Spider Crawl Data

So I've been blogging about page speed, loading time, or down-load time and how Google rates web sites. Well what is up with Google's spider. Google Bot has been hitting my site pretty hard. Now as I look at the Crawl errors report I find 12 pages that Google indicates as 'unavailable' ~ maybe the server is getting over loaded.

Now I have to ask if Google is the one that's slowing down my site as they continually pull down page after page. AWSTATS indicates that Googlebot has used up 198.13MBytes of bandwidth so far this month. The Yahoo spider was the next worse offender with 125MB of bandwidth used.

Was this a Catch 22 situation? I was updating hundreds of pages to reduce down-load times by adding a new search bar. GoogleBot picked up on the page up-dates and tried to retrieve them all within a few days ultimately slowing down my server. What is up with that? It may well be that I'll have to wait a few weeks before the data comes back to normal.

I mean look at the change in the time it required to download a page; a low of 68mS all the way up to 1,608mS. And if that data is true then why does the site performance tab indicate a 3.7 second average load time while the crawl rate indicates a 186mS average load time [0.186 seconds] ~ that's a pretty big difference..... I can only conclude that the page takes .186 seconds to download, but the Java Script for Google Analytics and any pic file from Google Picasa take up the rest of the time.

AMDs 6-Core Processor

Did I just read an article saying AMD would come out with a new six-core processor for a mere $200. I think it may be time to up-grade my PC and get a new one. What; I'll have to upgrade to the new MS OS, what ever that is. I'll have to go out and find out what people are saying about OS7 [Windows 7]

Windows 7

-- Improved performance with multi-core processors
-- Improved boot performance
-- Does not yet support USB 3.0 [available with SP1 late 2010]
Desktop
-- No USB 3.0 support yet [that I found]
-- PCI Express 3.0 not yet been released [later this year]
-- Serial ATA revision 3.0 [no products found yet]
-- DDR3  [mainstream support]
Ok I guess this blog posting is pointless. I would like the 6-core processor, but not at any cost. My office applications wouldn't even really see any advantage any way. But more importantly I find no support for USB 3.0 or Serial ATA version 3.0. I also don't want Windows 7 before the first service pack.

So why purchase a PC that will be out-of-date 6 months after I get it. By next year all USB drives will be USB 3.0. I'm not sure if I would wait for PCIe 3.0 support, I'd be waiting another year. So no new PC for me this year, I'd just end up giving it away 6 months later.

I did note that the AMD3 socket processor style is out. ~
Six core AMD Processors; Phenom II X6 1055T and Phenom II X6 1090T

Web Site Performance

I've got a few more weeks of data from Google's Site Performance. The data seems to indicate that the site speed is about the same it was in the last posting. However now Google indicates I'm 7% slower, so I have to assume that the other sites being used as a comparison are also getting faster? Because it still indicates 3.7 seconds to download a page.

Their text; "On average, pages in your site take 3.7 seconds to load (updated on Apr 20, 2010). This is slower than 62% of sites. These estimates are of medium accuracy (between 100 and 1000 data points). The chart below shows how your site's average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times.".

So far 833 pages have received the newer smaller html code for Google's Search Bar, but I guess the 1k of text reduction per page doesn't seem to be helping any. Looks like this is a scrolling graph, as Nov has fallen off the end and replaced by newer data in Apr. The Page Speed suggestions do not seem to be updating, as Google still shows the pages and suggestions as before.

Web SIte Speed Enhancments

So to follow up with 3 of the last four postings regarding page downloading times and so on. I'll go ahead and detail a few of the things I've been doing to the web site to speed up down-load times. Or really to decrease page down-load times, depending on the page that received a change or not. I really can't make a single change that would effect the entire web site, each page is completely separate from another page.

So the new Google search bar is now on 684 pages. Each page that gets the new search code sees a reduction in html code or text of 1,480 characters [1,480 bytes] ~ I started replacing the search bar code a few days before I posted about it with Custom Search Bar. Just 1k Byte may not sound like a lot of data, but in fact it is when you consider how often these pages are down loaded, perhaps 15,000 page requests per day. It's a big saving on server bandwidth [over time] and Google sees the page as 1K smaller too, which was the point. People really pay for server bandwidth by the month so my reduction would be 400,000 pages x 1,480 Bytes, once all the pages get switched over. The second benefit is that the old search code from Google used an Engineering site logo which Google saw as another DNS look up that was a drain on the page loading time [logo stored off-site].  So this change saves the site 1 DNS look up and 1KB per page.

Using data from Feedburner [the blog feed] and Adsense [advertiser] I determined that there were not that many people reading the blog as a news feed. Plus the news feed was not generating any revenue, so I decided to remove the feedburner banners from the web site. Right, why publicize; the banners take up space, slow the page down and produce no income from the site. In addition the banners required 663 characters of html text and required an additional DNS look-up. The down side is that the banners were only on about 6 pages, so the savings is small, but those 6 pages should make the entire site appear faster [to a small degree].

Five gif files have been removed from the site, two were reinserted into this blog. The attached graphic shows monthly traffic to the web site for 2009. In addition to the page losing the graphic and seeing the size reduction this blog gets a link from the web site indicating the new location of the graphic. The 5 pages also no longer require another DNS look-up because the graphics were out on Google Picasa. Now the FAQ pages never received that many hits and the gif's were out on Picasa so my server sees no change. However Google will see the loss of a DNS look-up and the disappearance of five 80K Byte pic files.

In addition to removing those pic files I also reduced the size of another 14 gif files, saving between 20 and 30K Bytes per file. Yet another small change, but these files were local so the server will also see a reduction.

Any single change is small but the aggregate speed increase to the web site should help. I'll find out in a few weeks when Google up-dates the Site Performance report again. It's hard to tell, but this is Search Engine Optimization [SEO] because Google uses down-load time as part of its Page Rank algorithm.

Google now ranks pages by Speed

Seems hard to believe, but they do indicate that one of the 200 different criteria for Page Rank is page loading time. Recall that just a few posts ago I indicated that their own speed rating was complaining about their own Google products [Web Site Speed Performance] being used on my pages. Even back in 2007 I had complained about the (then new) W3C strict coding style with the Physical Page Size post, as even the smallest function required a large amount of coding.

Anyway most of the comments (including mine) to Google's blog posting were negative, and for good reason. How do you trade off page content with page loading speed. Many people mentioned Google Analytics code [tracking] or Adsense code [ads] as issues with loading time. However there were two comments I would like to bring over from two different posters [each from a different Google Blog];

"Doesn't this punish the small operator who has less control over their, usually shared, hosting? Or those in countries that have lesser infrastructure? At the same time, allowing bigger business to throw money at the speed problem and gain a better ranking?"

"With the recent court ruling with the FCC vs. Comcast speed might be tiered or throttled in the future. Is that a concern?"

Anyway it's already been said on those blogs. It's the Gmail Buzz debacle 1 month later, I just don't get it ~ as I remove Google product the rest of the night.

The attached graphic is daily stats for the engineering website for March 2010 [generated by AWSTATS]. Nice to look at, but the real reason it's here is because it was just deleted from my site ~ replaced with a link to this posting. It was a large graphic that required an additional DNS look-up [because it was located out on Google Picasa]. The next few posts will also contain one of these FAQ pics as they are moved off the site to increase the speed of those pages. The pics also get dumped from Picasa.

Blogging and Feed Stats

So it's been awhile sense I spoke about the benefits of blogging, so it must be time to address the issue again.

Much of this blog deals with web master stuff, SEO techniques and web analytics. But almost any topic is fair game.

The first reason is to bring in traffic to your web site [Engineering Buses]. This particular blog brings in 2 or 3 visitors a day to the web site. Sixty five percent of that incoming traffic is from new visitors. Now that may not sound like a lot of people, but it's still new traffic from people that may not have otherwise found my web site. So in a sense a blog is like free advertising. The other blog which only relates to new page additions to the web site brings in twice the number of visitors.

The second reason, at least for me, is that I can blog about any topic. So I can cover topics I would not otherwise address. Remember each blog posting is just like a web page, so I can blog and generate a new web page about any topic which wouldn't fit or relate to the web site. There are currently 528 posting in this blog and another 212 posting in the other blog ~ 740 additional web pages.

Of course you don't even have to visit the blog, you can read it as a blog feed. The attached graphic is the blog feed stats from people reading the feed generated by feedburner. You can access the feed by clicking on the rotating Feeds banner to the left.

Web Site Speed Performance

I figured I would follow yesterdays posting regarding adding the new, smaller, script for the Google search bar with how Google sees my site when down-loading. Remember their web spider, GoogleBot, reads 500 of my pages every day. See a previous blog posting on Special crawl setting. So Google would know if my server was slow or not.

Here is what Google had to say; "Performance overview
On average, pages in your site take 3.7 seconds to load (updated on Mar 26, 2010). This is slower than 55% of sites. These estimates are of medium accuracy (between 100 and 1000 data points). The chart above shows how your site's average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times."

Google Webmaster Tools gives a lot of page examples and what I could do to speed them up.
Their first suggestion is to 'Enable qzip compression' to reduce the page size. That's a nice idea but it makes working on the page a bit hard. Why don't I just save the 2k and continue to replace the Google search bar. I mean I am careful about up-loading large graphic files. In fact for pic files that can't be reduce, get uploaded to GoogleSites, and I only use a link to the file.

Their second suggestion is to 'Minimize DNS lookups', well guess what the DNS lookups are being used to access Google products. There are three common look-ups that they are referring to.
A logo used with the old Google search bar, which gets removed as the new search bar replaces it.
The Google Analytics code that I use as the site counter, provided by Google.
Finally, Google is complaining about pic files that I'm storing on Google Picasa that it has to down load. I just posted about Google Picasa off-line the other day too and how I used Picasa to save bandwidth.

So there are three of the four things Google says is slowing down my site, and there all Google products, does that make any sense. The fourth compression issue may not be an issue at all if the rest of the Google code on my page was a tad bit smaller. For example the new search bar code that is much smaller than it's been over the last five years. The adsense code also got smaller a few years ago, but could also be smaller.

Custom Search Bar

I started to add a new Google search bar to the web site. The new version of the search bar replaces the current one already used on the site. I'm not really sure when Google came out with the new code. I'm also not real keen with the reduction in options, but that's another story.

The code for the search bar is only 430 characters, while the current version used contained 1,910 characters. That's a reduction of 1,480 characters per html page [depending on the search bar used]. So a character is one byte of text, or 8 bits of data. Eight bits x 1,480 bytes = 11,840 bits per page ~ that's the size of a pic file.
Say 10,000 page views a day x 11,000 bits, that's 110M Bytes per day.

Now I've only started to change the search bar on a few pages so far, so I'll be changing the code the rest of the year. The pages with the search bar at the top center of the page keep the same location. While the Dictionary style pages with a side bar will have their search bar moved up to the top of the side bar. Although you should keep the search bar in the same place for all your pages so people can't find it. These pages are having it moved to the top, just to the right.

I may be saving 110MB of bandwidth/day, but the pages are getting larger as the site grows. So in reality I will not see any reduction in bandwidth, maybe just keeping the bandwidth around the 13G Byte number. Take note of the last posting to see the increase in bandwidth over the last month. Remember it's nice to load up a page with graphics or what ever but keep your visitors in mind and keep the page-loading time down. Otherwise you my have people clicking away because the page takes to long to load.

Today I'll add the new search bar to the few dozen pages that get down-loaded the most, that way I'll see an immediate reduction in bandwidth. The other pages can wait until they need some other up-date.
Graphic; US Coast Guard HH-65C helicopters.

SEO stuff really work

The numbers are in from last month, so I guess I should post them. The numbers seems to be on the increase, more than I figured. Although I can always predict the out-come based on the average numbers ~ maybe 10,000 visits per day, and 5,000 on the week-ends. However I did not expect to see the large jump in page views, which is finally up to the numbers back in 2006. I guess the trick now is to keep the numbers up there~

How to read the data:


Server Bandwidth:
The lowest curve is server bandwidth and does not relate to the other numbers on the chart. The bandwidth is hovering around 148,000 [in the graph] but really equates to 14G Bytes as the numbers were changed to fit the graph. I track bandwidth just to make sure the server does not see a heavy load.

Unique Visits:
Are visits from a computer within a month, but any one computer is only counted one time. If any one computer returns for a second visit it's counted by the Visits curve.

Visits:
A site visit is registered each time a person visits the site within a month and each time the person returns to the site. Site Visits should always be equal to or greater than Unique Visits.

Page Views:
Are the number of pages a person views per month, regardless of how many times the visitor returns to the web site. Page Views should always be equal to or greater than Site Visits. Page views are really the only data point that is falling. Page Views is related to Bounce Rate, which is the percentage a person visits one page and then leaves the site.

Another way to see the same data, as site visits, or number of visits ~ so a comparison can be made year over year. This chart makes it easy to see that site visits are higher than any other month and any previous year.
2005 was the year I started to follow Search Engine Optimization [SEO] techniques. I guess the SEO stuff really works.

Web Visits vs NATO Member Countries

I wanted to show the relative increase in site visitors this year. So I picked year to date numbers compared to the same time interval last year. I also wanted to show a few random countries, so I used NATO Member Countries.

Currently March numbers are the highest ever of any other month, and there are still two days left. The first day of next month I'll show the standard bar graph of visitor status, or what ever I put up. But I wanted to detail something different before hand, another view of some of the data.


The over-all site is up about 20% over last year; however some of the countries listed below may show a higher or lower increase. None of the countries listed had a decrease in visitors to the web site [Engineering Data].


Now none of the [22] new pages generated this year are getting any web visits [yet]. So the increase in site visitors must be due to new pages added last year, or additions made to existing pages already residing on the web site. Maybe a few posts back I detailed how poorly the new page additions were doing.

NATO member states:
Albania;  27% increase
Belgium; 16% increase
Bulgaria; 35% increase
Canada;  22% increase
Croatia;  57% increase
Czech Rep;  32% increase
Denmark;  11% increase
Estonia;  52% increase
France;  24% increase
Germany;  24% increase
Greece;  25% increase
Hungary;  15% increase
Iceland;  6% increase
Italy;  19% increase
Latvia;  47% increase
Lithuania;  45% increase
Luxembourg;  3% increase
Netherlands;  7% increase
Norway;  27% increase
Poland;  17% increase
Portugal;  31% increase
Romania;  27% increase
Slovakia;  55% increase
Slovenia;  42% increase
Spain;  13% increase
Turkey;  17% increase
United Kingdom;  17% increase
United States;  11% increase

Now to be fair there have been some countries that show a decrease in site visits; for example, the 1 hit from the Vatican City did not return again this year. ~ this may appear to be a long posting, but it's just the list. I guess I forgot NATO started letting the eastern-block countries in for membership.

Just for the record, I just posted a comment to a blog post regarding Alexa data. Alexa indicates 11.1% of my site traffic is from Iran, while Google Analytics [site counter] indicates 0.43%. The data above is from Google Analytics, not some third party site.
Graphic; Flight of a NATO AWACS and three F16 fighters. Open Source. [public domain].
Graphic; Map of NATO countries and EU members. Open Source. [public domain].

Picasa Web Albums

So it would appear that Google's Picasa Web Albums is off-line, and I'm not really sure how long they've been down. The web site [Engineering Portal]  uses a lot of grapics and pic files, but not all of them are local to my server. I off-load some of them to Picasa to keep the server bandwidth down, which runs around 13G Bytes a month. Right, if someone else is serving the picture files then my bandwidth is not effected.

It's hard to say how many pic files reside on my server, as they could still reside in one of my directories but not used any more. So the count is an estimate but it would appear there are 687 picture files local to my server [give or a take]. Picasa on the other hand is serving another 919 graphic files [or not]. Because it appears that currently there are over 900 pic files not showing up on the web site.

So is it a good idea to up-load your files to another server? Well if your doing it to shows friends, sure. But what about if your trying to run a business? I guess I don't have an answer, but I am saving on my bandwidth. It's not saving me any money because my bandwidth limit is much higher than 13GB. What I am saving, or enhancing, is page load-time [I hope]. If the page is downloaded from my server and a pic file is downloaded from Picaca the visitor should see the page render faster. Or what if the files were on my server, what would be the bandwidth then?
Maybe a standard graphic file is 10 to 20K, and there are over 360,000 page views a month [over 380,000 page views this month]. That seems like a lot of down-loading [saved]......

So I see that the graphics are down in blogger as well [this blog]. I guess that makes sense because Google stores the blog graphics in Picasa too. I was going to attach a graphic showing server bandwidth vs page views, so that will have to wait. I'll add a link to this posing as a comment a bit later [SEO Techniques]. And it seems like just a few days ago the web site was off-line for a few hours too.

Oh, SEO stuff; the website link 'Engineering Portal' points to the normal site, I'm just using a different term to describe it ~ for the search engines. To try and insure the words are assigned to my home page , or related to...

Site has been assigned special crawl rate settings

So I just checked Google Web Master Tools to see how the site was doing [looking for any issues]. Plus I had just up-loaded a new xml sitemap. The last update of the xml site-map was in December, so this new one covers the 20 odd pages added in the last few months.

Anyway, because the site was off-line for a few hours the other day, I checked the crawl rate. I no longer have the option of changing the Google crawl rate [for Googlebot]. Instead of a crawl faster or crawl slower selection I see this message;
Your site has been assigned special crawl rate settings. You will not be able to change the crawl rate.

Under the Crawl errors page I don't see any issues. There are 16 pages not found, but those are all mis-spelled page addresses from other web sites [incoming links], which I can't do any thing about. So I check how GoogleBot is crawling the Engineering web site, all looks well. In fact it seems that over the last three years around 500 pages are crawled per day. Here is the site crawl rate history over the last few years [Engineering Blog with a search term of Crawl]. So what is the deal and what does Special Crawl Rate mean?

I tried a Google web search for the terms 'assigned special crawl rate' and I get a Google News group with dozens of people asking the same thing. Well News-Groups are not that great a place to get information, only because so many people post a reply, just to post with out ever answering the question. Some people said it was for large sites, others replied that they had a small site. Then people would say that's why 1000's of their pages are not indexed [which is different all together].

So I can't answer the question of why your site has been assigned a special crawl rate, because I don't know why my site received it. But I can say that at least for my site, there has been no change in the crawl rate ~ all the way back to 2007. Click the crawl rate graphic for a larger image for year-to-date crawl rates.

I could add to that and say my site does not even require a sitemap, any new page gets spidered with in about a month. Of course this blog gets spidered today, remember blogger is owned by Google. Oh if I didn't already say Google indicates 1,653 urls submitted in the xml sitemap, with 1,322 urls indexed.

Attached graphic; Google Crawl Rate for January 2010 to March 2010.

The Web Site is Off-Line

The web site [Engineering Electronics] is down for about an hour now and I can't get any work done, so I figured I would go ahead and get a blog post in. The web site does not go down that often, but I'm never happy when it does. I don't make any money when the site is off line and I could always be losing new visitors ~ not good.

I should call, but I'm sure they will just say; we know its off-line and we're working on it. A few years back I did call and complained after the site was down most of a day. I remember asking how they arrive at their up-time number ~ You know the 99.999% on-line guarantee [that number]. I don't remember getting a response to my question, and the guarantee is useless as well. You have to go into your site stats and prove to the hosting company the site was off-line ~ like they don't already know. If I had more confidence in my cable connection I'd get my own server and do the hosting myself.

Anyway I've added a few new pages over the last week, keeping the site-map updated each time. The site is still doing better than last year, at around a 20% increase in site visits. Pageviews on the other hand are only around 15% higher, but there still higher. This same period last year the site had 922,867 page-views, while this year the site has received 1,063,542 page views. Really the pages-per-visit are down 4%, but because of the increase in traffic the other numbers are still up.

Wait a minute, a page just opened up, it may be trying to come back on line? Maybe I lost about 500 web visits, depending on how long it was really off-line. When the stats come in at 5:30 am I would guess I will not be seeing a 10,000  visit day [which is almost the norm now].....

Sitemap Generation

I updated the html sitemap for interfacebus.com. This is the first update since the interfacebus-sitemap was up-loaded on 12/19/09. So I added in the last 22 web pages generated over the last few months, and removed a few more duplicate entries left over from when the page was generated.

I also went ahead and ran Xenu tonight to check for bad links. Looks like we have 99.17% good links out of 7,396 links. Seems I my have had about 10 bad links listed [which I have already fixed], I assume the other web sites will come back on line in a few hours ~ which is when I'll recheck them.

I'll go ahead and run the xml site-map generator over the week end. So the 22 odd new pages get included in that file and I can re-upload that file to Google. The last time the xml sitemap was generated was around 12/19/09 too.

Graphic; KC-135 Stratotanker Cockpit Instrument Panel [USAF Tanker].

PageViews performance

Yep I went out and looked at the performance of the new pages that have been generated so far this year. In most cases the page views are very low, maybe one or two a day or no views at all.

I opened three or four of the different pages and added a bit more text when possible. But a number of these pages were generated based on a graphic. So either the text is already embedded in the picture or the graphic doesn't really require any additional text. So I'm kind of stuck, the pages are un-fixable  there's really nothing wrong with them. Except for the fact that the page bring in zero traffic.

Now I know I need text on a page to bring in traffic from the search engines. It's standard Search Engine Optimization [SEO] stuff, day one. But these pages were generated around a graphic file, little text required. Maybe I should stop generating a new page just because I have a picture file I want to use. Still I'm not even getting hits from people already on the site [engineering], nor am I getting any traffic from people doing an image search.

The question is what to do? Some of these pages were generated 3 months ago and have only seen a dozen hits.
1. Well I added some additional text to a few of the pages.
2. I also commented on a few of the Blog pages that added them. I always comment on my own postings, to indicate updates or changes in the original posting. Of course the comment enhances the blog page, because more text is added. Remember a blog post is also a web page.
3. Then there is this blog posting, with links to the pages that need help.

Now I talked about this same issue last December [New Page Generation and Page Views], only how new pages did over the entire year. Normally I never care about a page until it's at least 3 months old, which some of these are. But these page views are so low there's just no getting around the fact that they most have some kind of issue.

Panel Mount LED. Holds a graphic of a few LEDs. Added 1/7/10, zero page rank
Capacitor Networks. Graphics and a bit of text. Added 1/15/10, zero page rank
Via Stubs in PCBs. Definition of a Via Stub. Added 1/17/10, zero page rank
Jumper Headers. Holds a graphic of some jumpers. Added 12/31/09, zero page rank
These pages have only received between a dozen and 2 dozen page views so far, subtract a few because of me. Oh and page rank doesn't mean any thing, but it wouldn't hurt if they get one soon. Of course there are more pages in the same boat, but why fill the blog post with a bunch of page links.

Why are my earnings low

I figured it's been more than a week so it's time for a posting. I only wish I had a topic.
But when in doubt post how the page views are doing.

What I find interesting is that page views are up over the last six months, both unique visitors and total visitors. In fact not only are page views higher on a per month basis, but over the last several months they are the highest numbers ever for any month. However the problem is that earnings for the site are stable, flat, or altogether boring..... Sure I've seen revenue increases for a day or a week, but nothing long term. I have not seen a steady increase in earnings which would track with the increase in visits.

Yea I could move ads or change ad formats, which I do. But I'm really always working on new content, and when I do move an ad it's to make the page look better and not to make more money.

The attached graph shows total visitors per month, which accounts for unique visitors and re-counts them if they return. So if a person visits the site they become a unique visitor. If that person returns during the same month that visit gets counted again as another visit [per the graph]. Each time a person visits the site and views a page, that gets counted as a page view. Normally people will view more than one page when they visit. So the number of visitors will be less because that would account for less pages that might be seen. So you visit the site [unique visitor], you come back and your a re-counted visitor, and every page is counted as a page view. Then the chart shows a number higher than unique visits, but lower total page views.

err, I was watching Donnie Darko while typing, so forgive the typo's.

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.