Videos: XGL + Compiz

XGL + COMPIZ

Watching this videos I feel I'm really missing something and finally need to upgrade my Matrox G200 graphic card...

For all of you who like eye candy, check this out!

Hacking jExam

Are you bored of continuously going to jExam's site, type your password plus your pin once again just to confirm that the results of your exams are still not there?

This simple (and primitive...) PERL script creates a RSS-file containing all your notes. Just add it to your news ticker program and forget about logging into jExam until October.

Set the variable "domain" to "52005" if you use the domain of the University instead of the faculty's one.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use WWW::Mechanize;
use HTML::TokeParser;

my $login = 'your_login';
my $password = 'your_password';
my $domain = '52004';
my $pin = 'your_pin';

my $jexam = "https://jexam.inf.tu-dresden.de/jexamV3";

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();

$mech->get($jexam);
$mech->form(1);
$mech->field("loginName", $login);
$mech->field("password", $password);
$mech->field("domain", $domain);
$mech->click();
$mech->get("$jexam/ResultsPage.event?newPage=t");
$mech->form(2);
$mech->field("pin", $pin);
$mech->click();

my $stream = HTML::TokeParser->new(\$mech->{content});

my ($tag, $subject, $note, $points, $rss);

$rss = "<rdf:rdf>\n";
$rss .= "<channel>\n";
$rss .= "<title>jExam: Ergebnisse</title>\n";
$rss .= "</channel>\n";

$tag = $stream->get_tag("table");
$tag = $stream->get_tag("table");
$tag = $stream->get_tag("table");
$tag = $stream->get_tag("table");
$tag = $stream->get_tag("table");

while ($tag = $stream->get_tag("table")) {

$tag = $stream->get_tag("span");
$subject = $stream->get_trimmed_text("/span") ."\n";

if ($subject =~ m/ist online/) {
last;
}

$tag = $stream->get_tag("table");
$tag = $stream->get_tag("tr");
$tag = $stream->get_tag("tr");
$tag = $stream->get_tag("td");
$tag = $stream->get_tag("td");
$tag = $stream->get_tag("td");

$note = $stream->get_trimmed_text("/td") ."\n";

$tag = $stream->get_tag("tr");
$tag = $stream->get_tag("td");
$tag = $stream->get_tag("td");
$tag = $stream->get_tag("td");

$points = $stream->get_trimmed_text("/td") ."\n";

$rss .= "<item><title>$subject [[$note]]</title></item>\n";

}

$rss .= "</rdf:rdf>\n";

print $rss;

Going beyond Mentos

I'm sure I am not the only one seeing kids (and some "big" kids...) everywhere playing with Mentos and a big bottle of diet cola, some of them hacking the trick to its limit.

Mentos + Diet Cola propelled Rocket

Now, if you consider that funny, check this out.

CO₂ propelled Bucket

What you need is:

Some dry ice.
Some empty 1/2L bottles
One Bucket

Fill 1/3 of the bottle with water.
Put some dry ice in it, close it tightly and leave it on the floor.
Cover the bottle with the bucket.
Run, and if it doesn't explode do not pick it up!

Now, that is fun!

How does it work?

As opposed to frozen water (wet ice), dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide which at temperatures above -78°C starts to change its state. If the pressure is under 5.1 atmospheres it doesn't melt but sublimates directly into gas, producing enough pressure to make the bottle blow.

Analyzing the Slashdot Effect

A couple of days ago I did a little experiment with the previous (and first!) entry of this blog with the objective of collecting some statistical information about people like me, who are avid readers of nerdly news, and in particular of trying to measure the famous slashdot effect and compare it with its analogous from other sites. The blog entry made its way to the front page of Slashdot, Digg and their spanish clones: Barrapunto and Meneame, generating around 140,000 combined visits that were logged using Google Analytics. This time I want to share the results with you.

Duration

The article was on Slashdot's front page for about 20.5 hours (from August 13^th, 2:30PM until August 14^th, 11:00AM). As you can see below, most of the visits took place on monday morning. After leaving the front page of Slashdot and Digg the daily visits were reduced from 81,300 to 17,000 and surely will continue dropping as fast as they grew.

	Sunday	Monday
Visits:	42,813	81,316
Visits/hour:	4,505	7,390
Visits/minute:	75	123

Bandwidth

A first visit to the page produce a transfer of arround 720kB, with that and the number of new visitors can we figure out how much data (approximately) was transferred during that time.


Sunday:	28.7GB
Monday:	54,6GB
Total:	83.3GB

Where do all those geeks come from?

People came from all over the world, in fact from 157 different countries. Most stories in Slashdot/Digg reach every corner of the world!


North America:	77,634 visits
Europe:	41,159 visits
Oceania:	6,443 visits
Asia:	5,423 visits
Hispanic America:	5,350 visits
Africa:	724 visits


USA:	67,752 visits
Canada:	9,882 visits
UK:	9,336 visits
Spain:	7,577 visits
Australia:	5,209 visits
Germany:	3,770 visits
Netherlands:	2,413 visits
Sweden:	2,014 visits
Brazil:	2,008 visits

Languages


English:	116,853 visits
Spanish:	7,402 visits
German:	1,975 visits
French:	1,763 visits
Japanese:	1,758 visits
Dutch:	1,465 visits
Portuguese:	1,351 visits

The Referrers

I didn't imagine such big difference between the traffic from Slashdot and from Digg.


Slashdot:	75,753 visits
Digg:	18,087 visits
Barrapunto:	3,767 visits
Metafilter:	3,271 visits
I-am-bored.com:	1,627 visits
Slo-Tech:	1,589 visits
del.icio.us:	1,582 visits
Meneame:	1,538 visits

Firefox & the geeks!

Almost 2/3 of the people were using the Firefox browser, who said Internet Explorer is the most popular browser? Well, not among us :)


Firefox:	63%
Internet Explorer:	20%

OSs

Unfortunately Linux is still not so popular as Firefox, even among the geeks.


Windows:	72%
Macintosh:	14%
Linux:	13%

Combo: OS - Browser

Screen Resolution


Resolution:	1280x1024 and 1024x768
Color Depth	32 bit

Plugins


Flash:	96,6%
Java:	96%

Connection Speed


Dialup:	9%

Do geeks click on Ads?

Finally for all of you wondering what you can get (besides a burning web-server) from being slashdotted, here are the numbers. You are not going to become rich, but perhaps you have more luck than this guy.