Andrew J. Page

I've updated Baruchs LaTex thesis template. Enjoy.

Opera Mini - Easy to use web browser. It should be the first thing you install.

Fring - Universal instant messenger and VOIP application. It works with MSN, Gtalk, Yahoo, Skype, Twitter etc.... Its very easy to use, and allows you to stay connected all the time. This alone is a killer app.

Gmail - If you use Gmail, get the mobile application. Its fast and neat. You cant send attachments however.

Google Maps - Get satellite photos and maps on your phone. Can pinpoint your approximate location (to the nearest cell tower).

Train timetables - Stripped down interface to the Irish Rail website, without all the bloat.

The logical operator for NOT Equals in Matlab is ~= rather than !=
So not is ~ in matlab, compared to ! in Java/C/Perl etc....

Bigulo has performed more than 5 million searches since Sept 2006 (14 months). Its still going strong, with a constantly high level of traffic (and very low bounce rate). On average each visitor looks at 5 pages per visit.

I googled for something from Politics.ie today and came across a Chinese domain leecher. They had setup http://poitics-ie.hostsoft.us (now blocked) and were redirecting their DNS to the Politics.ie server. Thus they were leeching off our pagerank (and content) and succeeded in getting 1200 URLs into the Google index (with our content). They then either sell the domain (with a temporarily high pagerank) or replace the pages with ads and steal some of our referrals. Anyone using that domain now gets a 403 error.

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We went for a hike last weekend, its great what can be done with gps

In Linux, this command will find all .tex files in your home dir, tar and gzip them, then save them to a /backup folder. The name of the file is the current time. Just pop it into cron, and away you go, automatic daily backups

tar -zcf /home/andrew/backup/`date +%s`.tx.tgz `locate ".tex" | grep andrew` >/dev/null 2>&1

Heres a bit of useless but interesting info for you. This complex, which looks very nondescript from the ground, is where Ireland prints and distributes money. From Google maps you can see the unusual roads around it and pillboxes (presumably for machine guns). Every now and again you'll see heavily armed convoys of ordinary articulated trucks heading into it.


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The housing market appears to be going down the tubes, but its difficult to see that that is the case. So I decided to visualise all of the houses currently for sale in Athy, Co.Kildare on a timeline, based on when they were first put up for sale on daft.ie.

I picked Athy because its advertised as 1 hour from Dublin (well the border of Co.Dublin), and since its so far out its very at risk in an unstable housing market. And as you can see, theres loads and loads of houses for sale for an extended period of time.

Timeline of houses for sale in Athy


I've only tested it in Firefox, so if your using IE, tough luck.

Theres daily news reports about how the property market is on its last legs, but yet theres few hard facts. Most "facts" are innuendo, or from business forecasts. Estate agents wont release hard facts because they probably think it will make things worse. So I decided to check things out for myself on Daft.ie, the largest property website in Ireland.

First off Daftwatch has shown a steady increase in the number of properties for sale in Ireland, which either means theres more people selling houses every month, or houses are on the market for longer and the backlog is getting bigger. So keep reading to see the stats.

Percentage increase in the number of properties on the market since beginning of year:
85% - Nationwide (26,000 to 48,000)
87% - Dublin

I implimented an automatic tagging system a while ago for phpbb, which calculates the most commonly occuring words in a thread and saves them as tags. A user can then click on a tag to find other threads tagged with the same word.



They can then see all of the threads with this tag on a nice interactive timeline, can click on a thread on the timeline to see the 1st post, or drag it to see a different point in time.

Interesting ad in the Phoenix.

Some people have thousands of friends on social networking sites. Just look at this list of Bebo users, sorted by number of friends. Mouse over the stars and you see that some people have 8,000 friends. Whats more unbeliveable is that 15,000 people have befriended a commercial product!

With the upcoming elections Politics.ie has seen its traffic explode, trippling in 2 weeks from 30k pageviews per day to 100k pageviews per day. Six months ago it was only 15k pageviews per day and when it got to the 30k mark we got ourselves a new dual Xeon to keep up.

So heres some things I've done over the past while to reduce the load on the server to cope with the huge increase in traffic.

Installed eXtreme styles template caching mod - this precomplies the templates phpBB uses.

Removed the CSS from being included inline in each page to a standalone style file saving 12kb per page.

Caching of pages - the most viewed pages are the latest discussions page, the landing page and the index.php page. So by taking a snapshot of each every few minutes, and serving those out, that cut down on the number of pages to be dynamic ally generated. Very simply I just put a check at the top of the php scripts to see if the url matched e.g. '/latest.php' and served out a copy if it did. Only a few pages are suitable to caching. Nobody has complained so far, so it must be working fine.

Turned on mod_expires in apache and set images & javascript to expire in 1 month, thus they will be cached along the way. The mod_mem_cache isnt suitable because of the dynamic nature of most of the pages on the site.

Logged into Googles webmaster tools and asked Google to slow down their crawling (they were asking for 80k pages per day).

I've also optimized the mysql queries, but thats for another day. All in all the above things reduced the load a fair bit, but the load is continuously rising so the reduced load is used up.

Sage Tyrtle has taken my How to choose a wife booklet and turned it into a very funny audioplay. Its available as a podcast.

Over 2 million searches have now been performed by the Bigulo search engine. It took 6 months to get the first million, and only 2 months to get the second million.

Bigulo has been up to some other stuff too. A bebo irish celeb page was launched a few weeks ago, letting you find people like the cast of Glenroe and Podge & Rodge.

A page for the general election in ireland which lets you find the bebo pages of Irish election candidates was also launched. This got loads of media coverage with interviews by over a dozen radio stations including RTE1, 2FM, TodayFM, Spin1038, FM104 etc...