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2011: Posts Of The Year

Michael Wyres — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 22:00:08 +0000

I certainly hope my readers have had a safe and happy holiday period. Today, I have decided to take a quick look at back at my popular posts from 2011, with the most read articles for each month, and a little discussion of each.

If 2012 throws up some similar results, it will be another good year! Enjoy!

January: Single Point of Failure

V/Line commuters on the Geelong line, and Metro Trains commuters on the Werribee and Williamstown lines have endured another year of extensive “track equipment faults” at Newport station – and nothing ever seems to be done about it.

“Now, I’m the first to accept that unexpected things happen all the time, and that running an integrated public transport network is undoubtedly difficult, but the regularity of problems at Newport are becoming monotonous.”

February: NBN: End User Services Taking Shape

The rollout of the National Broadband Network (NBN) gathered pace in 2011, and at their February industry forum, the shape of end user services began appearing before our eyes.

“For the market, this means that the providers who innovate and deliver the best products over the network will emerge on top. The competition will be furious.”

March: Online Piracy Not The Problem

Copyright holders want us to believe that we are killing their business models through online piracy, but is it us or them who are to blame?

“The sooner they adopt digital, storage-format-agnostic distribution of their content, the sooner people will stop downloading material in those formats.”

April: NBN: Hands On The Hardware

This article was actually paired with the top February article, but reared its head with a lot of page impressions in April.

“I managed to get a few moments with the hardware that end users will receive when their premises are connected to the network progressively over the next nine years.”

May: Alan Jones And The NBN Fail!

In the midst of another of his on-air anti-government rants, Alan Jones demonstrated for the masses how little knowledge – (or willingness to research) – he has when it comes to the NBN, and this page generated a lot of views thanks to re-tweets from the ABC’s Mark Colvin and Latika Bourke.

“If you are going to jump up and down, Alan Jones, make sure you do a bit of research first, instead of instantaneously jumping at an opportunity to forward your political agenda. Your idiocy will remain on the interwebz forever, Mr Jones.”

June: New Timetable Improves Little

Back to V/Line and another attempt to “improve services” which appears to have delivered little to long suffering commuters.

“We were promised by V/Line that “these changes follow several months of work with Metro and feedback from our customers“. Oh really? Customers asked for slower trains?”

July: The Australian FUDs It Again

Rupert Murdoch’s various media interests – (and particularly in Britain) – have taken a hammering this year. In Australia, they’ve fought a long campaign against the government, criticising it in news reporting and editorial position at almost every turn – trying to be the news, rather than report it.

“Stop trying to make news, and actually report the news. Ironic that you are called “News Limited” – since your ability to report “news” seems rather “limited” at times.”

August: HP Shipping Fail – You Just Have to See This!

This was not the most highly read article on my site for the year, but it was certainly the fastest moving article – at its peak managing several hundred views an hour. Four months later, this one still stuns me!

“If your goal is to be “exemplary global citizens”, I’m sorry HP – you fail.”

September: A Simple NBN Maths Lesson

The financial critics of the NBN project generally scream blue-murder about where the money to pay for it will come from. Some fairly simple second-grade mathematics is all it really takes – demonstrating some quite astonishing revenues for even a relatively weak uptake of network services.

“That’s where the money is coming from folks! And it will come a lot quicker than many would have you believe.”

October: Waltrip: Bathurst A “Geological Oddity”

October saw three-time NASCAR champion Darrell Waltrip visit Mount Panorama, for the first live broadcast of our Bathurst 1000 into the United States. Interested in what it is like inside the cars on our famous circuit, Jason Bright made sure DW will never forget his first visit!

“It was television gold, and DW seemed genuinely stunned by the experience.”

November: Opposition “NBN” Plan To Cost More?

Opposition communications spokesperson, Malcolm Turnbull has been spouting for months about the “reckless” cost of the NBN – where it is starting to come to the fore that his alternative plan, though cheaper in the short term, will be far more expensive over time – a few shared by many, including the ACCC.

“Over time, the opposition plan will cost more than the current intention of building a full FTTH (better) network, before we even consider the lost benefits to the economy.”

December: Screw You, Greedy Music Industry

Copyright protection is a hot topic at the moment, but information that emerged in December showed that the music industry is not suffering as much as they would have us believe – if at all.

“It isn’t downloads that are killing your industry – it is your own overpricing greed and lack of vision that’s doing it.”

Browser Update 2011

Michael Wyres — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 22:21:39 +0000

With just a few days left in 2011, I’ve taken a moment to have a look at the web statistics for this site, with a view to having a look at how the ongoing browser wars are travelling.

In March, I had a look at how things had been over the previous six months, and found that Google Chrome was emerging as the big winner over that period.

I was, however, curious to have a look at a bigger picture over the last four years for which I have detailed statistics – and while it has slipped a lot, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer isn’t quite dead yet.

The following table shows the annual percentage of hits on this site since 2008, that have originated from browsers identifying themselves as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Apple Safari – the four main browsers in the marketplace these days:

	2008	2009	2010	2011

IE	46.1%	65.2%	48.8%	27.9%
Chrome	-	3.2%	9.9%	20.1%
Firefox	21.2%	20.0%	22.4%	25.8%
Safari	3.7%	3.8%	6.9%	9.0%

The most obvious thing to note from these numbers, is that while Internet Explorer’s market share has taken a hammering over the last couple of years – (dropping from 65.2% in 2009 to 27.9% in 2011) – it still leads the field.

On a monthly basis however, Chrome often beats IE into first place.

I feel that tends to be because of the subject matter I post month to month – in months that I post a lot of “techy” or “nerdy” stuff, Chrome tends to win – suggesting that Chrome has gotten, or is getting, a foothold amongst the geeks. I don’t think this is a surprise.

In months where I post predominantly other kinds of material, Internet Explorer does well.

Interestingly, the share of the market held by Firefox – the previous geek favourite – has remained relatively stable across the four years, and actually recorded its best year on this site in 2011. Go figure.

Perennially fourth placed Safari is still on the rise – but I suspect this is largely due to the proliferation of the Safari-equipped Apple iPad and iPhone in the community. For this reason, Safari’s share will be interesting to watch over time.

While Internet Explorer remains on top – (at least with visitors to my site) – it is clear that the massive share of the market it previously enjoyed is on the wain.

It seems the majority of people who have jumped the IE ship have landed on Chrome, but even Firefox – (which by anecdotal evidence seemed to be on the slide) – appears to have picked up some of the IE refugees, with a healthy gain in 2011.

Internet Explorer still rules – but the challengers have their foot on its throat.

A Subtle Site Refresh

Michael Wyres — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 02:23:15 +0000

I have just rolled out a subtle refresh to the appearance of this site. Regular visitors will know that it is largely based on the old theme, with a few nips and tucks to give it a spruce up.

This update was also in response to the users of some mobile devices – (particularly early Android devices) – who have pointed out that their devices were not correctly rendering the CSS. This should now be fixed for the most part.

Please let me know if you spot anything odd!

New Link Shortener!

Michael Wyres — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 09:04:37 +0000

As the next stage of a series of updates and changes I will be making to my site, tonight I unveil my new link-shortening URL. Shortened links will now appear with the “mwyr.es” domain, adding a little more personality to my ramblings.

Stay tuned for more updates over the coming weeks.

Site Power Works

Michael Wyres — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 02:46:19 +0000

Just a quick update for regular readers – there will be some unexpected power remediation works at one location where part of this site is hosted this afternoon, so there will be a short period of degraded service. The site will be up, but there will be errors in the right hand column of the pages.

It should hopefully only be for a few minutes when it happens – so everything will be back to 100% after a short break.

The exact time is not known at this stage.

Now Mobile Enabled

Michael Wyres — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:30:19 +0000

Just a quick update about some site changes – some minor backend changes that won’t particularly be visible, but importantly, when viewing on smartphones, you should now see a mobile version of the site.

If anyone spots anything unusual with the mobile version, please drop me a line and let me know!

Against the ANZAC Spirit: ISP Filtering

Michael Wyres — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:09:36 +0000

Our ANZAC heroes fought long and hard in many different wars to fight off threats towards the freedom of our great nation. Australia would not be what it is today without their selfless devotion to this country. On this ANZAC Day holiday morning, I have been doing some coding to make my archive of articles on Australia’s proposed mandatory internet filtering more readily available.

I certainly did not set out to do this as an ANZAC tribute, but I when I realised that although ANZAC Day was yesterday, and that today is the national public holiday we have to celebrate it – (normally the same day, but with the 25th falling on a Sunday this year, the holiday is today) – I could not help but feel a sense of irony.

The ANZACs fought for our liberty against foreign threats. I am sure that many would be devastated that the latest threat to our freedom comes from within. Government controlled censorship. The buffoons in charge of this policy say “it is only about blocking refused classification (RC) material”. There is nothing to stop them from refusing classification to anything they choose.

That’s why their list will remain secret. That is how they are planning to restrict our freedoms online. At a time where we celebrate the pride our nation has for its forefathers, I’m not feeling a lot of pride for those who are here in power now.

Better Cross Posting

Michael Wyres — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 02:06:55 +0000

In my ongoing development of MAWstatus, I have just completed some changes to make cross posting to Twitter and Facebook more reliable.

I discovered this morning that one of my scripts received an error code back from an API that I had never seen before, so I had to make some minor changes to accommodate that – so at the same time I have rolled out my Twitter auto-tagging feature, meaning that tags on my postings here will automagically become hashtags over on Twitter.

I’ve also fixed an annoying “Operation Aborted” error message that you sometimes get when viewing with Internet Explorer – all the more reason not to use it though, I say!

Have a good weekend!