I don’t know what changed, but I got 33% more unique visitors to my site this month than last month. Incredibly, the daily average of visits for the last week is 80% higher than last month’s daily average. My traffic has doubled since August of 2004.

Internet Explorer continues to lose ground to other browsers. This month I’m showing 65.7% for IE, 14.5% for Firefox, and 11.9% Unknown. Mozilla got 3.1%, and everything else was down in the noise under 2%.

There were 2,000 different search phrases used to access my site this month.  Some examples:

• The funniest search term I’ve seen yet is “percentage of rat in mcdonalds burgers”. I don’t know if the person was really wondering if there was rat meat in the burgers or if he made a mistake typing “fat.” In either case, I near busted a gut on that one.
• Back in October I said I didn’t know what “ham so won nude” was. It turns out that Ham So-won is a Chinese actress and singer who created quite a stir last year with her two books of nude photos. Sorry, no links. You’ll have to track down those pictures yourself.
• The idea that somebody was searching for “erotic breast feeding pictures” is somewhat disturbing.
• “gas powered shoes”?
• The only way I know of to “stop loud attic turbine” is to replace it. They’re only $20 or so down at Home Depot, and even an amateur home hacker like me can replace one in under 15 minutes.
• For the person who was wondering “how to manage a prima donna”, my advice is “fire his ass.”
• “rabbits in ketchup”?
• For the person wondering “how long does it take for a toenail to regrow,” I can say from experience that it takes between six months and a year.
• “bad smelly gas caused by not smoking”?

I’m mildly disappointed that my Web traffic reports only list 1,000 of the search terms. I’m sure to be missing a few laughs.

I just spent a maddening few hours trying to get search engine friendly (SEF) URLs working for the Mambo installation on my test server.  SEF tells Mambo to generate more “natural” looking URLs for the pages.  That is, instead of something like http://charlie/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=4&Itemid=49, the URL becomes http://charlie/content/blogsection/4/49/.  This is very important if you want search engines to index your site, as many search engines will discard a URL that looks as if it’s pointing to dynamic content.  This shouldn’t be terribly difficult to change, right?  Just enable Mambo’s SEF option and set the proper options in the .htaccess file to enable Apache’s rewrite engine.

The first problem I ran into was enabling .htaccess files on my system.  The documentation says to locate the <Directory /> section in the /etc/apache2/httpd.conf file, and add a line that says “AllowOverride All”.  That’s easy enough even for a Linux novice like me.  I restarted Apache and … it didn’t work.  The Web server continued to ignore my .htaccess directories.  Honestly, I wasn’t terribly surprised by this, as just about everything I try to do under Linux involves reading the documentation to see how somebody thought it was supposed to work, and then scouring the Internet to determine what really works.

After looking at more documents than I care to remember, I came to the conclusion that Apache really is supposed to work that way.  So, figuring that something in my configuration was overriding my AllowOverride setting, I went searching.  I found the culprit in the file /etc/apache2/default-server.conf, which httpd.conf includes after the <Directory /> section.  The directives in default-server.conf “apply to all virtual hosts, unless deleted or overridden somewhere else.”  I had to change the “AllowOverride None” directive in default-server.conf in order to make my .htaccess files work.  I don’t know if this arrangement of configuration files is part of the standard Apache 2.0 distribution, or if it’s specific to SuSE 9.2.  Either way, it’s pretty darned confusing.

I got SEF working on the test server, but am having trouble getting it to work on the production hosting server.  My .htaccess file appears to be working, but apparently Sectorlink has disabled the Apache option that allows URL rewriting.  That’s understandable, considering the security implications of URL rewriting if you configure it incorrectly.  If I can’t get Sectorlink to enable the option, I’ll have to come up with another way to process search engine friendly URLs.

I spent a lot of time working with the Mambo content management system on my Linux test server here, and yesterday installed it on a subdomain on my production hosting server.  The installation was not as simple as Mambo’s install documentation would have you believe, requiring that I set a whole bunch of directory permissions and fiddle with a configuration file.  I wrote up a little article about my experiences, and will be posting it to the site.  I have things up and limping, but but I’m not pointing anybody to it until I iron out some of the more obvious weirdnesses, two in particular:

• Designing a Web page template for Mambo is not trivial.  At least, it’s not trivial for somebody with my meager HTML and CSS experience.  CSS, especially, is wonky enough to give a programmer fits.  I haven’t yet figured out all the relationships and rules that determine what style will be applied where, and how defaults are supposed to work.  If you know of a good advanced CSS tutorial that goes beyond the simple stuff that’s all over the Web, I’d sure like to hear about it.
• The instructions for enabling search engine friendly (SEF) URLs in Mambo are unclear and incomplete, and might be just flat out wrong.  I haven’t been able to get SEF working on my test server or on the production server.  SEF is important if you want search engines to index your Mambo site, as most of them will discard a URL that looks like it’s pointing to dynamic content.

I’m still not 100% certain that I’m going to convert this site to Mambo.  I will go to an online CMS at some point, but I want to be more comfortable with whatever system I choose before I do the conversion, as it’s going to be a lot of work and I don’t want to go through it all more than once.  I’ll keep you posted.

I completed my article about asynchronous I/O in .NET, covering the oddities I mentioned in my January 13 entry.  The article contains an overview of asynchronous operations, describes how it’s supposed to work in .NET, shows that it sometimes doesn’t, and provides a workaround.  Take a look at Making Asynchronous File I/O Work in .NET: A Survival Guide over on DevSource.

A posting on a bulletin board that I frequent pointed me to The Political Compass–a questionnaire that’s designed to gauge your political leanings.  Since everybody was posting their “scores,” I thought I’d take a look.

The questionnaire is actually well designed, although they could have selected more neutral wording on some of the questions.  Their FAQ indicates that they purposely slanted the questions–some to the right and some to the left.  All of the questions give you a four-point answer scale:  Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree.  On some of the questions I would have welcomed a non-commital response between Agree and Disagree.

It only takes a few minutes to take the questionnaire, and then you get to the results page.  My major complaint about the results page is that you have to scroll down in order to see your results because the top of the page is an explanation of how the results are displayed.  In particular, the top of the page contains this graphic:

All too many people see that graphic and think that it is showing their results.  But it’s not.  That graphic and the supporting text just show what the two axes mean and how to interpret your own score that’s given towards the bottom of the page.  You have to scroll down to the section titled “Your political compass” in order to see your results.

My score, by the way, was 2.13 on the economic scale and -2.92 on the social scale.  That puts me slightly in the “Libertarian Right” quadrant.  I’ve long said that I consider myself fiscally conservative and socially liberal.  According to this questionnaire, I’m slightly more centrist than I thought, but not surprisingly so.

I found the questionnaire and the discussion on the site quite instructive.  It’s worth taking a look.

If you’re writing a Web diary (blog), you’re probably interested in how many people visit your site.  I’ve been writing my Random Notes for over four years, but had never tracked visitors on a regular basis.  I did have something that’d tell me how many hits I got, but hits don’t tell the real story.  Every time the Googlebot reads a page, it counts as a hit.  The important numbers are unique visitors and visits.  As part of my hosting package at Sectorlink, I get very detailed reports on the number of visitors, visits, pages served, and hits.  The reports differentiate between hits by automated crawlers and visits by client programs like Web browsers.  This gives me a very good idea of how many people are visiting the site.

I started keeping close watch on the number of visitors when I added my RSS feed last summer.  At that time, I also started submitting my site to search engines and aggregators such as Weblogs.com, syndic8, and Technorati.  Since then, I’ve doubled the number of visitors to my site.

A colleague recently sent me a link to a feed submitter that will submit your RSS feed to 15 RSS aggregators as well as Google search and Yahoo search.  You simply enter your feed URL and your email address, and the program automatically submits it for you.  I did that last week, and two days later I noticed an increase in activity to my site.  I can’t guarantee that submitting was the cause, but it sure looks suspicious.

A recent news story said that on average, American adults are 25 lbs lbs heavier now than the adults of 40 years ago.  That’s a pretty sensationalist headline, evoking images of a nation in which every adult is 25 lbs overweight.  The media, as I’ve pointed out before, have a poor understanding of the term “average” in general, and they seem incapable of presenting a balanced story underneath their sensationalist headlines.  For example, some of that average weight increase is undoubtedly due to a reduction in malnutrition and also to an increase in average height.  If we all were an average of a foot taller, that 25 lb increase wouldn’t be an issue.  The real issue is the percentage of people who are considered overweight or obese today compared to 1960.  But it’s difficult or impossible for many reasons to make an accurate comparison of today’s population with the population in 1960, so any comparisons you see are likely pulled out of thin air or somewhere that the sun doesn’t shine.

More often, comparisons are made against 1990 for some reason.  The number tossed about these days varies depending on the source, but somewhere between 40 and 70 percent of American adults today are considered “overweight” or “obese”.  The number who are considered “obese” (more than 20 lbs overweight) is reportedly between 10 and 30 percent.  That’s roughly double the number from 1990 if you believe the reports, although again there are problems comparing today’s population with 1990’s population, the two biggest being changing criteria and detection bias.

Although today we have the Body Mass Index (BMI – more below), there was no generally recognized standard in 1990 for determining who was overweight or obese.  Different doctors used different criteria.  One could argue that the overs and shorts would balance–that is, that on average the doctors who had more stringent criteria were balanced by those who were more lenient.  It’s a nice theory, but probably impossible to prove.  In any case, the lack of a generally accepted standard makes any comparison against 1990 somewhat suspect. 

The other problem with comparing today’s population to 1990’s population is detection bias:  we’re seeing more fat people these days because we’re looking for them.  If you go looking for something, you’re almost guaranteed to find more of it than if you weren’t looking at all.  Scientific studies in general, and medical studies in particular, often suffer from detection bias.  Another form of detection bias is trying to compare a population that you can see (today’s Americans) with a population that you can’t see (Americans from 1990).  It’s possible to sample particular populations from historical records (military physicals, hospital admissions, etc.), but then you have to prove somehow that the sample is representative of the entire population.  That, too, is a difficult proposition.

The most widely accepted standard used today to determine one’s “relative fatness” is the Body Mass Index, or BMI.  The BMI procedure calculates a height-to-weight ratio, and then uses that calculated number to put you into one of four categories:  “Underweight,” “Normal weight,” “Overweight,” or “Obese.”  Calculating the height-to-weight ratio is a useful measure of relative fatness, although it’s not a definitive guide.  A body builder, for example, would be inordinately heavy for his height.  Still, the height-to-weight ratio is a good starting point.  In general, a higher BMI value is an indication of excess body fat.

My only real issue with the BMI standard is the grading scale, which I think is skewed towards an unrealistically thin ideal.  For example, my weight of 185 lbs and height of 5′ 9″ results in a BMI value of 27.5–halfway between overweight and obese.  Now I’ll be the first to admit that I could stand to lose a pound or three, but I’d have to get down to 169 lbs to get out of the “Overweight” cagegory.  At 169 lbs, I’d be a lean, mean, biking machine with the physique of a professional bicycle rider.  That might have been realistic when I was 30 or 35, but certainly not today.  The BMI scale needs to be adjusted up a few points and probably adjusted for age as well.

That’s my long winded way of saying that I don’t put too much stock in the reported percentages of overweight or obese people, or in comparisons between today and 15 or 40 years ago.  It would be nice to know what those number really are, but I don’t think that we can obtain them to any degree of certainty.  That said, it looks to me as though there are many more overweight and obese people today than there were 15 years ago, and I’m wondering why that is.  I’ll be exploring that over the next few weeks.

Definitions are slippery things. The word “habit,” for example, is defined as “an acquired mode of behavior that has become nearly or completely involuntary.” A “compulsion,” on the other hand, is “an irresistible impulse to perform an irrational act.” I wonder what you’d call an irresistible impulse to perform a rational act, but I digress.

The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is … ummm … well, the second thing I do every morning is brush my teeth. Almost without fail. This is behavior born of long practice. Some people can get up, go for their morning walk, and have breakfast before brushing their teeth. I can’t. Really. If I don’t brush my teeth right when I get up, it throws my whole rhythm off. I’ve learned not to fight it. I’ve often wondered if my need to brush first thing every morning is bordering on compulsive behavior. Certainly there’s no logical reason why I couldn’t wait until after my morning bike ride.

That’s not the only behavior I sometimes wonder about. Before I turn the ignition key off in the car, I always turn off the lights, radio, windshield wipers, back window defroster, air conditioner and anything else that’s “on.” I even turn the fan control off and move the temperature dial to its lowest setting (“off” if you view it as the heater control).    I developed this habit during years of flying in private planes with my dad, and then as a pilot myself. The checklist says to turn off all electrical devices, turn off the ignition, and then turn off the master switch. This is absolutely essential in most airplanes, because gyros and other things will draw current if the master switch is on. Many a pilot has had to have the FBO come jumpstart his airplane because he left the master switch on. But it’s more than a habit for me now.  It’s an irrational ritual in a modern automobile where everything’s keyed to the ignition switch, especially when you consider that the first thing I do when I start the car is turn on the radio, air conditioner, lights, and windshield wipers.

I haven’t had a locker and closet inspection since I left the Air Force Academy in 1982, yet I still hang my pants (you have no idea how long it took me to stop saying “trousers”) with the zipper facing out and the legs hanging to the left. When Debra and I first got married, she caught me re-hanging some pants that she’d hung wrong. Let’s just say that I don’t let her catch me doing that anymore.  Habit or compulsion?

So am I twisted? Do these and other behaviors indicate a mild form of obsessive compulsive disorder? I’ve come to accept that they probably do. I’ve also come to believe, that everybody exhibits signs of one or more “disorders,” and that complete normalcy is a myth. A person who had no idiosyncracies would be incredibly dull. The most creative, dynamic, driven, or productive people I know all are slightly unhinged in one way or another. Society wouldn’t change otherwise. Striving for “better” or “different” when what you have is “good enough” isn’t entirely rational.

The line between idiosyncratic behavior and mental illness is pretty fuzzy. I accept and even embrace my little weirdnesses, but I also keep them in check. I’m not sure my friends would understand if I rearranged their closets the next time I came for a visit.

Although I’m impressed with Mambo so far, and think that it will do what I need, I’m being somewhat cautious with my implementation.  I’ve decided that I’m going to install it on a production Web site, but that first installation won’t be here.  I want to make sure that I have a good understanding of its strengths and weaknesses before I go through the trouble of reworking this site and converting all of my content.  Few things are more painful than having to revert after a failed migration.

If you’re looking for a content management system for your site, be it a personal site like this one, a large corporate site, or something in between, there’s probably a solution out there for you.  I found the following resources very useful while I was doing my research.

• opensourcecms.com (built with Mambo) provides “try before you install” demos of many open source CMS packages including portals, blogs, forums, Wiki, and others. This site is specific to systems written in PHP, using MySQL, and running on Linux. It contains a short description of each product, and a fully operational demo that lets you drive the product around and even fool with the administrative pages. Their demo server re-installs the demos every two hours, so any changes you make to the configurations aren’t permanent. You don’t have to be afraid of goofing something up.
• CMS Matrix has a list of literally hundreds of content management tools, and a tool that lets you search and select by feature set, or select different packages to compare features.  It can help you narrow the field quickly so that you can concentrate on examining just a few products in depth.
• Open Source Content Management is “the international association for open source content management.” They have lists of projects, a news feed, a features matrix, calendar of events, standards, and other things you might expect from an association of CMS developers and users. They also apparently have a Wiki, although I’ve not been able to access it.
• cmsinfo.org is an Internet community of CMS developers and users that provides news and information about open source web log programs and content management systems. It had some good news coverage in the past, but it looks like updates are spotty. I don’t see any news since December of 2004. Still, they have a list of open source CMS systems and some old news articles that will give you some idea of what’s available.
• CMS Watch is a commercial endeavor that supplies consulting and sells some industry-specific reports online. Their site has industry news, product lists, some general information about CMS topics, and articles about and reviews of CMS products.

Beyond that, you’re on your own. I’m still learning the lingo, and I don’t have much experience with any of the products yet except CityDesk and my ongoing education (for work) in Microsoft Content Management Server.

If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, check out the Wikipedia article Content management systems.