Having tried several anti-virus packages over the years, I have settled with Avast!.  It normally sits on my taskbar quietly monitoring things and I generally forget about it.  The only time I remember it’s there is when I do a complete scan, or when it makes me jump with a loud advice that it has just updated itself.

Every couple of months, a banner flashes at the bottom of the screen to warn me that an infected mail has arrived.  Sirens blare, and I have the opportunity to delete the mail, which I do.

Yesterday, it went off twice, which is very unusual.  Normally I could expect five or six alerts in a full year, so two in one day was exceptional.

So far today, I have had nine infected mails.  Yes – nine.

Is there a new flood of the damn things on the Internet?

Or have I just been chosen as the lucky recipient of this month’s batch?

For some time now, I have been collating statistics on four websites.

My main area of interest is in the Alexa trends, to see if they bear any relationships to other factors, such as traffic.

It would seem logical that a ranking should track traffic, but this is not apparently the case with Alexa.

There are some interesting things to note about the above graph.

The first is that the top line is pretty much stable, with no more than a 5% deviation throughout the period.  This site however has experienced a 50% growth in traffic over the time of the graph.  How come this is not reflected in the Alexa stats?

The bottom line is the growth in ranking for this site.  It has a very low traffic rate, and very few followers.  I post on it a couple of times a month, so it should be languishing at the bottom.  Yet the trend is constantly upwards.  Traffic to the site over the period is more or less a flat line, so why the growth?

Of the other two sites, one (the green) is a very popular blog though posting is sporadic, while the other (the red) is more of a niche site with regular postings.  Again the stats don’t reflect the figures I would have expected.

I hope Alexa know what they are doing, because I don’t!

There is a feature in Google Earth that I was unaware of.

I discovered quite by chance that it is possible to download all the information in my Garmin SatNav onto the application.

As the SatNav retains a considerable backlog of journeys taken, I downloaded mine, which still contains a lot of the French trips. I now have a record of every single journey I made since the 20th of September, including start and end times, distance covered, speeds and more.  Most importantly though is the track data, which displays precisely where I drove.

What is not apparent from the first image is the level of detail.

This is the track from the 22nd, which is the day we went to Domme.  That loop through the woods is not a tracking error – the road has to climb around 300ft up a cliff.

My one regret is that I didn’t discover this feature a long time ago.

I like messing around with software, trying new ideas and pushing it a bit beyond the limits.

I saw an interesting idea the other day for people who have Woopra Analytics in their sites, and Google Earth installed.  It’s a very neat integration of the two.

Essentially, all you have to do is add a Network Link to Google earth in the format http://localhost:9565/yoursite.com, obviously entering the appropriate site name.  Give it a low refresh rate (five to ten seconds) and sit back.

The effect is quite mesmerising.

As visitors arrive on your site, so little pegs appear on Google Earth, giving the visitor’s identity and their location.

The above snapshot shows three simultaneous visitors, where two are overlapping.

Needless to say, the location is actually the location of the ISP, so for example Grandad appears as a Dublin location, which is incorrect, but is near enough on a world scale.

As an application, it is not really of much value.

But it’s a lot of fun to watch in a busy period!