Toyota's Blackbox and OBD

I'm reading The Wall Street Journal yesterday and I see this article about an issue relating to reading the Blackbox in Toyota vehicles. Now it doesn't really say why people can't read the blackbox data but it most either be because there is no published literature on how to read the data or that the data is encrypted. I would assume the information in the blackbox is encrypted otherwise somebody would have hacked it by now. Of course there is always that privacy issue about giving out automotive data without the owners consent.

Anyway I always assumed that the data in the black box was as easy to obtain as the data on the OBD interface. Well maybe not that easy but along the same lines as reading any OBD codes as long as the user had the correct scanner, the right software and knew what the data represented. OBD supplies trouble codes from the engine indicating emission problems and other faults. [OBD Description].

So the OnBoard Diagnostics [OBD] interface has been required on US cars since 1996, or if your lived in California since 1988 ~ here's a little OBD History.While I gather the blackbox [Event Data Recorder] is that part of the system that records things like over-revving the engine, or things people would rather not tell a car dealer. Even worse that the Data Recorder could indicate that the driver was speeding just before an accident. I would still think the info is retrievable, or why record it.

In some way the blackbox data must be separate from the vehicle trouble codes that are readable as required by law. Is there one uC to handle the blackbox and another computer for the OBD interface? It was also my impression that the government was in the process of standardizing the data from the blackbox, which implies that it is retrievable.

I'm certainly no automotive expert, just an engineer that tracks the electrical requirements of different interfaces. Ok, the last time I worked on a car was in the seventies which is long before cars had computers.

Is this data available on the OBD connector, on the CANbus portion of the interface or is this a completely different interface on another connector and does it vary by manufacturer. At any rate I was just a little suppressed by the fact that it's so hard to get at the data.

The correct term for the Blackbox is Motor Vehicle Event Data Recorder [MVEDR].

New Features in Google Analytics

Following last November's post concerning new reports in Google Analytics [Google Analytics Recommended]. I just noticed another new report as a sub-heading under Visitors, for Mobile Devices and Mobile Carriers. I'm not really sure how long the reports have been available; however I did find some one's blog posting that the report came out in December. But the blog post also indicates that the 'Intelligence' reports also came out in Dec, except I found mine in Nov, so maybe it was a slow roll-out to users.

At any rate I found the report on Mobile Device users interesting because it shows the [Engineering] site getting more visits than I would have guessed coming in on cell phones. There have been 1,679 visits so far this year, say around 40 visits per day. I always figured most engineers would be sitting next to a computer no matter what they were doing. Maybe in the field there is no internet access so that leaves a wireless cell phone.

Now this number is still to low to force me to re-code for mobile users, 40 visits only amount to about 7 minutes of site usage over a 24 hour period. These days the page may be expanded or reduced on the screen, unlike a few years ago when a page had to be coded correctly to be seen on a small screen.

The sampled data from Analytics only goes back to November of 2009, but there has been an increase in phone usage over that time. Around 200 visits per week back in Nov. and around 280 per week for last month. So the trend is increasing.....

~ On a side note Internet Explorer is down another 3% this year [to date], with Google Chrome increasing by 3%.

Graphic: Google Analytics; Mobile Devices Report, by Operating Systems.

Google Buzz for Gmail

So I signed into Gmail Buzz today, looks the same to me.
But I really use Gmail for my website business so I don't do a lot of chatting.
Most of my incoming mail is from companies wanting to be listed on the web site [Buses], of course the rest are just personal emails.

Any way I didn't see a lot of new options to select from, other than to share Picasa photos or blogs...
I guess I'll have to wait till I get into a chat with someone before I can see the real changes. However the odds of me chatting with anyone are pretty slim.

I just checked my other Gmail account and that mail account is not offering me a chance to upgrade to Buzz ~ I assume this is an up-grade.

I see, Google Buzz opens up the 'social web' to Gmail, at least that's what the Google Blog says. Unfortunately I don't really use Gmail to socialize I use it as a tool to get my work done on the internet.

Note that I used the term 'Buses' to link to my web-site because [Google] Webmaster Tools indicated that this particular key word was rated a bit low in significance in key words found on my site.

Credit Card Problems

So what else is new.

I got a letter in the mail yesterday, ... your credit card information has been compromised ~ by a third party .....
Your account has been closed and we will issue you a new account number.

Well not really, I can still use the card for two weeks, but when I called the 'phone computer' it didn't recognize me as a valid account [canceled ?]. When the card company did answer the phone they gave me an account number I don't have [which would be the new one?].  I had to explain that I wanted to talk about a particular account number, which I assume was not the top message on his computer.

So we went around a bit, I wanted to know who compromised my account, and he kept telling me he was protecting me by giving me a new account number.
Ok, who compromised my account?
Well we can't give out that information, have I answered all of your questions?
No! who compromised my account? You just started a new account which will lower my credit rating, who caused that?
Well we do that for a number of reasons; fraud, mis-charging  ...... [who cares].
What ever, every time I stopped talking I got the canned speak about 'suspicious transactions' [or what ever he said].

Two minutes into the conversation I could tell that the guy was 20, but I gave him a few chances to answer my question. Of course he doesn't care if he answers my question or not as long as I answer yes to his question ~ that he answered all my questions [he asked me three times].

After a couple of minutes I gave up and told him I'd call back. I'll bet they have to tell me who accessed my account information, but I have not yet looked it up on the internet. Somebody just dinged my credit score by 30 points [guess] by making the credit card company open a new account.

At least I have a topic to blog about! It's been a week with out a posting.

Ya know they could cancel and reissue me a new account every week if no one is watching this type of activity by the card companies.

SEO Techniques that work

I must be doing something right, as last month had the highest numbers of both Unique Visitors and Visits [same person with more than one visit].

In addition to adding content and a few dozen new pages over the last few months, I have also been doing Search Engine Optimization [SEO].

As I've indicated in previous posts the SEO techniques primarily include adding 'alt' tags to pic files and 'title' tags to internal links. Many pages already had the html tags, but many pages did not have the enhancement, with some pages only having part of them. I've been making these enhancements over the last six months.

So my advice is to insure that every pic file has an 'alt' tag that describes what the picture is. In many cases a pic file also has a 'title' tag which describes the picture in greater detail. At the same time any page-to-page link also gets a 'title' tag, if it didn't already have one.

Now you could say that the increase in visits is due to content additions, or from adding new pages. However I would disagree, because although I have been adding a lot of new content, the per page content added is small. Or, much of the content added over the last six months is spread out over several hundred pages.

Secondly, the amount of new pages added over that time frame is also small, say around 61 pages in six months. Now you could say that was a great many additions to the site, but I'll try to indicate why it's not.

First off , any new page added last month [and December too] are still in the Google sand box and is irrelevant [Trimmer Resistor; random example]. Also any page added last month may not have even been completely spider-ed. So we'll forget about the 22 most recent page additions. November saw a lot of Component Package additions, pages holding gif files with little or no text ~ another 17 pages. October had a few 'How-To' additions which receive no hits to speak of ~ 8 pages. Same thing with September, just a few BJT Outline drawings which will receive zero visits ~ 4 pages. Now we're back to August, which is about the time frame that should start to matter, but again a few 'How-To' additions ~ 3 pages.

So I would discount 54 of the last 61 new pages as not adding anything to the site yet [really all of them]. I always assume 15 to 30 days before Google spiders a page. Than another 30 days before Google reads the page completely, still another 3 months after that before a page gets a Page Rank [if at all]. I'm not saying these pages aren't getting any page views just that the few dozen page views they are getting wouldn't show up as a change on the graph.

I contend that the increase in visits is due almost entirely from optimizing the pages for the search engines. Really, I've been adding pages to the site for years and I don't see any sustained increase in visits ~ but I do now. Search Engine Optimization has been the biggest change I've been making to the greatest number of pages over the last few months. The last few months are the highest for the site ever, not counting December [always a low month].

Now these 'alt' or 'title' tags also help site visitors, either by showing text if the gif doesn't come in or by providing detail if they hover over a link ~ it's win-win.

Now there is always one more point some would could make about the increase in page visits. That is the Google computer pushed this site up near the top of the search listing while another site moved to the second page. That argument could work for one month, but not for the last four months. As Google re-orders their listing every month. More importantly, we're talking about 1,600 individual pages, Google didn't push all of them to the first page!

Finally my page on Google Sites [Thermal Impedance ~ random page] is bringing in about 60 people/month, 73% of which are new to the site, word of mouth traffic? Googl Knol is bringing in yet another 60 visits per month at 57% new visitors [Component Derating ~ just a random page]. However neither of those referrals would seem to add up to the 10,000 additional visits which occurred last month, but it doesn't hurt either.

Right, we're trying to explain 20,000 new visitors, and the only thing I can say other then it is due to the SEO changes is that some how the few hundred visitors due to page additions or referrals adds into the thousands ~ I don't think so. Add the html TAGs.....

Why was my Page De-Listed

I pulled up one of my To-Do lists, sort of; add these companies to these pages [last accessed 2006].
I don't make To-Do lists any more, a few years ago I just started putting the data in an email and saving it as a draft. But I'm not blogging about the amount of data I have sitting around waiting to be added.

I checked one of the companies listed to see if it had already been added to the web site, on-site Google search indicated it had not. So I navigated to the 'manufacturers listing' to add the new company. Well guess what, the listing was there [Component Manufacturers]. So I see that the page has no Page Rank, but I can also conclude that the page will not show in Google search results [which is worse]. Although the page does exist and provides site visitors with data about the companies residing on that page, off-site users will never find the information because it will not come up in a search.
As with all pages in the Manufacturers Listing, the page has been on the web for many years. I don't understand why I can't get them listed. I do have pages pointing to them and they do get updated every now and then. I even have those pages listed in the Engineering Site-Map, but because Google uses 'no-follow' on Google Sites the link does me no good.

Although it might defeat the purpose of the page, I guess I could find some kind of text to add to the pages.
Other wise I have no way to protect the page from the computer algorithm deciding to list it or not.

Page Optimization

I'm always adding new content to the web site [Engineering Buses], either by inserting additional content to existing pages or just by adding new pages. So far this year 10 new pages have been added to the site, I don't track content enhancement. However I can tell how many pages have been updated, either from SEO practices or content additions, from the modified date on the PC I can tell how many pages have changed..
Jan; 327 page updates.
Dec; 328 page updates.
Nov; 389 page updates.
Oct; 296 page updates.
And so on, like I said I can't tell why a page was updated. However I could say that a page either received an embedded enhancement to help the search engines or had additional content added, and maybe an SEO change. Normally when I fix a page for optimization reasons it just means I added 'alt' or 'title' tags to links or gif files already present on the page.

I also add graphic or pic files all the time. Currently my PC indicates over 1,600 pic file [in a few different formats, gif, jpg..], however some may not be used but still reside on my PC. Maybe 1,500 different pic files and over 1,851 html files ~ both growing all the time.

So this month will have the highest number of visitors ever, not even counting today [numbers aren't in yet]. Here are the best 5 months [Number of Visits];
Jan 2010: 234,085
Oct 2009: 223,689
Nov 2009: 223,327
Mar 2009: 220,620
Jan 2008: 217,694
Graphic; Google Crawl Stats, last three months. At an average of 519 pages crawled a day, you would think that Google would find the 300 odd pages that are up-dated each month.

BluRay BD Player

I did end up buying a BluRay disk player the other day. However I want to play with it for another day or so before I write a review or make any recommendations one way or the other.

First off the resolution of a Blu-Ray disk far exceeds a DVD, more than I would have figured possible. I did purchase one BD DVD which I'll review below, but I was not to happy with the price. I only purchased one because there was a limited amount on the shelf, for what ever reason.

Which leads me to my second point, why are Blu-ray disks over ten dollars more than a DVD. I think we all know that the cost of a BD or DVD should be about the same. So instead of being taken advantage of I think I'll continue purchasing DVDs unless a Blu-ray disk is required, as in a Sci-FI or other high-res type movie. I see no need for some comedy or second rate movie to be in Blu-ray. Same as I wouldn't care if a comedy was in 7.1 surround sound, in fact I may not even turn my receiver on for a comedy.

None of the units ship with an HDMI cable, so be sure to purchase one with the unit. I figured I had one at home, but of course was to find out I didn't. So I started watching with Component Video and the Audio from Composite Video, Opps. However I did end up going out the next day to purchase an HDMI cable and a longer Ethernet Cable [to connect to my router].

So I find I can down load movies off the internet right into my Blu-ray player, that seemed a bit cool. There's even a few free movies out on-line, although I wouldn't recommend them. I also started watching [as background noise while working on the PC] an advertiser supported movie on-line. But as it stopped several minutes into the movie, and the room went silent, to download the advertisement I shut it off. Can't they buffer up those commercials? I mean it only took a few seconds of down-load time, but it just seemed like they were wasting my time waiting for an ad to download that I didn't even want to see in the first place.

Anyway I purchased Pandorum in Blu-ray. I like SciFi, and to me this one seemed pretty good.
Yes it is a Zombie in Space move [trapped on a spaceship], but so what, I just kept turning up the volume to see what would happen next. As you would guess there's a lot of running and hiding from the "Zombies", other wise they eat you. Now they're not really Zombies, but it's the same difference. Oh and these guys run like the 'new' Zombies [Resident Evil, 28 Days Later], they don't stumble like zombies from the 60's or 70's .

To many of the screens were dark [poorly lit], and there could have been one less chase scene but I liked it [and it looked great in Blu-ray].

So this is a prelude to a technical review of a Blu-ray player. I haven't started reviewing movies!

URLs Indexed by Google

This is the big question, right?
How do I get my pages indexed by Google?
I would say that the bigger question is how do I keep my pages index by Google.
Oh and the answer to either of these questions is of course '42'.

What I just noticed is that incoming links from other sites that are not indexed do not count as an incoming link. Maybe I already realized that fact, as I've seen many pages over the years fade in and out of the index. That's one of the many reason a page rank will go up or down, as pages fade in or out.

So using Google's Webmaster Tools to check the status of incoming links to pages, I found this; Most of the pages relating to the Dictionary of Capacitor Terms [topic page with the lowest page views] only had one external link pointing to them. Well that might be ok, but basically all pages should have at least one external incoming link, from my sitemap [interfacebus Site-Map]. The sitemap is located out on 'Google Sites' which is external to interfacebus.com. The difference here is that I know that the Capacitor Terms were only added to the site a few years ago. All new pages (page additions), in the last few years, get blogged about in the 'What's New Blog' [Engineering Pages]. So if I blogged about adding Capacitor Definitions [blog 11/17/07; Electronic Capacitor Dictionary], why is the external link from blogger [owned by Google] not being recognized? It certainty can't be because Google has not found it, it's been out on the web for two years.

Now that blog page, providing all the links, does have a page rank of zero [really no page rank available]. So can I also assume that the page is also not indexed in Google's listing?
Now I see another blogger page adding two new pages to the Capacitor Terms [blog 10/26/08; Dictionary of Capacitor Terms], that blog page also has no page rank and the two new Capacitor page links are also not recognized in Webmaster Tools. I blog about new pages for two reasons; first to show visitors what new pages have been added and to set the new page up with an incoming external link [SEO stuff]. Standard Search Engine Optimization [SEO] says to try and get external links pointing to your pages, well that's what I was trying to do. But if the pages I use go to a page rank of zero once they fall of the front of this blog than it's kind of pointless. I could add a 'history' page on the site, pointing to these blog pages. That would give the blog listings a page rank. Seems like a lot of effort, and kind of hard to keep track of [with all the different topics on the site]. Of course just by blogging about the other blog pages help [if that makes any sense]. I'll have to think about what SEO advice to give. However what I can say is that just because you blog about a page it really doesn't mean that the benefit will last more than a few months. So you have to find a way to keep a page ranking for pages that are used as 'external links'. One way would be to cross link, as I just did with this posting [pointing to the older blog posts]. Of course another way would be to re-post the pages, which I'll do now to make a point. However I don't recommend listing you page links over and over again in a blog ~ why would any one read the blog.......
Capacitor Dictionary pages, listed by the first term on each page.
Air Dielectric definition. [Page 1, main topic]
Capacitor Breakdown definition. [Page 2]
DC Leakage definition. [Page 3]
Electrode definition. [Page 4]
Farad definition. [Page 5]
Ganged Tuning definition. [Page 6]
Impedance. [Page 7]
Capacitor Manufacturers. [Page 8]
Paper Capacitor definitions. [Page 9]
Quality Factor definition. [Page 10]
Self Inductance definition. [Page 11]
Tantalum Electrolytic Capacitor definition. [Page 12]
Values, Capacitor definition. [Page 13]
..... This may appear to be a long post, but it's an important SEO topic that needs to addressed.
You'll note that I link to the Capacitor pages with a key word, and not just page 8 [for example] that means nothing to Google. Of course I also updated any of these pages as required.
Graphic; Leaded Chip Capacitor, Through-hole Capacitor.

Search Trends vs Page Views

As we all know the original SCSI interface is in decline and has been for a number of years now. The 'old' parallel bus is up against Fiber Channel [FC], Serial SCSI [SAS] and Serial ATA [SATA] to name a few of the possible Hard Drive interfaces.

In fact I found a chart of Worldwide HDD Shipments; All Form Factors by Interface, 2008-2012 [produced in 2009], units shipments vs year. The chart indicates that SCSI may have had a few percentage of the total units shipped in 2008, but is all but gone in 2009 and beyond. Seems right to me, of course there still must be a large amount of units still deployed even now, regardless of SCSI being obsolete. Their projection for 2010 indicates that 90+ drive units shipped would contain either a SAS or SATA interface.

But almost no SCSI drive was ever used as a personal 'home use' HDD interface, as the SCSI interface was always more expensive than an IDE drive interface. So most people would have never even had a chance to worry if they had an out-dated SCSI interface in their PC.

So as SCSI searches [on Google] dropped 90% over the last 4 years, SCSI page views on interfacebus have been flat. So why is that? The trend line above shows a tremendous drop in searches over the last four years, but visitors to this site remain constant. That tells me that over the previous last few years I've missed out on a large amount of incoming traffic. Were the pages on this site always relegated to some small portion of the key words, I guess there's no way to tell. Normally I don't like to finds pages that are in decline, but in this case I wish I did. Only because now I know that for a vast amount of internet searches related to the SCSI bus this site was never used. Any way; here are the rest of the pages that make up the SCSI section;
SCSI I interface description.
SCSI II interface description.
SCSI III interface description.
SCSI VI interface description.
SCSI V interface description.
SCSI single ended A cable, and  SCSI differential ended A cable.
SCSI single ended Q cable, and  SCSI differential ended Q cable.
SCSI B connector, and  SCSI P connector.
SCSI HDI-30 connector.

SEO advice; I don't have any optimization advice this time. Although pageviews to this SCSI related section have been constant, they have been consistently low.

Side note; I tried looking up 'Hard drive market forecast', HDD Sales trends, market volume and so on but I could only retrieve a table of contents to reports that had to be purchased. So finding the data is a bit hard and took a number of searches to uncover.
Graph: From Google Trends, using the search term SCSI [2004 to Jan 2010].

How to increase page content and grow visitors

Now we are looking at a different section of the site to determine how long to takes to gain new page views. A Dictionary of Resistor Terms section was added on April 11 2008 [blog posting; Resistor Definitions] consisting of ten pages. Some of the pages were larger or had more content then others, but 10 pages with ten different web addresses were added. The attached graphic shows the weekly pageviews for that section over time.

Now over time more and more content was slowly added as a new definition was added or a resistor definition was expanded. Also related content was added, as in 'Trimmer Packages', but was included in a different section of the site which is not represented as being part of the Resistor Dictionary. As a few of the pages grow to large they were subdivided into two pages growing the size in pages of the dictionary. For example back in June of 2009 [blog; Terms used with Resistors], the page "F-M' was separated into two pages increasing the size of the dictionary from 10 to 14 pages.

Now to the point; look how long it takes even to get a small amount of page views. It took 8 months before the page views consistently lifted off the zero floor. Another 6 months after that before the pageviews doubled. So, over a year before the section started to get a decent amount of page views. Still 6 months after that and the pageviews are just stable, or maybe increasing just a tad.

As always my SEO advice is start a page topic as soon as possible. Now if the page has little or no content don't blog about it. Just add it to your site-map or let the search engine find it over the upcoming month.

The bad side of this increase [which is only a few dozen pageviews] is that over the same time frame, other pages are declining in page views. For example the Unified Display Interface has been declining ever sense the page was added three years ago. Now that standard was started but never supported so it's not the fault of the web page. The issue leaves the entire web site with near flat pageviews, as some pages are increasing while other have to see a decrease in pageviews.

Test Equipment Manufacturers

Just at random I figured I would check how the small section of Test Equipment Manufacturers was doing. The page count, or the number of pages in the section has been stable for a while. The last addition was Thermal Test Chambers added back in Feb 2008. Before that the Frequency Counter page was added in Nov. 2007. All the other pages predate those additions and never showed up in the other blog...

So which page is doing the worst so far this year; LXI Test Equipment. Now I just saw an article, from last year, about how LXI was growing but I can't tell from the hits I'm getting. Also because I always update a page I blog about, a new manufacturer was added, which seem to be pushing LXI-VXI. It was my impression that LXI was competing with the HPIB interface. The difference being small, but HPIB gear is normally stand-alone equipment and VXI cards embedded in a chassis.
After that the page covering Thermal Image Manufacturers did the worst.
The rest of the pages in the section are listed below.
Spectrum Analyzer Manufacturers.
RF Power Meter Manufacturers.
OTDR Manufacturers.
Cable Tester Manufacturers.
Protocol Analyzer Manufacturers.
Used Test Gear.

While getting these links off the site I did notice that the page on Cable Testers has no page rank, not sure what is wrong here. The Cable Test page received more hits than five other pages in the section [which is not saying much] over the last 30 days. I see in Webmaster tools that no other external page links to it, that would effect the page rank.
Looking at last years data, these three pages did not even receive 1 visit per day [less then 365 page hits]:
LXI Test Gear, Thermal Chambers, and Frequency Counters......

Internet Browser Wars

Seems with the issue of the new flaw found in Internet Explorer I went out and checked which browser was being used most to access the web site. Well IE still gets used the most, but it looks like it's down another 3%, with Google Chrome inching up another few percentage points.
But that's nothing like I'm reading on the web about the large increase in downloads of Firefox. However most of my visitors come from the US and I think most of the recent Firefox downloads were in Germany and France [which had recommended dumping MS IE].
I also see that version 3.6 of Firefox is ready for download, so I'll do that now. I'm using 3.5.7 and sometimes it would hang for maybe 45 seconds? ~ That went well....

I did check how a few pages were doing, both speaker related. Neither page is doing well.
Mechanical Speakers. Companies that produce speakers, with out a case or speaker box.
Computer Speakers. Companies that make computer speakers or AV Speakers.
Both of these pages have been on the internet for years now.

Web Statistics Increasing

I really don't want to keep blogging about the same topic over and over again, but. The web site just received more than 10,000 visits in a single day. Yesterday the interface bus web site received 10,126 visits. That's up from maybe 9,500 visits last week and 8,500 visits last month.
That's the first time the site ever received over 10,000 visits in a single day. So this year should see two to 400,000 more visits than last year, and last year was the highest ever......

As normal, here are a few pages that are not recieving many pageviews and were never listed in the 'What's new blog'. All related to equipment cases.
This would be one of the few times I list a page with up-dating it. Each of these links looked ok, so no updates for now. The topics should be the main reason for low page views, but I do expect many more page views for the Transit case page. How many people would look up Captive screws?
Manufacturers of Transit Cases. Equipment cases used for transport.
Manufacturers of ATCA Chassis. Telcom equipment chassis.
Chassis Card Guide Manufacturers. PWB Card Guides.
Captive Screw Manufacturers. Captive screws for equipment.
Equipment Chassis Specifications. Spec document numbers and titles.

Oh the highest number of page views in Jan 2009 was 8,415 pageviews. Or an increase of 1,700 page views this year over last.

Graphic; Rack mount power inverter.

Blu-ray disk player recomendation

I think it's finally time to purchase a Blu-ray disk player. Not really sure why I've been waiting so long. Of course when the players first came out they were over priced, but that was a while ago.

Some time later I heard that Blu-ray players took forever to boot the movie up, which stopped me from making any purchased. Now I see that they want to increase Blu-ray disk storage space from 25GB to 33.4GB. However it appears that any Blu-ray player would require a firmware upgrade. I also see that by next year there will be 3D Blu-ray players, which also tells me that I would also need a 3D TV [what ever that is] and 3D movies. The 3D Bluray specification was released in December 2009.

I assume I want a Bluray player that plays a number of formats
~ BD Live; Netflix-ready; Pandora-ready; Blockbuster-ready; plays BD-ROM, BD-R, BD-RE, DVD-R, DVD-RW, CD-R, CD-RW discs

Interfaces Required
HDMI,
DVI,
USB,
Component Video,
Ethernet, for the Internet.
Not that I would ever use one but;
Internet Connect-able.

Interfaces not required
S-Video, the interface is outdated.
Firewire, not realy used by any one.

Now it my seem a bit odd but I would also like to stay with Sony. A lot of my gear is already Sony, so it kind of makes it easy getting the remote to work. Plus my remote is a Sony Remote Commander [RM-AV3000]. Now the remote is a little dated now, but I see no reason to get a new remote, as I already have a dozen other remotes that of course I don't use.

Pageview Counter Data

I happened to be updating the Antenna Tracking System pages.
So I opened up the Pageviews from Google Analytics filtered by 'antenna-tracking'. The first thing I noticed was that those few related pages don't receive many pageviews, maybe 10/day at best. The first recorded page-view received was on September 7 2007. Now that date occurs before I started the Engineering Page Additions blog, so I checked to see if any of the pages were ever mentioned. A few of the pages were listed in regards to a new page addition on Waveguides [post], back in 01/01/09.

So the point is why are these several pages not getting any pageviews and why are the pageviews flat [and low] over the last few years. Just by adding the links below I see one problem, as a few of the pages only have one manufacturer.
Antenna Tracking Systems; Main section page.
.... Antenna Towers;
....  RF Amplifiers; High Power Amps.
.... Antenna Controllers; Positioning Gear.
.... Light Antenna Pedestals; 
.... Medium Antenna Pedestals;
.... Heavy Duty Antenna Pedestals;  
...... Waveguides; .
The first thing I did was update a few of the pages, by adding new manufacturers. However I could not up-date all the pages because I could not find many companies making antenna pedestals. Companies want to produce systems, not just pedestals.

The second thing was to add the page addresses in this blog posting. I'm not saying that so many people read this blog that the page views will increase. But that Google will see an external link and may give the page more importance.

Oh, and by up-dating the page I showed Google that the pages are 'fresh'. You may have noticed when doing a search that Google postings show the date [listed on the page] that it was last updated. That fact tells me that Google is looking at this date, and may be taking note of the date.

So I added the pages in 2007, blogged about some of them in 2009, and now re-listed them in 2010 and corrected a number of short comings. I even added two more page to page links on the site.

Graphic; a Servo control unit.

Anchor Text

I'm out looking over Google's Webmaster Tools for the web site [Interface Buses]. I found a few issues with Short meta descriptions or Duplicate meta descriptions. Normally these HTML issues are caused because while generating a new page I copy a related current page. So I fixed most of them, the ones left are redundant pages.

The tools also give me a list of all the pages on my site and who links to them, or how many different pages link to them. I'll list a few pages here that only have a few incoming page links.

It was the Anchor text I really wanted to blog about. The Anchor Text is the HTML link on a page that points to another page. You always want to select a descriptive word or phrase. But I'm looking at this Anchor list and I see three people using the phrase 'here', another three pages using the term 'link', 'this', '1' and so on.

Now I don't control how someone links to one of my pages, but I can control how I link to internal pages. I see a few links here I may have used by mistake, like 'read more' or 'definition'.
SEO hint, when you find these trade them out for a better phrase.
Definition of Cable Armor.
Read more on Twisted Pair Cables.
What is a Gender Changer.

This is blog posting number 500

Comparing Visitors

Just a short posting showing visitors for the first week in January for this year and last year. The site has not made it back to 9,500 visits/day yet but I would think that will happen this week. Visits are up several hundred on the week ends and about 1000 on the week days. There are still more Electrical Interfaces going obsolete than being generated [as in yesterdays posting]. So any increase in page visits are good. Over 120 pages have already been up-dated so far this year, including these obsolete interfaces;
STD32 Interface.
SpringBoard Expansion.
STEBus.

Graphic; Statistics from AWSTATS.

The Demise of CableCard

Back in December the FCC came out with a media release indicating that CableCard was having only limited success. Other web sites change the phrase 'limited success' to 'total failure' of the CableCard approach pushed by the FCC. In fact back in September of last year the Consumer Electronics Association [CEA] went to the FCC complaining that it didn't appear that CableCard was doing anything for competition. So it seems that CableCard will have a very short life, what two years. Really zero years, I don't have any gear that uses a CableCard and have never even seen one.

One word about why I'm blogging about CableCard, and then I'll move on to re-posting two previous blog entries on the issue [with more back-ground information].

Checking last years analytics data I found that three of the four pages covering CableCard have received less than a dozen page views each for the year. I would expect a few more page views than that for a released standard, so I took notice and wondered why that was.
Here are the three CableCard pages and their visits [they differ only in pin-outs]:
S-Mode CableCard.  14 visits.
M-Mode CableCard.  13 visits.
CEA-679-Mode CableCard.  11 visits.

Blog Posting [10/5/06 CableCard]:    
CableCARD from what I have found so far is a 16-bit PC Card in a PCMCIA format. CableCARD was designed to replace the cable box from the cable company; any company could produce a CableCARD from the standard so you were not locked into renting from the cable company. This was the FCC.

CableCARD appears as a PCMCIA slot on the back of HDTV sets.

Any how version 1.0 came out last year [2005] from I understand and has a few draw backs. Information only flows one-way with CableCARD. So with CableCARD you are not able to use Pay-per-view because the card only receives signals from the cable company it does not send information out to them. Seems like a lot of people are already waiting for CableCARD 2.0 to come out to address the short comings of version 1.0.

So CableCARD from a hardware view is just another implementation of the PCMCIA card. Why they used the out-dated PC Card interface escapes me.

Blog Posting [8/27/07 CableCard]:  

I was out looking at Digital TV's on-line, up-dating the web sites listing for CableCard. This is a PCMCIA slot and PCMCIA card, a tuner card that can be inserted into a slot in the TV to replace a cable set-top box. Some TV descriptions indicate the term CableCard, while others indicate Digital Cable Ready [see below]. I was only able to find a few HDTV units from Hitachi which came with a CableCard slot. I see a few from Sony too. The CableCard allows the user to plug cable directly into a TV set without the need for a set-top box [STB]. CableCard slots may also be found on Digital Video Recorders [DVR]

Version 1 of CableCard was 'one-way' only so with out the cable decoder box things like 'pay-per-view' was unavailable. Version 2 released in June of this year should be fixing this problem [I have not yet reviewed it]. As of July 07 according to an FCC ruling; cable companies now have to supply set-top boxes that come with a removable CableCard. The ruling may bring CableCard back from the dead.

As far as PCs with a CableCard slot ~ forget it [for now]. CableCard interfaces are only available on Windows Vista machines and only with new OEM PC purchases. So you can't go to a store and purchase an up-grade to add CableCard, it has to be bundled with a new PC. Here's a quote;

"AMD's Digital Cable Tuner will only be available from PC manufacturers, and then only with a new Vista PC. There are no plans for support on Windows XP, nor are there any plans to sell the Digital Cable Tuner as a standalone product. "CableLabs has to know about every single system manufactured," ..... "They require full encryption and content protection, which means it's bound to Windows Media Center." HP has one: Digital Tuner-equipped m8010y.

Digital Cable Ready [DCR], this attribute describes a TV that incorporates a CableCARD slot to facilitate the reception of one-way digital cable content (which may include analog, digital, high-definition and/or premium programming) without the need for a set-top box. A CableCARD is typically provided for a nominal monthly fee by the cable provider. Sets may also use the term Digital Cable Turner.

So the CableCard standard was released in 2005, with only a few products available by 2007, crushed in 2009 and I assume no longer supported in any new product by 2010 [never being used by anybody]. However it is still mandated by the FCC, so they would have to change their rules.....

Webalizer Stats

It may be over a year now, but I finally pulled up the report by Webalizer today. Webalizer is a server side stats counter that just gathers data about how many times a web page is viewed. It's ok for a counter but I like AWSTATS better. AWSTATS is also a server side counter, but I have both set up and running.

Some of the visit data shown in these posts is from AWSTATS, but most of the graphics are from Google Analytics [which does not reside on the server]. Oh non of the three counters agree, they all differ by a few percentage.

What I wanted to do is post the visits per hour for the web page [from Webalizer]. The site is an 'engineering portal' type site for electrical engineers.
The odd thing I see in the data is that most of the visits occur around 8am, while I would think that most of the visits should occur later in the day when the entire country is awake. Most of the page visits to the website are from the US, so why wouldn't most of the traffic occur after 1pm?
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