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.