I am fi­nal­ly pub­lish­ing my Lati­noWare 2008 tu­to­ri­al, in re­vised and ex­pand­ed for­m. It will prob­a­bly be a 10-­part se­ries, and here is ses­sion 3.

See al­so:

• ses­­sion 1.

• ses­­sion 2.

I am not sure if this is good or bad:

On one hand, I have more sub­scribers than ev­er, even con­sid­er­ing when this blog was in plan­etkde (BTW: maybe I should add my pyqt feed there again? Nah, I don't qual­i­fy as "ac­tive KDE con­trib­u­tor")

The dip in the last three monts was be­cause I just post­ed noth­ing, and now I am post­ing again, it's do­ing well.

On the oth­er hand, I am at 50-­some sub­scriber­s, which is a bit pa­thet­ic for a blog that has ex­ist­ed for over 9 years ;-)

On the grip­ping hand (Lar­ry Niv­en FTW!) I am hav­ing more fun with the blog than I had in quite a while, so I would post even if noone read it.

And in case you are won­der­ing what that peak of over 6000 reach (the av­er­age is un­der 100!) it's this. That post had over 12000 vis­i­tors. My sec­ond most pop­u­lar sto­ry had on­ly 3800.

Here's the most pop­u­lar con­tent in the last 2 years or so, se­lect­ed from 783 posts (784 with this one) and 47 longer sto­ries:

1. 12228 vis­i­­tors: Win­­dows: My eX­Pe­ri­ence

   So I wan­t­ed to see what win­­dows looked like. Don't wor­ry, I feel bet­ter now.

2. 3797 vis­i­­tors: Mak­ing Lin­ux sys­tems that don't suck. Part II

   A rant on cron and at. I nev­er imag­ined this would be num­ber 2.

3. 2968 vis­i­­tors: BOP: Ball Ori­en­t­ed pro­­gram­ming

   I am rather proud of this one: a pyqt-based graph­i­­cal, an­i­­mat­ed in­­ter­preter for FLIP, a lan­guage based on balls :-)

4. 2888 vis­i­­tors: Good News: Lin­ux gives life to old hard­ware. Bad News: Maybe in some cas­es it should­n't.

   Sil­­ly, yes, but a cool pic­­ture :-)

5. 1870 vis­i­­tors: Py­­Cel­l­s: The Python Spread­­Sheet re­­dux

   My sec­ond or third at­tempt at writ­ing a toy spread­­sheet us­ing python. I have been at it for about 5 years, ap­­par­en­t­­ly.

   This is pop­u­lar... even when the code it de­scribes is based on a com­­plete­­ly bro­ken li­brary!

6. 1841 vis­i­­tors: Squid au­then­ti­­ca­­tion via POP or IMAP

   This was al­ready about 4 years old when I start­ed coun­t­ing, so I have no idea how many vis­i­­tors it re­al­­ly had. It is a handy scrip­t, I still use it some­­times!

7. 1813 vis­i­­tors: The Lin­ux Boot­ing Process Un­veiled

   I re­al­­ly ex­pec­t­ed this one to be much high­­er. It's even linked from wikipedi­a! Ev­ery day it has 2 or 3 hit­s. Then again, the first 3 years are not be­ing coun­t­ed ;-)

8. 1706 vis­i­­tors: Queue Man­age­­ment for Qmail

   While the tool it in­­tro­­duces is lame nowa­­days, the ideas are sound, and it ex­­plains a re­al prob­lem.

9. 1548 vis­i­­tors: Cus­­tom wid­gets us­ing PyQt

   Very ob­­so­lete, noone should read that.

10. 1505 vis­i­­tors: How to make your own dis­­tro in 3 not-­­so sim­­ple steps

    Oh, this one. It is wrong. It gives bad ad­vice. Yet noone seems to no­tice ;-) Not my best idea, not my best ef­­fort, still get email about it ev­ery month or so.

Fol­low­ing the path of the ven­er­a­ble tinyurl, http://Tin­yarro.ws takes ad­van­tage of uni­code to make things very, very, very short.

For ex­am­ple, this blog's URL would be http://➡.ws/콢

As you can see there is a tiny ar­row (thus the name of the ser­vice) and a seem­ing­ly ko­re­an char­ac­ter.

The do­main name is legal, that's just a one-char­ac­ter uni­code name, which seems to be le­gal ac­cord­ing to the rules of the ws TLD. Then a uni­code path, again just one char­ac­ter.

Since uni­code has sev­er­al thou­sand glyph­s, it is pos­si­ble that about a tril­lion URLs could be done us­ing on­ly a 3-let­ter path, which is pret­ty awe­some.

Of course you prob­a­bly can't type the damn things, but you can copy­&­paste them.

If any of this does­n't work for you, get on the uni­code wag­on al­ready!

I am fi­nal­ly pub­lish­ing my Lati­noWare 2008 tu­to­ri­al, in re­vised and ex­pand­ed for­m. It will prob­a­bly be a 10-­part se­ries, and here is ses­sion 2.

See al­so ses­sion 1.