes when Dalek, Father's Day and The Empty Child, and the last three stories screen. Later in the year there's a spike in November (for the Red Nose day special) and one in December for The Christmas Invasion. The graph ends in April short of the New Earth screening, but you can see it's leading up to another spike there. I'm interested to see if it matches the Rose spike. :)

And, coincidentally, the new Full Frontal Nerdity is Doctor Who related!

Back in '92, when I was attending Victoria University in Wellington, my very first contact with the Internet was reading a feed of rec.arts.drwho on the University's BBS system. A year later in the newer labs, I was finally able to post to the newsgroup, and find other newsgroups to read. Before the web, Usenet was the first time I was able to read the thoughts of people on the other side of the world.

I was a bit of a terror on rec.arts.drwho during the early-mid 90s, and at one point even went to the trouble of writing a program to calculate weekly posting stats for the group. I stopped that after it became clear it was encouraging people to post large amounts of noise, though the "Weekly Stats 03/08" thread became a RADW legend. I've seen a few people from that period turn up again, especially on LiveJournal.

Fast foward to, well, now, and my ISP, Xtra, have announced that they're going to ditch their Usenet server. I haven't really read the newsgroups regularly for a while now. Occasionally I fire up Forte Agent (no relation to the annoying Microsoft characters) to see what's being talked about, but with the new Doctor Who series I've been avoiding rec.arts.drwho.moderated to avoid spoilers and many of the other groups I read are pretty quiet.

Still, I'll miss it when it's gone, even though I can theoretically read it through Google Groups. Usenet is, after all, one of the Internet's oldest services.

(See previously: Xtra Broadband speeds, and I'd like to reiterate that they should change their name from 'Xtra' to 'Less')

Xtra here in NZ have been making a big fuss over how they've finally brought their broadband service speeds up to a 1/3 of world standard instead of only 1/30th. Of course, I'm not seeing any difference at all, because we've burned through the paltry 10GB data cap which Xtra insists on placing on accounts. Our connection (shared between three computers) is therefore currently choked back to worse than dial-up speeds, and web pages are taking 5 minute or so to load. An online transaction I was attempting to make timed out because the connection was so slow.

So, will the extra speed which Xtra has provided just mean we burn through the 10GB monthly allowance faster?

Perhaps they should change their name from 'Xtra' to 'Less'.