Woopra
I heard just heard about another web analytics program today called Woopra. I have to be honest and say that my first reaction is that I’m quite happy with Google’s Analytics. However, after watching this video, I can’t wait to try it for my sites. Looks like fun.
Termites
Speed Up Your Internet Access
Conspiracy?
Pink Floyd released the “Take in Back” music video in 1994. I worked long hours on one shot in the video for two weeks, laying it off to tape only minutes before our producer had to board a red-eye flight to Florida for the editing session the next morning.
12 years later I received this email with this image and the following message:
Excel Dates Incompatible from PC to Mac?
I discovered an amazing “bug” in excel tonight. I needed to create a copy of part of a spreadsheet into a new sheet. See if you can spot the difference between the original on the left and the new spreadsheet on the right:

You’ll notice that the dates are off by exactly 4 years and 1 day after a simple cut-and-paste into a fresh spreadsheet. It took a little while to figure out why this was happening.
Force an email through
Every once in a while, emails get stuck in my webserver’s mail queue behind a backlog of spam. Here are a few useful commands from this article to push the legit mails that are hanging out in /var/spool/mqueue/:
CPU Benchmarks circa 1997
About 10 years ago we were curious to see how our SGI’s stacked up against other processors in terms of rendering power. We chose a “highly complicated” scene to render with PovRay since it was available for many systems and collected the results.
We just recently re-ran the benchmark on a modern computer and you’ll notice the update at the top of the table. Read more »
The Ebb and Flow
The NY Times prepared an interesting graph showing movie grosses for the last 10+ years. Interesting to see the shapes of gross earnings over time.
Do actors really matter anymore?
ABC News visited Sony Imageworks to confirm that actors really are important for mocap movies. View their 4 minute piece on the subject.
Quicktime Quality
For some reason, Quicktime will choose the lowest quality stream when viewing video (by default.) This is particularly noticeable when you are watching DV footage since DV encoded avi’s have both a high quality and a low quality stream. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to watch the low quality stream on any modern computer, but at least it’s easy to fix.

Simply open Quicktime Preferences and make sure the above line is checked.


