The year 2008 is ending, and there is a flurry of blog posts with an end-of-year theme, be it resolutions, predictions, or something else for the new year.

I’m horrible at keeping resolutions and predicting, so for the year 2009, I’ll be, as the title so clearly states, tracking and graphing things.

Credit: Randall Munroe of xkcd.com. Click the image for the comic’s page.

So, what will I be tracking?

• Length of time spent playing BZFlag (an open source 3D tank battle game) — I really need to cut back on playing it. Tracked via this simple shell script I made.
• Length of time spent browsing the web. Tracked via Usage Counter Firefox Extension.
• Length of time computer is left on. Tracked via Unix ‘uptime’ program.
• Number of Delicious bookmarks posted in the year (via Delicious API app that is not yet completed).

I won’t be the only person tracking statistics in 2009. Yuvi outlines his plans to restart The StatBot, which is a website where he blog about all sorts of interesting statistics he measures.

Will you be tracking anything in 2009?

I haven’t been too excited about web apps. Sure, I use Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, and various other online tools, but I’m rather cautious about their use.

So, I log into my super secret mail URL, as I use Google Apps for Your Domain to check my email. I see that I’ve been sent an email from a friend containing a Word document.

To view the file, I click the View as HTML link that Gmail displays next to the attachment. In a new tab, the HTML rendition of the Word document is supposed to appear, but it doesn’t.

Not discouraged, I click Download Original Attachment, not knowing what is to come.

Click on the image to view it full-size

Yes, Google says that my account is now locked. Although I have planned for such a lockdown, Google denying my access to the account shocked me. Fortunately, the account was unlocked in a few minutes.

I repeated the test three times (not wanting to test it further due to Google possibly getting suspicious), and my account was locked down each time I tested it. I conclude that it is a bug within Gmail that set off the alarms, causing my account to be temporarily locked up.

The lesson? Depending on web applications to keep data secure or accessible is dangerous.

The sad part is that my story isn’t unique; many people have faced similar problems with a variety of web applications.

Remember, friends don’t let friends use web applications unsafely.

The Ubuntu Linux installer is pretty user friendly compared to, say, the Slackware installer.

Yet, I still have something to complain about it. Yes, I know! My complaint is rather silly, and perhaps ought to be ignored by the world. Keep reading this post and decide whether or not I’m crazy.

Wait, what is my complaint? See the below screenshot and explanation.

Click the above thumbnail for the full size image.

See those multicolored bars in the screenshot? You know, the ones that are giving a graphical representation of the partition layout. The coloring of the partitions are inconsistent. Green represents the new Ubuntu installation, and /dev/sda6 (a Fedora Linux installation). Oh, not to mention that green also represents /dev/sda5 in the top bar.

Is that it? No, I’m not finished.

Click the above thumbnail for the full size image.

See, another example of confusing inconsistency! First of all, simply switching the radio button changed the color representing Ubuntu from green to blue. The color representing /dev/sda1 (Windows Vista) still remains blue, though.

Are my complains silly? Yes, but I think that a confusing diagram is one of the worst things to put into a software application capable of destroying one’s hard drive with a misplaced click, especially when operated by technophobes (what, you haven’t told your mother to switch to LInux?).

So go ahead, think that I’m simply complaining because I feel the need to publish a blog post. I’ll just sit in my corner and continue complaining about colors.

Update: Note that the thoughts I describe in this post ONLY apply to my blog posts. Three other authors have contributed to this blog.

Today is the one-year anniversary of my first post on this blog. Please do not read my first post, or any of the 136 other posts (not including this one), because you will be sorely disappointed.

A long time ago, I wanted to create a website where I could talk about some interesting tech-related ideas and see if anybody liked those ideas. Eventually, I registered a domain name for this blog and attached it to my web hosting account at Bluehost.

Was I successful?

Yes and no.

I’m a bit of a pessimist, so first I’m going to explain why I think I failed. My goal was to write many high quality blog posts centering around programming. The posts would include actual code examples. I’ve deviated far from my goal. With the difficulties I had with displaying code examples, I talked about other topics, such as blogging. (Although my posts on blogging and social media did get A-List blogger Louis Gray’s attention.)

I also took way too much time to develop certain consistencies, such as the capitalization in the title (Prepositions are not capitalized).

But, I did succeed beyond my wildest dreams.

Although I started the blog in December 2007, I only started tracking statistics in the middle of May 2008. By the end of the (not completely tracked) month, about 134 MB of my bandwidth had been used by non-bot visitors. I thought that this was a good start.

In June, I had used more than a gigabyte of bandwidth. Now, this had really excited me. Because all I post is text and some images, the fact that I had used up a whole gigabyte of bandwidth made me feel giddy.

June made me feel giddy, but July had me shocked. On the first day of July, I had nearly reached the total bandwidth used in the entire month of June. On the second day of July, I had used up eleven more gigabytes of bandwidth. A poorly written blog post of mine hit Digg, Reddit, LinuxToday, TuxMachines, and countless blogs in many languages.

Most of the hundreds of comments (spread across the websites listed above) that my post received were negative. I felt a little disappointed that my most viewed post of all time had to be one that made me look foolish. But then I stopped skimming over the comments and started reading and analyzing them. I discovered that I could learn a lot about the Linux community from the comments, and I decided that in the end, it was good that I had published the post.

In the end, I didn’t accomplish my original goal of having others see my brilliant ideas. Instead, I found the brilliant ideas of everybody else.