Fading dreams

Recently I got a letter from BT saying that BT Infinity was finally in my area. I checked online and it still wasn’t available. Then I checked Virgin – same outcome. I even learnt that my existing provider PlusNet was now providing fibre but even that isn’t available in my area. I checked the post code of my parents’ house and found to my dismay that 25Mb broadband was available to them. By natural deduction that must mean they don’t live in Docklands but in fact in Walsall. I love Docklands but such poor internet provisioning by all providers to this area right next to Canary Wharf is nothing short of shocking. I shall have to be content with speeds of 1-2Mb for now. Maybe in 10 years we’ll have made some progress.

FaceTime is finally released for the Mac (as a beta) which now makes it ubiquitous and even more compelling. The seamless integration across iPod, iPhone and Mac of video calling is really quite impressive and it’s all at no extra charge. Thanks Apple.

Since I bought my current machine from OCUK two years ago (coolermaster cosmos sport case, quad core, 8800 GT) I hadn’t upgraded my graphics card. I’d considered upgrading many times but had put it off due to cost, the general heat and noise production of more recent graphics cards and lastly indecisiveness on my part. However several generations of graphics cards later, following the advice of a friend, I finally committed to a purchase. The purchase was made more compelling given that I recently upgraded from 2×19″ monitors at 1280×1024 each to a 24″ monitor (Dell U2410) at 1920×1200. To game at native resolution now at decent frame rates is going to require a much more powerful card.

Today I ordered the Zotac Nvidia GeForce GTX 470 from Dabs.com. This card is really going to be leaps and bounds more powerful than the 8800GT so I’m very much looking forward to it although the trade off will be greater heat and noise production under load but hopefully that won’t be noticeable when playing games. The games I intend to play to test the new card will be Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Far Cry 2, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and Splinter Cell Conviction. It’s sad however to hear that Splinter Cell Conviction will not be available on Steam in the UK. Such disparities between the US and the UK are so incredibly frustrating for UK users.

When I was integrating Google analytics on this site today I found out that it now has asynchronous tracking. This means that the tracking code on your site will no longer hold up page load but it also means that by putting this code at the end of the head tag it is more likely to load before the user leaves the page. As a result I’ve migrated my two sites from the old way to the new way.

Old synchronous tracking code

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXX-X");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

New synchronous tracking code

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
  _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.dhruba.name']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();
</script>