STG's

I was checking out CoffeeCup's site for easter eggs and decided to get the free mini report about my site optimization. The whole thing is fairly generic, full of links to the full report. The one thing I found interesting - and funny - is that one of the extra pages they have on the report is the EXE file for my main product, STG FolderPrint Plus... And my order page has 0 bytes according to their report. Kind of hard to take it seriously after that! On the other hand, an excellent web based FREE page speed report is http://www.webpagetest.org/ . I've tried it yesterday, from an old Google blog post, and it has a lot of detail. And no incorrect information I noticed .

Some interesting SEO tips at CSE HTML's forum . Very much worth taking a look.

I've read another (very short) book on the Percy Jackson series. This one was possibly a little more entertaining than the others. As always, interesting new greek mythology monsters and locales. A little extra development on the series arc too. Spoiler: I think Thalia's return and departure from the main story line seemed a bit short. Of course, she might return...

I've just finished reading Heat Wave - by the fictional author Richard Castle, of the TV series Castle. I really like the series, so upon hearing that a book was made as if written by the author, I went and got it right away at Fictionwise.com , in which I rarely can buy books anymore, due to country restrictions, but now and then they have one of them unrestricted. (Entering Big DRM Rant) To the Kindle fans, I'd probably buy there (I obviously read a lot - just look at the blog posts), but it has two problems - no reader software for my cell phone (not that bad, albeit a bit annoying) and really excessive DRM compared to eReader. eReader just requires you to enter your name and credit card number to read the book in any device. If they stopped existing, I'd still be able to use my backups to read it in any device. On Amazon, when the new Kindle was released, people with books that weren't available on the new version (as well as magazines and newspapers) simply...

Reading the Gamersgate newsletter, I learned there was a discount for Colony Defense, which I had never heard off. So I downloaded the demo. It's pretty awful. The design was clearly made for use with a gamepad. For example, instead of clicking on a tower to select it to upgrade, you rotate the world to place it. The 360 view looks cute, but is pretty annoying. The overall result is awful. You can probably do much better going to a flash game site like Kongregate.com and choosing one of the top tower defense games.

Amongst my regular fiction, I'm also going over back issues of Communications of the ACM (I'm a member). One very interesting article was A Few Billion Lines of Code Later: Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World . It details the various ways Coverity had to adapt from being a research tool to a commercial tool. I found particular interesting how they have to dumb down certain bug detection, so that users could understand them instead of thinking it was a false positive. Also, I liked the little table of various transforms they have to make between compilers to make sense of their code - QNX has lowest count, while Metrowerks is the worst . Having a comment from Bjarne Stroustrup (designer of C++) is pretty cool, too!

I've just finished The Sea of Monsters - by Rick Riordan - the second book in the Percy Jackson series. It was fairly fast (about a day) since it's a bit short. The story follows the same format as the first book - Percy is at the end of the school year, monster attack, he goes to camp, then goes on a quest. In the middle several references to Greek mythology are inserted. There is a bit of an arc about Percy's destiny and the horrible plot to bring a previously "dead" evil character to life (very Harry Potter ), but it doesn't feel like a strong part of the story. Overall, very enjoyable, but nothing special.

I've been using Amazon Associates for years, although not in a very meaningful way - just a couple of pages on my site, and occasional post here. One big reason is that it takes a long time to go Amazon Associates, find the book, and add the link back here. Well, no more - with the gadget (available on the Monetize link, for Blogger users) it takes only a few seconds! So I'll be adding links and images on the relevant posts.

I've just finished reading Shadow Unit - Season Two. I've commented on it several times before, and for those that didn't see it, it's like Criminal Minds, but the serial killers are super-human monsters affected by what they call the anomaly . I've read it on my cell phone and notebook (because my eyes can't take much of cell phone reading anymore), using this Kindle version (thanks, Arachne!) and Mobipocket reader. Season 2 was pretty good. Of course, the season finale felt pretty weak after the awesome Season 1 finale. Still, I'm dying to know what happens to Hafidha next! Shadow Unit is free, please consider donating, there is a link on their page. I did, it's totally worth it!

Sol Survivor is another tower defense game. I'm particularly fond of them, and played oh so many over the years (and still play Desktop Tower Defense regularly at Facebook!). Some I loved, some I hated. Sol Survivor is definitely in the hate category. Which is a pity, because it's the best looking tower defense game I've ever played. The models and the terrains are quite spectacular. But somehow the gameplay doesn't work for me... It just feels annoying and like a chore.

Shatter is a new arkanoid-style game, with plenty of physics and that stylish retro-scheme. I've just bought it from checking out a video trailer, since there isn't a demo - from Google, looks like the used to be one but they removed. I imagine after playing the demo users might be less likely to buy than just watching the trailer. I'm not a fan of Arkanoid games overall, but the trailer was enough to convince me. There are a few differences from most classic breakout games. In particular, you both blow and suck (not at the same time), you have shields, you can shoot and the particles can behave in interesting ways. The "shatter" part is about the little pieces in which bricks get. You can suck those to get energy, which you can use to shoot shards, or with the shield. Also, there are boss battles! I've just won the first, and I can tell it wasn't as easy as I'd expected! This boss was made from a large number of segments, and could both ram ...

While I initially expected this comment to my MS Pivot post to be spam (most comments this size would be), this turned out to be quite interesting. It's certainly one of the better thought out graph systems with a time component I have ever seen.

Continuing my read of a bunch of SEO/conversion articles on Avangate, this a very interesting concept - SEO Microsites. In essence, it's about making a semi-neutral authoritative site about a specific segment, which has important keywords for your software. That makes it easier to get a good SEO ranking. You wouldn't push your product heavily, however - just have a regular mention and some side banners or descriptions. Very interesting, I might try it eventually... If I ever get the time. PS: This is my 100th post!

Some interesting tips on this article. One I particularly agree with is watermarking output. I've gotten several times the purchase/download rates when I added it to my folder print application - on the main print and titles of reports - and my thumbnail/album/slide show generator - on both thumbnails and html. One other point I need to think about is about adding samples on start. It was easy to do on Clipfast (just add a few clips) and STG Cache Audit - just do a scan, it's fast enough. But I'm not sure what the best way would be for STG FolderPrint Plus or STGThumb. Scanning the whole drive is a serious no-no - it could take hours for larger drives with millions of files. Even scanning the My Documents folder could take a while. For STGThumb I have a similar problem. I guess I could add a sample folder and scan that, but I don't see it as that helpful. One other option would be scanning the My Pictures folder, but I wonder how many actually use it as storag...

I've been reading the Kindle pack file for Season 2 of Shadow Unit in my cell phone. While I didn't bother to comment on individual episodes, Getaway was a wonderful Chaz centered story. Chaz is having bad hallucinations and decides to quit the unit. Falkner won't let him, implies that as a beta, they will hunt him down if he leaves (!!!), and makes him take a medical leave. He decides to go to Vegas to disappear, but instead gets involved on a case... Nice side-stories too.

Google Apps Marketplace is Google's way of integrating cloud-based apps into their apps system. There are a few videos about it that explain quite well how it works, for developers - part 1 . Among other features, you get single sign-on (using OpenID), data sharing, and single point admin on Google Apps Control Panel. Developers do need to pay US$100 (for any number of apps) and 20% of the revenue. Personally I consider it pretty reasonable. It's not much more than software registration companies charge (except for start fee, of course), and given their total monopoly on the particular topic (Google Apps) it's not like you could go around and choose someone else. There are several other interesting videos. I really liked the data connection integration with GMail .

DevExpress had an interesting movie about Sunk Costs. In the movie, Julian talks about Sunk Costs, and how they relate to software development - i.e.: whatever you spent into developing something (time and money) is gone. If it's not ready, you should only consider the cost going forward when comparing it to potential opportunities. Certainly something to think about...

Since it was on sale on Gamersgate, I decided to check out the Cogs demo. It's touted as an steampunk puzzle. The basis of the game is a tile slider system - much like the kid toy available since 1880 ( wikipedia ). If you like that kind of thing, you might be interested. If you are sick of them, like me, you very probably won't like it.

I just finished reading The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan. It was a very fast read, because it was quite fun and I couldn't put it down. It's another greek-mythology-really-exists-today series - another I've enjoyed (with a heavy hacking/magic as computing angle) is Webmage. This one is clearly more targeted at kids (with the 12-year old protagonists) but still very nice. I'm looking forward to the movie.

I've recently watched Quantum of Solace, the latest bond movie. It was pretty good, although the ending felt a little awkward to me. One of the things I really thought was cool was the interface the MI6 computers used in the movie. Movie of one of the segments Interesting letter from the makers A couple of stills

I've just finished reading the whole season one of Shadow Unit, an experimental short fiction effort I've mentioned before. The first few episodes were good. The final episode was worthy of any TV series. It was incredibly tense, and I ended up sleeping about 2-3 hours later than usual, because I just couldn't stop reading! Pretty awesome. It also had tons of follow up, in small hyperlinked content. That is a characteristic of Shadow Unit I've never seen anywhere as well done - now and then, there are links for small side stories, character background or sketches, links to various web pages and huge playlists. It adds up to a huge amount of extra content. On the truly unexpected side content, there was a made up transcript of the commentary of the actor about a scene. Pretty cool.

I like to check out Kongregate once in a while for flash games, and once in a while, I find one that is really great. Infectonator is a silly pro-zombie flash game, where you infect the whole world, one city at a time. You start with a weak infection tool, which can barely turn a few people into zombies. They will hunt other people down, and each time have a small chance of infecting them. There are heroes that will kill your zombies. After that, you can use your money to improve your zombies. They can last longer, infect more, be fast, stronger, etc. You can also have multiple infection shots per attack, bombs and better infection features. Along the game you can get your own zombie heroes, which are quite funny. For example, you can get a Michael Jackson zombie that is very similar to the Plant vs Zombies one, a large zombie named tanker (I presume that it's a nod up to Left 4 Dead), something similar to Ronald McDonald, Coronel Sanders,etc. Overall, it's very much worth the ...

Microsoft comes up with some cool research. Some become products, and some don't. One cool looking piece of research tech is Pivot. It provides a way to see new relationships and reorganize large collections of data. It is looking very interesting so far and the video is well worth looking at.

The new Street View feature with visualization of user photos is pretty awesome. You can view a nice example here . It's similar to Microsoft's Photosynth, but the integration with Google Maps is much better (and it doesn't require Silverlight). Also, as I understand, Photosynth only took user submitted pictures, while this is based on automatic extraction from sites such as Panoramio, Flickr and Picasa.