Author Archives: Alistair

About Alistair

My name is Alistair Lattimore, I'm in my very early 30's and live on the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. I married my high school sweet heart & we've been together for longer than I can remember. Claire and I started our family in September 2008 when Hugo was born and added a gorgeous little girl named Evie in May 2010. You can find me online in the typical hangouts, Twitter, facebook & Google.

Favikon, Favicon Generator For The Masses

Stumbled onto a simple but useful free online service last week named Favikon. As the name suggests, it is related to the small but often memorable favicon or favourite icon. For those that don’t know what a favicon is – … Continue reading

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Google Account Canonical URL Failure

Search engine optimisation consultants world wide have been pushing the URL canonicalisation wagon for quite some time. URL canonicalisation ensures that a given internet resource can only be reached by a single URL. That might seem like a relatively straight forward … Continue reading

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Wikirank, Visualising Wikipedia Usage Data

  I came across a clever web site named Wikirank, which provides visualisation tools to explore and compare the usage data from wikipedia.org.  If you’re wondering how Wikirank could manage that, wikipedia.org provide access to their web server traffic logs … Continue reading

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Enhancing Dopplr “Add Trip” Functionality

I recently signed up to the fabulous travel service Dopplr, which lets you share your travel plans with friends, family and colleagues. While adding in a trip from the Gold Coast to my home town of Chinchilla, Dopplr got a … Continue reading

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CommBank Keeping Warm By Burning Money

While viewing http://www.news.com.au yesterday, I noticed an advertisement on the home page for Commonwealth Bank of Australia. The ad was for instant approvals and same day funds (working now), however clicking the ad presented me with a “Page Not Found” … Continue reading

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Twitter Performance Problems, The Root Cause

The performance and scalability problems of Twitter have been covered to death, so I won’t wax lyrical about the different reasons that the micro-blogging service has had performance and uptime problems over the last year. With the advent of cloud … Continue reading

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Search Engine Optimisation Via Dead Trees

I thought I’d undertake some professional development surrounding search engine optimisation, ironically in the form of a paper back book, named Get to the top on Google written by David Viney. As I work my way through the book, I … Continue reading

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Project Euler, Problem #1

The first problem within Project Euler isn’t meant to twist the brain in knots and is a gentle introduction to what is coming further down the road. The problem states: If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that … Continue reading

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Project Euler, An Exercise In Exploration

Some time ago I stumbled onto a math based problem solving site for programmers named Project Euler. The Project Euler site describes itself as: Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just … Continue reading

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Django Internationalisation (i18n) Statistics

The Python web framework Django supports internationalistaion (i18n) for nearly 30 different languages already. While reviewing the changesets flowing through the Django source repository, I often notice amendments to the internationalisation code and it got me thinking about how ‘complete’ … Continue reading

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