Military Robots

Ever notice the growing number of robotic systems that are coming out of the military. There appears to be a 2001 law pushing the number of un-manned systems. Guess that's why DARPA was running that unmanned vehicle contest every year.

Many of the robotic systems seem redundant, but I guess most are low production run test beds. The flying robots seem to be the most numerous being developed.
The military even has a road-map on development; it's a large pdf file [the link no longer works]. A number of systems are all ready deployed, with hundreds of robots operating in the field. Wow, flight hours for Unmanned Aerial Systems was 160,000 hours in 2006.

Most of the systems appear to be unarmed, so far....

Peak Oil and the end of Gas

Figured I would post something other than web site stats for a change.

The Peak Oil theory has been around for decades and relates to how oil fields produce oil. Basically an oil field's production follows a bell curve. There's a ramp up period, followed by maximum oil production [peak oil], then a gradual decline in production. The term Peak Oil is used to describe an individual oil field, an output from a country, or the entire planet's production.

The US reached peak oil in the seventies, and oil production has been slowly declining, and yes, that includes the North slope and Gulf oil fields. However the US still produces a great deal of oil, but we also consume three times that amount. And yes we still find new oil fields, but when you read the data you find that we consume more than we find [net oil in the ground is decreasing].

So anyway, the debate over the last decade has been when will the world hit peak oil. What year will global oil production flatten out or start to decline. The other tick is that usage increases 2% per year, so how could usage increase at the same time production stalls. Most countries have already reached their own peak oil, so production is falling in almost evey oil producing country. I think world production has been flat for three years now.

Of course there are those people that would say we could just discover some great new field that would save us. Sure, but it will be 400 miles of some coast in 4 miles of ocean and cost 100 billion to produce. All the cheap oil has already been found, others would say. The cost is never going to come down, in the long run. Some would say we will never run out of oil, which will be fine because oil is used for a great many products. But as long as cars run on gas......

So what, well a number of people have predicted that peak oil will occur between 2005 and 2010. Like I said, I think world production has been flat the last few years so I'd guess I shoot for 2006. Regardless of what the price of a barrel oil goes to, consumption will exceed production...

I see 500,000 hybrids have been sold to date; however, many large hybrids don't really save that much gas. err, they are only several mpg better than a normal car. The normal size hybrid cars do a lot better and get twice the mileage ~ up to 50mpg. The full hybrids, or battery cars are not slated to be released until 2010. The cars running almost completely off batteries get well over 100mpg.

I think the only thing that will slow the coming of peak oil is the cost. Now that gas is $3.50 people will drive less and consume less oil, so demand does not increase, or reduces [same thing happened in the 80's].

The web sites relating to peak oil have jumped over the last few years, as more people discover the issue. If your driving a large gas guzzler start thinking about dumping it before it's value drops to $0. I really want to predict gas lines in 2009, but with the price increasing consumption may drop off.

The graphic shows wind generated power for 2007 in the US. There's been a large increase over the last 5 years; but remember, power generation plants burn coal not oil ~ cars burn oil... Those states that have no wind production ... there are other maps that show wind speed, the states in white don't have 'much' wind.

There's a poll on the left side of the page to indicate when peak oil will be reached..

Web Site Optimization vs Bandwidth

I up-loaded the xml sitemap for interfacebus up to my site on Google Pages. The xml site map is used by search engines to determine the page addresses of all pages located on a web site. Search engines find your site map via a command within your robots.txt file. Up until now the robots.txt file indicated the site map was out on my server. The sitemap started on my server because Google Sitemaps does not give you the option of having the map in another location.

However, all other search engines find the sitemap via the robots text file. So Google will still check the site map, and hit my bandwidth, but now all the other search engines will go out to Google pages to access the sitemap.

The xml site map is 284k bytes in size and was viewed [down-loaded] 43 times last month. That's over 12 MBytes of server bandwidth. Yes I'm still trying to reduce bandwidth; currently running at 58.35kB/visit.

The html version of the sitemap [used by people] has been viewed 631 times this year. At the bottom of the sitemap is a list of the html pages located on 'Google Pages'; however the xml file will not be listed. The html viewable sitemap is also out on the Google server, saving server bandwidth..

The attached graphic shows the search trend for the term "miniPCI". I checked after my Analytics report indicated only three hits to the miniPCI page on the site [that's 3 hits for the year]. However it looks like I viewed data for a 404 page. The active MiniPCI pages has seen 3,377 page views. The page covering the MiniPCI 100-pin Signal Assignments page has received 333 page views, while the page covering the 124-pin MiniPCI card has received 3,497 page views.

Top Content and Page Views

So far this year [Jan 1 to Apr 17 2008] Google Analytics indicates that interfacebus.com has received 1,329,486 page views. Unique Pageviews would be 978,448 pages, still a very large number.

40,000 Page Views; 1 page address
30,000 to 39,999 Page Views; 2 pages20,000 to 29,999 Page Views; 4 pages10,000 to 19,999 Page Views; 9 pages1,000 to 9,999 Page Views; 247 pages100 to 999 Page Views; 636 pages1 to 99 Page Views; 582 pages
Many if not all the pages that received under 10 page views are 404 pages for misspelled or incorrect addresses. So that 582 number is looking more like 550. Also there are several dozen new pages, with 2 dozen added in the last few weeks that shouldn't bring in much traffic yet.

So there are 4 to 500 pages that only get about one visit a day. Remember that it's not all about page visits, some pages serve to round out the web site. Most pages must receive hundreds of page views a month, while many only receive tens of page views.

Seems like I blogged about this same issue a few months ago? Each time I find a page that has been on the web for years not getting any page views I do the same check ~ like this one....

This data has been up-dated on 6/23/09; see Page Content Issues.

Usage Statistics for interfacebus.com

Here is a partial stat from Webilizer, one of the three counters tracking interfacebus.com. It's about the same as any other stats page I've blogged about, except the Hits per Hour notation. 5,000 hits an hour? Or, 17,666 hits per hour, which accrued on the 2nd. That same day received 174,759 page requests. The odd thing is that the bandwidth or down load for that day was about the same as any other [total kBytes].

Bandwidth is still running about the same as last month; 57.87KB/Visit..

Search Bar Usage

The number of visitors using the Google search bar is increasing. I've been adding the search bar to all the web pages over the last five months [off and on]. There were many pages that never previously had a search bar.

The chart shows search usage by date [11/5/05 to today] for interfacebus.com.

The average is 279 searches per day, with 248,66 total searches.

Click on the graphic for a larger image.

This accounts for people using the Google search on the bar on the web site and on the left of this page, it searches interfacebus.com. If you need to search this blog use the search bar in the far upper left corner of blogger.

Currently the search bar defaults to search the web site and not the internet; however, there may be some search bars that default to the internet. I'm currently changing them so that they all default the website.

The Broswer Battle Update

Looks like Firefox is continuing to gain ground over Internet Explorer. The attached picture shows Firefox being used by 28.53% of the visitors to interfacebus.com. That's up from 23.89% over the same time frame last year. In fact IE is only accounting for 65.48% of the incoming hits, that's down from 70.44% last year.

The figures from March - Dec, 2006 show Firefox at 20.88% and IE at 72.33%. So IE usage has dropped 7%, while Firefox usage has increased 8%.

Java Support;
2006 = 96.47%
2007 = 98.15%
2008 = 98.25%

93.73% of the people are using the Windows OS so far this year.

Operating Fuses using AC or DC Voltages

I was reading one of the usenet groups the other day, and came across a posting I replied to. The poster was asking about available voltage ranges for fuses {AC voltages}, as he could not find the [absolute] correct voltage rating for a fuse. My reply was basically a quote right off the page for Manufacturers of Fuses.

"The voltage rating of the fuse does not indicate the operational voltage of the fuse. The voltage rating determines the maximum voltage that will not jump the gap between the elements after the fuse has already blown. So the fuse will operate at the rated voltage and any voltage below the rating. "

Someone replied back indicating that in fact I was not correct and that;

".. DC is a more severe condition. ... You should not use an AC rated fuse in a DC circuit. ..."

Followed by another poster who had this to say;

"The AC/DC differential tends to be glossed over a lot .... . One way this shows up as physical difference in AGC style fuses is that DC rated fuses are often ceramic rather than glass, presumably to contain the arc."

I took note of that reply and turned to the internet to research the issue. I came across a site that seem to indicate the same thing I was saying. In the mean time others replied as well. I posted the quote I found on the internet and also a quote from a US Military Standard.

"... once the fuse has opened, any voltage less than the voltage rating of the fuse will not be able to "jump" the gap of the fuse. Because of the way the voltage rating is used, it is a maximum rms voltage value. ..."

MIL-PRF-23419: Fuse selection: The following steps should apply in the selection of a fuse for any application: Step 1: Select a fuse with a voltage rating equal to or in excess of the circuit voltage.

Ya know, if it's good for the government. In fact the third section of MIL-PRF-23419 indicates this:

1.2.1.3 Voltage rating. The voltage rating is the maximum dc or ac root mean square (rms) voltage for which a fuse is designed (see 3.1). The voltage rating is identified by a numerical value followed by the letter "V".

In fact if one of the "/" documents are referenced you'll find that the maximum voltage rating provided does not indicate AC or DC values, just 125 V [MIL-PRF-23419/H].

It appears that the newsgroup thread has ended [at least until the week end], but I kept looking into the voltage issue. I came across data that I intend to add to a new page covering the Difference between AC & DC Fuses. Because of this blog entry, generating that new page, up-dating the sitemap, and adding a new page to the What's new Blog; the new page is just a copy of a per existing page with a new page address. I should get some data out there within 12 to 24 hours.

Caution; always check the IEC, NEC or any other standards body that regulates Fuses. Never rely on the web for information when it comes to personal safety.

Declining Page Views Trend

I posted a partial graph of this data back in November of last year, AWSTATS. That post provides the definition for the terms used, but I'll provide them again here..

Unique Visitor:
A unique visitor is a host that has made at least 1 hit on 1 page of your web site during the current period shown by the report. If this host make several visits during this period, it is counted only once. The period shown by default is the current month.
Visits:
Number of visits made by all visitors.
Think "session" here, say a unique IP accesses a page, and then requests three others without an hour between any of the requests, all of the "pages" are included in the visit, therefore you should expect multiple pages per visit and multiple visits per unique visitor.
Pages:
The number of "pages" logged.

This new chart shows an alarming trend, a major reduction in page views. However another counter shows no real change. New visits seem to be stable, as do returning visits. The server bandwidth appears to be dropping, as the trend line moves away the 'unique visits' line.

SEO and Hits from Image Referrals

When running your web site don't forget about what on-site images could do for your web page. The attached graphic shows the incoming visits to interfacebus.com from people using Google's image search.

The incoming hits are low, but they seem to be constant. Perhaps around 5 hits a-day in early 2006 to 20 a-day by the end of 2007. So not only text brings in site visitors, but an attached pic may also. Any way, incoming hits are good, and most graphics shown on interfacebus are located on another site to conserve server bandwidth.

The total visits due to image hits are 8,441 for the last two years. Yes, I know the site receives that amount of traffic in one day, but these are still new visits. I noted that the visits are increasing too. ~ Just to forget that people may also find your site via a posted image.....

Just another way to optimize your site for search engines, by letting them find your page with a posted image or graphic.

See also  SEO Tactics and Visits from Image Searches. 6/22/09
Chart; Image referrals per day.