Google Earth

I have just found a new product offered by Google, called Google Earth. Google Earth is basically a software package which allows you to look at the world as a 3D globe, and zoom into any part. The globe is covered by sattelite images, and can be zoomed in to the point where individual people and cars can be seen. The section of the map being looked at is downloaded from Google in real time, so there is a slight lag, but it's well worth it, especially when you consider how much you get to see. I wouldn't want to use it on a dial-up connection though.

The hills and valleys are also mapped and rendered in 3D, and many features of America are mapped extensively, including gas stations, hotels etc. This is just a brilliant way to spend a few hours. You can go to the Pyramids, or check out the Grand Canyon. I checked out my parent's house and saw my red car parked out the front. It's just the coolest thing I've seen in a long time.

The entire globe is covered by sattelite images, which are updated on a 3 year rolling basis, so unfortunately you can't check on things in real time, although this is probably a good thing otherwise everyone would be conducting surveillence on each other.

Here is a screen shot of what Google Earth looks like:

As you can see, Sydney harbour, the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House.

Forgot to take my shoes to work yesterday!

I actually forgot to take my shoes to work with me yesterday. It's the first time I have done that, and it will be the last. I normally take my shoes with me and put them on just before I get out of the car. I prefer driving with bare feet. In fact, if I had my way, I would not wear shoes at all unless absolutely necessary.
On this particular day, I was late and still half-asleep (not uncommon) and I pulled up, reached to the back seat, only to realise that there were no shoes in the car. Fortunately it's not too much of a problem, as I spend most of my work day in a room by myself on the computer or packing orders. It was still embarrasing to tell my colleague, as it's something that "Only John would do", but it was all quite funny.
So I padded around in bare feet all day, which felt quite strange at work, although to be honest, if it were "professionally acceptable" I would do it more often, as I just find it comfortable. The way I see it, feet were designed to be used without shoes. Not a good idea for walking around town though.

Sydney Petrol Prices

As we all know, fuel prices in Sydney, and for that matter the rest of Australia and the world have been rising steadily, and are now hovering at around $1.40 a litre. I remember the days when it was 40c a litre. Australians traditionally drive large cars, with vehicles such as the Ford Falcon and Holden Commodore, and now the Mitsubishi Magna being some of our most popular cars. The distances are large, and big engines drive air conditioning easilly, so needless to say, many Australians are feeling the pinch.

It is probably a case of what we are used to as much as anything else, and personally, I am prepared to fork out a bit more, rather than drive less or get a smaller car. I am considering an LPG conversion at some stage though. Especially if the price gets above $2.00 a litre.

The government is coming under a lot of fire about this issue, and quite rightly so. Even though they claim the price fluctuations are out of their control, they still take a massive percentage of tax (actually two separate taxes). Whichever way they put it, their take increases every time the price of fuel goes up. They will keep the tax on as long as they possibly can, although it seems to be wearing thin now. I believe they will offer some kind of relief when the price of fuel starts to affect other industries.

Many accuse the oil companies of profiteering, and colluding to keep the price up. The pump price in Sydney goes up every Thursday, which happens to be payday for most people, and then down again just before the weekend. At the end of the day, they are maximising their profit as any other company will do. It's just that everyone uses their product, and they have a lot of power and wealth and sway over government. It's not good but it's just the way it is at the moment.

Australian release date finder for PC, X-Box and Playstation games

A friend of mine has just opened a website that lists all up and coming release dates in Australia for games. The purpose of this is to provide an easy and centralized place to go to find out what's coming out soon and when. The site is still under development, but usable, and will eventually utilize an SQL backend and feature games and merchandise for sale.

The URL of this site is www.releasedatefinder.com.

Google has fixed the 302 spam problem

A previously mentioned problem that Google was having with scraper sites hijacking URLs with dodgy 302 redirects appears to have been solved, or at least the guys at Google have it in hand. I think people expect Google to fix problems on the fly as we can with our small websites, but in reality, any change to their system must require a lot of forethought and testing, considering how vast their network is. They are working with affected webmasters to try to solve the problem, and there are now fewer scraper sites in the index, which makes searchers, webmasters, and Google all happy.

The correct way to do a 301 redirect using ASP

Today, we're going to cover the correct way using asp script to perform a 301 perminant redirect. This type of redirection is used when the resource has moved perminantly. The most common example is when redirecting domain.com to www.domain.com, in order to avoid duplicate listings in search engines.
A 301 is very different to a 302 redirect, which should NEVER be used in this case. A 302 indicates the resource has been moved temporarily. If domain.com is redirected to www.domain.com, it will cause duplicate content issues.
When using Windows remote hosting, it can be difficult to get such redirects set up or removed, as it is necessary to go through the ISP's support team. There is a way of initiating a 301 redirect from within an ASP file. This is not the response.redirect command. response.redirect will always issue a 302 redirect. The correct sequence of commands is shown below:

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.site.com/default.htm"
response.end
%>

When these redirects are performed, it happens at the server level, rather than at the HTML level. The browser never sees the ASP code, it is just read by the server, and the server knows to return the redirect code and location in the header.

You can check the header code that your server is returning for any of your pages using an online tool such as the Server Header Checker. It is always a good idea to check any new redirects with such a tool, and ensure that it is returning a 301 code, as accidently using the wrong one can have disasterous consequences.

Canonical domain urls, www and non www

I have recently experienced a traffic (and sales) drop on one of my main sites. This was to be expected as the recent changover from the Access backend to the SQL meant some downtime. Unfortunately, this downtime occured at the worst possible time, as the world's largest search engine (Google) who also happen to be that site's main source of traffic were crawling it at the time. Basically I messed up the migration, because I didn't reaslize that the whole site was going to be physically moved to another machine for the upgrade. I saw the new option the ISP had given me to create the new SQL database, so I preceeded to set everything up and migrate. Of course, the whole thing fell over once the hosting company swapped machines, as the machine name and probably several other things changed. I also had a few dramas with getting the product data imported into the SQL database, as I had made some modifications to the Access database, and had to change the SQL one accordingly.
The whole thing meant 24 hours of down time, or semi down time, as all the static pages were still working, so the site was still functioning as a product catalogue.

Now, on to the whole point of this post. Webmasters may be aware of the fact that the domain name www.site.com is different from site.com. Although ownership of a domain secures ownership of both, they are technically two different names. Normally they will just point to the same place, such as the IP address of a web server. As they are both pointing to the same web server, the same content will be returned whether the user enters www.site.com or site.com. Also of note here, is that the URL entered into the address bar will not change when the page is loaded. Therefore this is not a redirect, but an alias.
Google and probably other search engines can see this as two domains with duplicate content. This is countered by setting the non-www domain to perform a 301 Perminant redirect to the www domain, changing the address int the browser, and pointing search engine bots to the correct address. Because my hosting company cannot redirect the non www name separately, I used and ASP solution. I got them to set default.asp over default.htm the default page priority, and I made default.asp redirect everything to http://www.mysite.com/default.htm.
This has worked well, and it quickly got rid of my duplicate home pages on Google. (This was about a year ago.) But during this changeover, it turns out the ASP was down for a few hours (the default page priority was not set on the new server), and during this time, GBot crawled the root of my site and indexed the duplicate pages. It would have to be the worst timing ever. So I have cleaned the site up, redone all the sitemaps, and sent a note to Google, asking them to get rid of the duplicate entry that has appeared. it comes up mysite.com/ in the index. Now I just have to hope that all will sort it's self out.

Motorists are not using Sydney's cross city tunnel

It seems that many other motorists are also deciding to vote with their feet on the new cross city tunnel. Patronage has been less than one third of what was expected over the last two weeks since it has opened.

As previously stated, I will never use it, because if people start using these tollways, more will be built. Then before we know it, every major road in Sydney will be privately owned, inadaquate and cost money just for the privaledge of travelling on it. The citizens of Sydney need to make this toll road not work, and make these greedy enterprises who have a stranglehold over Government realize that they will not get away with ripping off every day workers, especially when it means closing existing roads to try to force people to pay to use the private road. That was the final straw for me. We are supposed to live in a country of choice, and yet, a large corporation can lobby the RTA to close roads so theirs becomes more profitable and the only available route for motorists.

Here is a rather good article that sums it up.

Upgraded main site from Access to SQL

I make a living running a large retail website, which has just hit a product count of 4000. I use the VP-ASP package, which is an open source ASP application that can be used with an MS Access, SQL or MySQL database. It's a great package, being open source, I can change, add, or modify any part of the application to suit my needs. This is crucial for an online store.

I had been using the Access back-end for about a year, and with some updates over the weekend it started to slow down considerably. Right from the start, search and any other function which called a lot of data from the database was reasonably slow (but still acceptable). After the weekend it was obvious that we had outgrown Access. I had heard bad things about running a web application from an Access database and we were starting to experience them. It makes one realize how much work the back-end database of a large, busy web application actually does.

I made the decision to upgrade to an SQL database, which involved changing our hosting plan. I also changed us to a dedicated IP address. We are using a shared web server, connected to a separate SQL server.

The changeover could have been smoother, we had issues with incompatible datasets between the Access and SQL database, and the hosting company's ODBC fell over halfway through the migration due to them shifting our domain to another server at the wrong time. We had to wait overnight for that to come back up again. We now have everything running on the new server, and are just waiting for the DNS records to catch up and start pointing to the new IP address. It still feels wired having the site down for so long. It will have to be done better than this next time, as 24 hours downtime is unacceptable.

SQL is much better for this purpose than Access was. I get whole pages of records displayed instantaneously, and search is actually usable. SQL is running this application better than I can locally on a test server and MS Access. I have read in several places that Access is not well suited to web applications, and it's true. While such a database would be acceptable for 1000-2000 records and up to 10 tables, I would not want to push it much further than that.

Dob in a hoon campaign

In Perth, WA, there is a campaign to encourage motorists to "dob in a hoon". Basically, if they see anyone driving irresponsibly they can lodge a report with the police and have it followed up, sometimes leading to car confiscations.

I don't have a problem with crackdowns on dangerous driving, and residents have every right to expect police to enforce the road rules in their residential areas to allow them to live in peace.

A problem does arise, however, when drivers can face consquences based soley on heresay evidence from another motorist. We're not talking a small fine here either, were talking confiscation of your car for up to three months, which could have dire consequences on someone's life and career. I have already heard of a case where a guy was reported doing 250 on a highway (which his car wasn't even capable of). After having the police at the door, it turned out that an angry female reported him, to get back at him over another matter.

If/when they introduce this stuid idea in NSW, I will be reporting every second car I see, and I will be urging other motorists to do the same. If they get an influx of complaints which are obviously bogus or trivial, they will soon see that the system is unworkable (Pretty obvious I would have thought).

We need to do this, otherwise it's likely that Australia will become a place where the police are knocking on your door to take your car away after the slightest altercation with someone.

GTech Pro accelerometer

I just purchased a GTech performance meter from E-Bay for $50. I always heard that these things are $250, so I wasn't sure if this one was going to be any good. I know the name GTech though and remember wanting one years ago, so I brought it.

I'm surprised at how useful it has proven to be so far. It is a small device about the size of a pager, and it sticks to the inside of the windscreen with a suction cap attachment, which is adjustable to make it level. The power lead plugs into the cigarette lighter. The main factor is having it perfectly horizontal at all times during use. When it is switched on, it displays a real time g-force reading, and it can be adjusted on it's mounting bracket until it reads zero. The only problem is if you have a car which squats or wheel-stands when it launches, as the pitch change causes gravity to offset the readings. Apparently there is a new GTech unit which measures g-force on multiple axes, and can compensate for this. This is probably why mine was available so cheaply.

Here is the GTech Pro website for anyone that's interested.

It only arrived today, so I've only had a chance to do the 0-100kph test (actually 0-60mph as it's made in the USA). It's hard to find a dead flat, quarter mile long stretch of road to stop in the middle of before blasting down it at full throttle around here:) It got 9.2 seconds with a heap of wheel spin, and then 8.3 seconds with a more sedated launch. The factory specs are 8 seconds for the V6, so I'm pretty pleased with that. I'm sure I can get them faster. I'm not used to doing launches any more having had the Subaru for so long, so it's going to take a bit of practise to get up to scratch again. The idea to to have it on the edge of traction, but not breaking it, right from the start of motion. Easier said than done in a car with a heap of power (8-10 times more than mine).

The other tests it does are 60mph-0 stopping distance in feet, instant G-force readings, quarter mile terminal speed, and rear wheel horsepower. I will post the results when I get a chance to do those tests.

GTechs are cool and I recommend them so far. I wouldn't pay $250 for it, but for $50 it's a great guide to the performance of a car. I always used to think my car was slower some days, or worry it was not making all it's power for some reason. Some modifications make the car louder or sound different can make a car "feel" faster when it actually isn't. A loud, low car with rock hard suspension will feel faster than a new 7 BMW with the same acceleration.

I'll post up here if I have any hassles with it.

Dynamic (SEO) titles on Blogger blogs

I just got around to making all the individual post pages on this blog have the page titles reflect the title of the post, rather than the main title of the blog. I found this simple way:

In the Template section of the Blogger dashboard, replace this code:
<title><$BlogPageTitle$></title>
with this:
<mainpage> <blogger><title><$BlogPageTitle$></title></blogger> </mainpage><itempage> <blogger><title><$BlogItemTitle$></title></blogger> </itempage>
and each page of your blog will have different title text, that reflects the contents of that page. There is more about this here in the Blogger help section.

Faulty earth connection from TPS and coolant temp sensor.

I have fixed a common fault with the wiring on the VP/VN Commodores. There is a cable run under the engine bay which goes from the TPS, Oxygen sensor, and IAC solenoid. This run joins to the main loom just behind the alternator. Inside this cable run (under the convoluted tubing and tape) there is a black wire with a yellow trace that joins to two other wires. I understand this is a shared earth between the IAC and coolant temp sensor. The crimps on these connections are not soldered, and over the years the connections corrode and deteriorate. This then causes an incorrect signal from these sensors to be read by the ECU, which makes the idle rough.
I unwrapped the entire run (horrible job), and soldered all the crimps (there are some others along the run too). The idle is now much smoother, because the ECU knows what's happening. I would do this on any of these cars still running a standard wiring loom.

Castrol Formula R 10W60 - Brilliant oil

I had a feeling that the oil I had put in the Commodore was a bit too thin. It had developed a noisy lifter or two and wasn't running all that smoothly. I changed it for a fully synthetic oil yesterday, and although it cost a lot more for the oil, I recon it's well worth the money. I used Nulon Engine Flush to get the old mineral stuff out and it now idles smoother, which I didn't expect. I think it's possible that one of the hydraulic tappets was blocked and not extending fully, causing the valve lift on one cylinder to decrease slightly. I have never seen this much improvement from a simple change/upgrade of oil. The engine even seems to be making more power. The thing that struck me was how loud the injectors were, then I realised that it was because the rest of the engine was so much quieter than before.
I'm now planning to send the spare heads away to be crack and pressure tested and reconditioned, and maybe some larger valves. Although the engine idles better, it's still not perfect, and I think the valves on the head that I did not remove may not be sealing properly. Of course, I will be purchasing a compression tester this week so I can test them myself, as it could also be a number of other things, and I won't bother doing the heads yet if the compression is okay. I want to get the manual conversion done before any engine work happens.
One possibility is a faulty connection where the earth wires to the throttle position sensor and engine temperature sensor join to go to a common earth point. I have heard that these wires are crimped together and not soldered, they corrode over the years and cause the engine to idle roughly. I need to remove a lot of tape to get to these connections and am not looking forward to it. It will probably happen tomorrow, if I have time after bodywork. (Removing badges, sanding and finishing bonnet paint repairs, cleaning interior, and finishing rust repair of boot.)
I got a front grille, and a new glovebox (mine was broken) from EBay last week. I haven't recieved them yet, but so far the process has been easy enough. We'll see how it goes. If I get the goods this week, I will be buying a lot more off EBay in the future, as it is quite fun and easy, especially when you don't have much time for regular shopping. I find it hard to get my regular groceries, let alone exotic car parts.

Harold Scruby shows his true colours, abusing motorists via email

This newspaper article, taken from The Courier Mail, illustrates the true character of self proclaimed "road safety" activist, Harold Scruby. He is more of a road safety extremist, with his fanatical views that he wants to impose on the motoring public of Australia.

Safety campaigner traffics in insults
Amanda Watt
09oct04

THE acrimonious relationship between the Pedestrian Council of Australia and motoring enthusiasts has been exposed in an exchange of abusive e-mails involving the council's high-profile chairman Harold Scruby.

Mr Scruby, 57 ? who regularly comments on road safety issues and is behind the annual Walk to Work day ? called one writer a "little cretin" and told him to "go clean your grease nipples".

In another e-mail he referred to car enthusiasts as "petrol-head Neanderthals" and told another writer to "go away and play with your muffler and leave road safety to people who at least attended high school".

"Were you bullied at school?

"Did your parents hate you? Perhaps you missed the breast-feeding bit? Low IQ perhaps! Something must explain your behaviour," Mr Scruby wrote.

The exchanges were sparked by e-mail inquiries to Mr Scruby from motorists incensed by the pedestrian council's success in getting a Mitsubishi Magna television advertisement withdrawn. The advertisement depicted cars racing.

Other e-mails to Mr Scruby questioned the motivation behind the council's campaigns.

Mr Scruby, who has attracted support from all levels of government for his annual walking campaign, initially said he didn't recall writing the e-mails when contacted by The Courier-Mail this week.

He later said he had only resorted to childish taunts after being inundated with more than 100 abusive e-mails ? including some that made threats. One e-mail writer told Mr Scruby: "Stab yourself in the face with a pencil, we will all pay $20 to see that."

Mr Scruby said that he had simply "tried to humour" the e-mail writers.

"No expletives were used and I made no threats against them," he said. "If we got reasonable letters we responded reasonably, but when we got hillbilly stuff then I responded (in kind).

"It's not acceptable to be spammed like this by a group that is clearly well-organised, their attempt now is to undermine my position. My nature is if people write to me foul, disgusting e-mails they can expect something in return."

But one of the e-mailers, James Stevenson, said the head of the Pedestrian Council of Australia should not be ridiculing road users wishing to debate him on safety.

The e-mail exchanges, many of which have been reproduced on Internet forums, have prompted Mr Stevenson to form a lobby group on behalf of car enthusiasts.

Mr Stevenson said the Australian Drivers Group, was still in the initial stages of development, but had already attracted 150 pledges from those wishing to join. He has written to several politicians about Mr Scruby's e-mails asking if there was any way of disbanding the council on the basis of his comments.


"Please have a read of Mr Scruby's responses and confirm that this is the kind of representation you would find acceptable from a safety council," Mr Stevenson wrote. "In my opinion he is running dangerously close to being charged with slander or defamation."