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Name That Caption Contest

February 2, 2010 in General | No comments

With this short post I’m participating in a contest started by Thomas LaRock.  He has written a book called DBA Survivor: Become a Rock Star DBA and is giving a copy away to the winner of the contest.

In the banner I see a man looking out of a window at a grey, dull world.  Based on that info, here’s my caption title:

SQL Server – Color Your Day!

And here’s another one:

Waiting for that report to finish?  Hire A DBA!

See this post on his blog for more info.

PS: first post from Windows 7 64-bit :-)

Have fun!

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The LNCP

January 19, 2010 in General | No comments

Before you read what I’ve written below, I suggest that you have a look at this blog post by Tim Ford first.  Then it will become clear why this post is not related to SQL Server or even IT :-)

Let me tell you this little story about Luke, a bloke living down the street not far from the city center.  Well, it was a Friday night and he was going to the pub, just like he usually does on Friday nights.  It’s his favorite pub, the LNCP, and he has a habit of meeting his mates there.  The LNCP, some people say it stands for the Live Nude Cats Pub because that’s what they’ve seen there after they’d had several drinks too many.  Or at least, that’s what they think and claim to have seen.  Luke wouldn’t know and he doesn’t mind, he’s allergic to cats anyway, nude or not!

LNCP, the real meaning is Local Natural Coffee Pub, which is a beverage that you can get there 24/7.  It’s known for its high level of several substances, including caffeine obviously. But also some other rather undefined ingredients.  The locals have come to appreciate this beverage – just like Luke – and especially in the weekend they consume quite a lot of it.  The pub owner doesn’t want to give away her secret, no one knows how this magical drink is created.  In fact, all that she’s told them about it so far is that the brewing process is done by simply using some magical tool, library or bong.  Which isn’t of much use to those who’ve tried to reproduce it at home.  They’ve searched all local libraries for books containing its formula, nothing.  They’ve asked around if there were any wizards who knew of magical tools that could produce such a drink, no result either.  And let’s not mention the bong – that’s what they’d use after yet another unsuccessful search to temporarily forget about the fact that once again they hadn’t succeeded.

Anyway, Carabella – which is the pub owner’s name – she was quite good-looking.  (Isn’t that always the case with female pub owners in a fantasy story?)  And Luke and his mates, as they were regular customers, they knew her quite well.  And it happened to be that on this Friday night she showed them a special little hidden door at the back of her pub.  She told them, if you drink three of my magical LNCs in less than five minutes time and then walk (or better, crawl, as the door was quite low) through this door, you’ll experience the most magical moment in your life!

So the guys – they didn’t have any other plans that night and they were quite curious after what she’d told them – they accepted the offer.  They went through the door and came in a sort of stable.  Looked a bit like a horse stable, only, it was different.  They didn’t really know why, figured it was probably just some magic playing around with them.  Then suddenly a little white horse came out from under the hay.  It spoke to Luke!  The guys first wondered about what was happening and then they saw: the pony had wings, it was a Pegasus!  And as everyone knows, Pegasus can communicate with humans.

The Pegasus said to Luke:

Could I assist you in any way?

Luke thought about it for a while but answered negatively.  Although they are strong creatures, he wouldn’t know why he would need assistance from a Pegasus.  But the little pony insisted and said:

Are you sure?

But yeah, Luke was sure.

One of his mates shouted out that there was a door at the other end of the stable and suggested they should go and have a look.

Behind this door there was a magical landscape: a huge valley filled with large fruit trees singing all kinds of song, birds in many colors looking like rainbows all around, animals in all kinds of shapes.  But there’s one problem.  A huge problem.  They are located at the top of a very steep mountain!  When Luke will look out the door the first time, he will appreciate the gorgeous landscape but as soon as he looks down he’s going to be very sad about the pony, or better, about the fact that he refused the pony’s help!  Because after all – as everyone knows – Pegasus can fly, even the small ones!

Then Luke woke up, all sweaty and reeking of something, he didn’t immediately know what it was.  When he looked down he noticed that he was in the middle of some horse dung in a stable he didn’t recognize.  He heard something move behind his back and turned around to face a small horse.  He vaguely seemed to know this animal.  Suddenly it spoke to him:

As I’ve started, so I’ll finish!  Would you require my help?

Luke thought about it for a moment and replied:

Sure, I’ll take your help.

Then the horse said:

Well done young Skywalker!  Just ask George “Let’s Have Padme Die Of A Broken Heart Instead Of Anakin Crushing Her To Death” Lucas what on earth LNCP stands for next time you see him.

And the little white horse took off its mask, or better, her mask.  Luke didn’t know what was going on but heard her say:

Shall we have a shower?  You really need to get rid of that smell!

Luke didn’t need to think twice this time!

Morale to the story: any man given a second chance should think twice about it before answering!

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Publishing Articles On Experts Exchange

December 13, 2009 in General | 3 comments

Since a while now, about two months and a bit to be exact, I’ve been publishing some of my articles on Experts Exchange.  It all started when their Content Coordinator found my blog and convinced me to start doing that, thanks for that Jenn (aka jennhp)!

In total I have now six articles published and four of them are EE Approved.  What does that mean?

EE-Approved is a designation awarded by the Page Editors to show that your Article is of superior quality: either it discusses something new, or provides a unique and original solution to a particularly interesting problem. If your article is selected as EE-Approved, you will receive 1,500 points.

When I published my first article back in September, getting an article EE Approved earned me 1,500 additional points on top of the 500 for getting it published.  This was recently changed to 4,000.  Which I really appreciate and I think was needed to make this a success.  When comparing the effort that goes into writing a good article with the effort to decently answer a 500 points question I think it is still not comparable.  A question can earn me 2,000 points (when the answer gets A-graded, most of my answers do) in just a couple of minutes – which doesn’t mean that all questions are solved this easily,  believe me.  But an article always takes several hours to write and publish.  Just to give you an idea: for my last article it took me one hour just to get it converted from my version in Live Writer to the tagged format expected by the “Write a new article” feature.  But then again, the minimum length requirements for an article is 300 words while my last article counted close to 2,500 words.

What should I conclude from the above paragraph?  That I should learn to make my articles shorter?  Or that Article Points and Expert Points received by answering questions are not comparable?  Well, probably both.  What I should learn is to split articles up when possible, but I will still keep mentioning the necessary details which in my opinion increases the quality indicator :-)

Anyway, it seems that I’ve been doing a good job because this is what the situation looked like on November 23, 2009.  Following screenshots were taken while filtering on Microsoft articles.

Five articles in Microsoft top 10

Not only did my articles control the Top 3 of most popular Microsoft articles,  they were also at position nine and ten, so in total I had five of my articles in the Top 10.

(The filter on Microsoft articles is highlighted in green btw.)

Highlighted on the left you can see one of my articles being featured.  This is a result of it being EE Approved.

As the next two screenshots show, it wasn’t the only one.

One of my EE Approved articles featured at Experts Exchange

And here’s number three:

My "Pie Chart Techniques" article feature at Experts Exchange

On that same page we can also see the Top 25 of Microsoft Contributors.  I was at position 7 with almost 15,000 points.  (Today I am at position 6, with about 20,000 points.)

Me at position 7 in the Top 25 of Microsoft article writers

So, why am I doing this?  Let’s see, I have several reasons:

  • I hope people will find them useful, which means I have been able to teach them something
  • It helps to improve my writing skills
  • It encourages me to explore details about certain topics that I wouldn’t need to explore otherwise
  • It brings me into contact with interesting people
  • I found out that writing can actually be a fun thing to do!
  • Points == T-shirts :-)

Right, so I started this post by thanking someone, let’s finish it the way it started.

I’d like to thank mark_wills for his enthusiasm and support.  He’s the Page Editor that has reviewed my articles and selected several for the EE Approved status (in cooperation with mwvisa1 I believe).  Just to make sure I haven’t missed anyone, I’d like to say thanks to all Page Editors that have approved my articles!

If you’d like to have a look at the articles, they are mentioned in my profile at Experts Exchange.  While you’re at it, if you like them I wouldn’t mind if you clicked that little YES button :-)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some articles to write.  (In an attempt to control the Top 5 – erm, yeah right – just kidding of course.)

Happy reading!

Valentino.

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Blog.AgeInYears == 1

August 2, 2009 in General | No comments

Now that my blog is about one year old (first article: 2008/07/27) it’s time to have a look at some statistics.  To analyze my blog’s usage I’m using Google Analytics.

Ow, I like Numb3rs btw.  I guess that’s one of the prerequisites to be a professional in the Business Intelligence zone of expertise.

Some General Statistics

Let’s start off with this interesting graph:

Visitors overview graph for one year

What the chart shows is the number of visitors for a whole year, starting at nothing and nicely going up to about 100 per day.  In case you’re wondering why the drawing looks like an irregular sine graph, every cycle represents one week with the lowest parts being the weekend.  Which means that my blog is not as popular during off-time periods as it is during working hours.  Looking at its content that’s normal and acceptable.

Taking a more detailed look, the first few months are good for the lowest amounts of visitors.  Which is logical of course as my blog was built up from scratch.  In 2008 a peak day was 31 visits on November 26.  After New Year’s day, visits started increasing.  This is explained by the fact that the most popular article until now was posted on November 11 (more on that later) and that more and more posts are being added every month.  Some other peak moments were February 23 counting 54 visits, May 28 having 80 visits and July 21 with 108 visits, currently the record!

Some more general numbers

Articles: 41 (well, 42 after I post this one, what a coincidence :-) )

Comments: 36

Visits (whole year): 8,898

Unique visitors (whole year): 7,322

Pageviews (whole year): 10,931

Highest number of visits in one day: 108

Countries where visits came from: 118

The Visitors

Following is some information about you, the visitor.

Geography

Where are you coming from?

World map showing numbers of visits over a year

Most visitors, 35% to be precise, came from the US.  Here’s the top 5:

Top 5 countries where visits came from

Belgium is at second place with almost 10%.  In most cases this would be weird for such a small country but as I’m Belgian it is quite normal and just a matter of social connections.

Browser, Operating System and screen

What are you using to read my blog?

The most popular browser is Internet Explorer, with almost 62%.  Firefox is second with 31%, followed by Chrome with 5%.

Taking a closer look at browser versions for Internet Explorer we see that 7.0 is the most popular with 61%, followed by 6.0 at 22% and 8.0 at 17%.

For Firefox this statistic is a bit harder to read.  Let’s just say 3.0 is the more popular one when looking at the whole past year.  Here are some details in graphic form:

Firefox versions visiting my blog

When looking at the figures of last month we see that FF 3.5 was picked up quite well with 3.5 good for 19% and 3.5.1 counting 17%.

As for operating system the numbers are not very challenging: 98.45% is using Windows, followed by Macintosh with 1% and Linux with 0.5%.  Apparently my blog had 2 visits from an iPhone as well.

Now, a closer look into what version of Windows is being used.  Almost 70% uses XP, followed by Vista with 22%.  Windows 7 is not mentioned at all although I’ve used it to visit my blog.  Hmm, I wonder what happens with pre-release versions of OSes in Google Analytics…

The resolution at which you’re reading my blog is very diverse, 102 different screen resolution settings were used in this one year of visits.  The most popular are these:

Most popular screen resolutions

The lowest one in this list would be 1024×768.  The template that my blog currently uses is 720 pixels wide.  I’ve been wanting to make the detail part a bit wider, this now confirms that I can do that without disturbing too many users.  Now it’s just a matter of finding some spare time :-)

Traffic Sources and keywords

How do you get on my blog?

The source that gives me the most visitors is Google with 72%, so no contest here either.  10% of you is going directly to my blog, without any search engine and another 10% is reaching my blog through blog.n-technologies.be, which is Ordina’s blog where some of my posts are being duplicated.

Bing is at position 6 with 0.86% but this number is not fair because Bing didn’t exist when my blog started.  If we look at the statistics of last month we see Bing at the fourth position with 3%.  Although still no competition for Google, it’s the second search engine in the list.  I’m interested to see how this will evolve.  Only time can tell :-)

Concerning the keywords used to find my blog the story is not that easy.  In total 5,120 different key phrases have been used during this past year.  Looking at the global list does not tell me that much except that “kb948109” is the most popular one with 1.18%, obviously leading to the article about this particular KB.

The Content

What are you reading the most?

This is as far as I’m concerned the more interesting part because it tells me what articles are the most popular and thus gives me an indication what people are looking for.  It’s also satisfying to see a new article go up in the list.

Let’s have a look at the most popular articles since I started my blog.  One article is far ahead of all the others, with almost 23%.  That article is Calling a web service from SQL Server 2005.  This is one of my longer posts.  It will be no surprise that this article is also the one with the most comments, 10 in total.  When examining the entrance sources for this post I noticed that 5% are finding this article through Stack Overflow.  With some Google magic I indeed found two threads that are referencing my article!

The second most popular article is the one mentioned earlier about KB948109, with 4.5%.  It seems that quite some people are experiencing this issue, just like I did.

Position number three goes to Excel Automation: the CultureInfo bug with close to 4%.

As you’ll agree, the above statistics are not treating my newer articles fairly.  So let’s now take a look at the same list whilst only taking last month into account.

At number one it is still the same post of course, but it’s losing ground.  This time it’s scoring 17%, 6% less than over the whole year.  Actually, “losing” is not a correct statement, it’s just that the competition is getting tougher.

Second most popular post: Reporting Services 2008 and SSL with 5.6%.

Third most popular post: SSRS and MDX: Detecting Missing Fields scoring 4%.  Interestingly, this one was posted less than a month ago.  It’s also one of my longer articles.

Some Analysis Fun

Firebox

A while back I posted an article about good customer service from the people at Firebox.  This was on May 30, 2009.  The same day I emailed their customer service just to let them know that all was received in good order and to say thanks.  This email did not mention that I posted an article about their service on my blog but in my signature I do have a link to my blog.

And indeed, through Google Analytics I can see a result of that email, more precisely through the Network Locations page.  This shows a list of internet providers, but for companies it usually shows the name of the company.

List of Network Locations through which my blog is visited

Hmm, number 3 is an interesting one :-)   But that’s not what we’re looking for here.  This is:

Firebox.com

There were 19 visits from the people at Firebox!  Drilling down on this we get the following interesting graph:

When did the people at Firebox visit my site?

As expected, this happened the days following my email to them.

We can now slice our data using another dimension, Browser for instance:

Firefox is most popular at Firebox!

I guess this is no surprise either, Firefox differs only by one letter from Firebox ;-)

Operating System is another dimension showing interesting results:

The people at Firebox use several OSes

It seems that the people at Firebox are quite free as to what OS they use.

The Screen Resolution dimension shows that maybe it’s time to get them some new screens :-)

Screen resolution at Firebox

And lastly, guess what Landing Page shows?

What Landing Page are the Firebox people getting on?

Right, as expected.

Microsoft

Out of curiosity I’m now going to slice the data related to the visitors coming through “microsoft corp”.

Guess what OS?

OS used by Microsoft people

Browser?

Browsers used by Microsoft people

And now a really interesting one: Source!

Google is the most popular search engine at Microsoft (as far as my blog visitors are concerned at least)

See that number one?  It’s not Live, Bing or MSN, it’s Google!  Looks like there’s still some work to be done.

Where are they located?

Microsoft locations visiting my blog

Conclusion

The above shows that the longer a post, the more visitors it attracts.  Which is quite normal obviously.  And that Google Analytics can be used to have some fun.

To further conclude I would like to thank everyone who has visited my blog and/or posted a comment.  If you keep on visiting, I’ll keep on writing :-)

Have fun!

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Experts Exchange: earned my first shirt

January 18, 2009 in General | No comments

Some months ago I decided to start helping people on Experts Exchange by subscribing myself as an Expert and answering questions when I have some spare time.  I have several motives for this, such as:

  • it helps me to think about technology
  • it’s interesting to read other people’s opinion on a topic of interest
  • I like looking for a solution to a specific problem, to learn and at the same time help someone else
  • it gives a good idea of what technology other people are working with nowadays
  • Free shirts!

Subscribing as an Expert is free and gives you a Limited Member account.

Answering questions gives you Expert Points.  The maximum amount of Expert Points that one can score on a question is 2,000.

Earning a total of 10,000 Expert Points and maintaining a monthly score of 3,000 Expert Points gives you access to Premium Services, for free.  Your account status gets upgraded from Limited Member to Qualified Expert.  One of the interesting parts of Premium Services is that you get Unlimited Question Points (i.e. the points that you need to ask a question yourself).

Expert Points are scored in the zone where the question was asked (max. 3 zones per question).  My focus is currently on all SQL Server related zones.  The first rank that can be earned is Master and you can get it by scoring 50,000 Expert Points in a zone.

About a week ago I earned my first rank, Master in MS SQL Server.

Profile of ValentinoV on Experts Exchange

Currently I have scored a total of 66,604 Expert Points and I have gained these by answering 53 questions.

Answer History

As the screenshot above shows, on Experts Exchange I am known as ValentinoV.  See my profile for up-to-date info.

Gaining a rank gives you the ability to generate an email signature:

Email Signature

Another feature is to generate a certificate with your ranks:

Certificate

Clicking the Create Certificate button will generate a PDF file such as this one.

And finally, you get a free shirt which specifies your rank on the sleeve.  Looking forward to receiving it.

Free shirt

As you see, it earns to be an Expert. :-)

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The Block @ Hoegaarden

September 1, 2008 in General | No comments

Nadat zuster Mia onze buurt onveilig maakte door het Sint-Janscollege in Meldert te bezetten met de Jeugd Van Tegenwoordig is het nu de beurt aan de SUVs van The Block.  Jaja, op een rustige vakantiemorgen reed ik naar de bakker voor broodjes en was direct wakker toen ik bijna van de weg gereden werd door een SUV met in grote letters VT4 er op.  (Nee, heb niet kunnen zien of het Hans Otten was want ik was te druk bezig met het vermijden van geparkeerde wagens – zie Doelstraat in Hoegaarden voor meer info.)

In The Block wordt deze keer de oude Brouwerij Loriers, naar’t schijnt de oorsprong van de Hoegaerdse Das, bewerkt.  De buurt waar dit gebouw zich bevindt werd recent reeds opgewaardeerd door het blootleggen van een riviertje en plaatsen van bruggetjes.  En nu dus nog wat meer want de lofts die in The Block gerenoveerd worden zijn maar een klein deeltje van dit project.

Wij kijken alvast.  Ow ja, hier nog een paar fotootjes.

TheBlock01

TheBlock02

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WordPress and Google Analytics

August 10, 2008 in General | No comments

When you add your website to Google Analytics it tells you to add the tracking code right before the closing </body> tag.

Now, the website that I was adding was this WordPress blog so my first question was: where on earth (or server) is the PHP file that contains this closing tag?  And after a bit of PHP code reading I found it.

The file is called footer.php and this file is located in /wp-content/themes/[YOUR_THEME]/.  Being located in the themes folder this means you need to remember to re-add the code when you decide to change your theme.

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