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.

New COTS Board Format

Ruggedized Enhanced Design Implementation [REDI]:

A new VME card format is out for release aimed at the new VPX and VXS VME card standards [EURO Card]. The new REDI standard adds much more than just a mechanical standard defined in the IEEE-1101 mechanical standard. The new REDI specification changes much from the old IEEE1101 spec and now tries to handle water cooled devices as well; in addition, to air cooled and conduction cooled boards.

What garbed my eye was the new card formats, really the same 3U/6U sizes, would now handle up to 500 watts. What? how big is my power supply now. The largest power supply I could purchase was 750 watts, now I have to provide 500 watts per slot. The only REDI backplane I've seen appears to be four slots or 2000 watts. How much does a 2000W power supply weigh, I assume it's a switching power supply.

Very few companies are producing VPX boards or VXS boards which are both still new card specifications. In addition, to date, both the VPX cards and VXS cards seems to comply with the older IEEE1101 standard and not the new VITA48 standard [which is yet to be released?].

Note: To make this blog post add a new web page, and add it to the sitemap I had to cut a corner. The two new pages that cover REDI or IEEE1101 listings are copies of another page, with additional notes ~ they are not ready to be released yet. But, no one should be able to find them other than from this blog listing. Also my main computer has begun malfunctioning, forcing me to my backup system.

I'll fix this post over the week end and expand to the posting via comments. The new pages will also be updated this week end, and will link the VPX description to the REDI page and the VME description to the IEEE1101 specification page.

Related links: Equipment Chassis Manufacturers.

Why do I need backlinks

Backlinks are incoming links to a web page either from a page that's part of the same site or an external page on someone else's web site. Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

Backlinks provide two benefits to a web page [site]. First, a backlink brings in visitors to your page. Second, a backlink provides pagerank [PR] to the page being linked to.

A page, that has a pagerank, will pass a portion of that pagerank to all the other pages it links to. A page with a page rank of 5 will pass 'x' amount PR to each page it points to. The more pages it points to the less pagerank is passed to each page. So the page that points to you passes you some amount of pagerank.

Server Analytics refer to backlinks as Traffic Sources, or Referring Sites. The server stats indicate that over the last month there have been 14,167 visits from 1,402 sources [backlink] to interfacebus.com. These are sites that link to me on their own, I stopped looking for referral sites years ago.

Last night I updated the search bar on 20 pages and in the process found a few bad links. I also added the tag rel="nofollow" to a few listings to preserve some of my own page rank. You do not pass page rank when you use the 'nofollow' tag.

I updated the sitemap again today reducing the number of redundant links. Remember that site map does not reside on "my" site, so they are all backlinks.

I added a new page to the site yesterday and made a comment in my what's new blog, providing a link to the new page [backlink].

I was in the newsgroups today, posted a reply to some ones comment. I left this blog address as my sig ~ that's a backlink.

Anyone see a pattern here?

Free Web Pages

I guess having a web page for free is great, but man these things are crap. They're just to hard to use, if you know what your doing ~ does that make any sense.

I signed up for MS Office Live [Not Recommended] back in 2006 primarily because they offered a free web page, space and a free address, for ever. I picked the site name [Address Removed], so I would lock in the *.net version of my site name. Microsoft registered the name during sign-up, and continues to make the payments each year so I hold the name. Yes, if you check WHOIS you will see that the site name is registered in my name, but I make no payments. They only offer a free address for the first year now. [UPDATE: Microsoft stop making payments in 2010, so I let the address expire.]

Any way my last update to that site was mid 2006 so I figured I add a few new links, correct some spelling issues and so on. I wish! The program would run-on all my links so they all pointed to the same page. It would append an 'http' to my link so when I copied the link from the browser I would end up with 'httphttp', which does not work.........

Guess that's why I stopped using the damn thing.

[Outdated text removed]

Free web pages at Google Sites; Engineering Data Site Map.

I've generated more pages local than I have using their system. I also use the web space to hold large graphics to off-load downloads from my server.
[Outdated text removed]

Web Site Usage

I compared January of 2008 with Jan. 2007 for Pageviews, Visits, and Pages-per-Visit. You can see the data in the chart to the left. Like any graphic here, click on it to in large the picture.

The chart basically shows that there is no real difference between this year and last. According to Google Analytics the site is short 3,000 visits and 30,000 page views ~ not a big difference.. Green is last year, Blue is this year.

I would have liked to see the Pageviews and Pages/Visit numbers to have increased over last year.
I was hoping that by adding the Google search bar to each of the pages, and having it search the site and not the internet the Pages/Visits would increase. However; it may be that the site is so optimized that a new visitor to the site [from a search engine] arrives on the exact page their looking for ~ reducing the page views.

New visits to the site are 78.93% this year vs. 77.96% last year, but these number are really about the same every month.

AWSTATS [Unique Visitors] indicates 153,351 for 2008, and only 148,633 for last year [Jan.].
The last two years have been flat and so far this year looks no different. {I've blogged about reason why ~ older PC buses that receive fewer and fewer hits a year}

New Site Uploaded

I spent the last few days fixing the site map that is generated from running Xenu. The generated site map starts with a great many redundant page listings, so I have to go in and remove a lot of them. The current page size for the sitemap is 505kB, while the one already on the web is 462kB.

I'll go ahead and upload the new map and up-date over the rest of the week. My system indicates 1143 html files [pages], as does Google. Google indicates I have 1444 indexed urls, and a total of 1606 total URLs. The difference is due to a number of orphan pages that capture misspelled page addresses.

Any way the 80 odd pages that were generated over the last few months are now part of the sitemap, and now have an external page link that points to them.

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization [SEO] is the process of configuring or setting up your web site so that it is search engine friendly. It really accounts for much more than that by insuring that a web page ranks high in a search result via key word placement. "Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site." I practice SEO; I make sure the title or page address relates to the topic, insure the first paragraph describes the topic and so on.

Any way, I just ran the program Xenu to validate the links on the site. The robot found only four bad links, and a ton of redirects. I don't think many of these companies practice SEO. They seen to change web names, redirect to a new address for awhile and than go back to the old address.... I really don't get it. I don't even list a few companies any longer because I continue to see dead pages as they keep changing their page addresses...

I should be up-loading a new sitemap tomorrow once I get a chance to delete some of the redundant listings in the report. I also ran Gsitecrawler and generated an XML sitemap for the search engines, Google is still checking it.

On a side note, the web site seems to be going well. Download speed is being increased by deleting HTML comments, or breaking up large pages into smaller pages ~ and making the pages more focused on one particular topic. Adding a search bar to all the pages, so the site may be searched from any page. Changing the search bar so that it defaults to a website search and not the web [some pages had search bars that searched the web, while some defaulted to searching the site which could be a little confusing. I also continue to add more pages, better than 80 pages in the last four months. Google now indicates 1606 URLs submitted.

Site / Server bandwidth remains at 57kB/visits, but I think the savings from reducing the html comments is being off-set by adding the search bar to the hundred's of pages that did not have one.

Not really web site related, but I've been trading out the older google referral links in favor of their new referral code. The newest code selects one of a hundred ads, while their old code would only run google related products ~ Adwords, firefox and so on. Plus the html code is smaller in most cases as one referral link may replace three other older google referrals.

Jan 2008 was the best month ever in terms of visits, and from the site history this month should be even better. March is higher than Jan, while Feb is lower January. New content is always being added, and html coding mistakes are fixed as they are found. ~ All is well

Sitemap Correction

I just noticed that a version of my sitemap was out on my server, it's an older version. Or perhaps a version up-loaded by mistake and not up-loaded to my Google Page Creator site. I use Google page creator to serve a number of pages and graphics to off-load the bandwidth from my server. Any way here is the correct address for the SiteMap.

I site map is used to list all the pages on a particular web site, like a table of contents. Sitemaps are just another way to show available pages. If you run a web site you should have a sitemap for a number of reasons. The best reason to produce a site-map is that it brings all web pages to the same level. Pages may be four levels down from the index page on a web site, using a site map brings all pages up to the same level. A search engine reduces the importance of pages for each level under the index page. Also lower level pages may not be spidered as often as other pages.

So the wrong sitemap was being downloaded around 5 times a day. That's 15,000kB a day at 300k bytes in file size. I've been working on reducing the server bandwidth over the last 3 months, there are a number other posts relating to increasing down-load speed / lowering bandwidth. The current bandwidth is 57.74kB/visit, which is no reduction at all.

Fixing this issue may help to lower the size/visit numbers. With all obsolete addresses, the page was not deleted but replaced by a redirect page of 10kB which is much smaller than 300kB.

Never delete a page address if you can avoid it, you never really know who may be pointing or linking to it. Delete the page and lose a link ~ never a good thing.

Actually the page was viewed 278 times this year or 834,000,00 Bytes ~

USB Drive adds Permeate Memory to a Computer

I added one of my older USB thumb drives to my computer to add more memory to the computer system. Yes you can plug in a USB stick into a USB slot and tell the computer to add that memory to the system memory. The USB Thumb Drive is only a 512MB device, but it's a spare stick so why not increase the computer memory for free. The PC is a Velocity Micro with 2GB of DDR2 memory, via two 1GB memory modules. More about the current PC used to run the web site... Oh, I run MS VISTA.

When you plug in the USB stick a pop-up window will give you the option at adding into system memory, but may not. I tried this with a 1GB Geek Squad drive but did not see the option to add it into system memory. Once I looked at the drive I figured that because it seemed to be configured as a CD drive it would not let me. Remember many USB sticks are setup to read and lock the data so you can pull it out at any time. With USB system memory, you want it to read/write as fast as possible. So you may need to reformat the USB drive to see the option to add the drive into system memory.

So I should be able to add more data as a comment in a few days....

Web Page Updates

With the addition of the page covering Manufacturers of Thermal Chambers, I also added those 'few' companies to the appropriate OEM alphabetic listing. While adding those new links I also noted pages that contain an old google search bar or pages that could use a new referral link, or pages that still contain html comments [to save server bandwidth]. Pages that were up-dated in the
Alphabetic Manufacturers section;

Manufacturers 'Br',
Manufacturers 'Ea',
Manufacturers 'Ec',
Manufacturers 'El',
Manufacturers 'Emco',
Manufacturers Eon,
Manufacturers 'Tele',

Two additional companies were added to the PON IC's manufacturers page. A few words were added to the FTTH Description page, now linking to the Ethernet in the First Mile page. A number of Engineering Acronym pages were updated, this being but one example. Also all the IC Packaging pages were up-dated; The MEMS [MicroElectro-Mechanical Systems] had a new oscillator manufacturer added.

When required the pages received a new search bar, had hidden comments deleted, HTML code fixes and so on. Any how, other than posting what pages are changing this post serves a higher purpose, right. The posting serves to provide another external link to these pages which is always a good thing, perhaps insuring a page rank. It pings the search engine to check these pages as the engine reads these page....

The point is not to list all 25 pages that were updated today, but hit the highlights. Let viewers know what is going on and at the same time serve a dual function of working SEO issues ~ optimizing the pages for Search Engines, either on my web site or from this site.....

Oh, if you read this blog, Bandwidth is 60kB/visit, still growing after all my work to date?

CoffeeCup HTML Editor Review

Hmm, I'm trying the free version of the CoffeeCup HTML editor and I'm not sure I like it. The CoffeeCup Editor seems to be really slow ~ I don't like slow.

I was using the free version of 1st page 2000, and yes the program came out in 2000. You go with what works, or in my case what does the job and gets the job done fast. Any how I've gotten the blue screen about 4 times with my new computer, and each time it seemed like it was because of the 1st page html editor. Note, I said it appeared as if the html editor caused it..

Yes a newer version of the html code editor came out in 2006, but when you visit the site and read the forum you quickly find that 1st page 2006 is full of bugs and the site provides no support [not my words].

I'm not buying a new html program editor with out trying it out first, so I found CoffeeCup. This program looks a lot like the other program I was using, so that's good. Free is good, but the company does offer a paid version. Before I say what the issues are, I need to say that this is only the second day using the new program.

The program issues, or what I do not like about Coffeecup;
1: I can not move the last modified date [column] next to the file name [column]
2: The 'Name' column defaults to the CoffeeCup folder and does not remember "my" folder
3: The 'Name' column re-cycles to the start of folder any time I save a file, changing position
4: Any time I save a file, I get the hour glass ~ we're done.

Just for the record I only use an HTML editor to view text. The program displays commands or text in different colors, and or high-lights certain types of text. Other wise I could just use a text editor, as I use no advanced commands. Many times I will select some text and hit the 'bold' button, or 'center' button to correct the text view ~ so what, I could code that myself.

Here is the link to the PC I'm using;
http://serial-phy-interfaces.blogspot.com/