I was hoping to write this post under my new website design, but I haven’t made much progress with my WordPress theme. Things are looking better though, since I just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.5 (after having a few unpleasant surprises with Wordpress 2.0.x). The upgrade went pretty smoothly, and the new features should help me write a couple of posts I’ve planned faster. My theme is now “widgetized” which should make the migration to the new design easier.

Regarding my job at Microsoft, it’s actually going pretty well. I still have a lot to learn, but it’s been a very interesting experience so far. Microsoft has a comprehensive training plan for new hires, which includes several online and classroom courses, such as MS101 and NEO –not the one from the Matrix–, but the New Employee Orientation. I also attended a Biztalk class in Washington DC (pictures in a future post), and an event for technical people held in Seattle called TechReady. I’m currently preparing myself to present a Biztalk certification exam.

I’ve also been playing several games on my PS3, such as Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Resistance: Fall of Man, Stardust HD and Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Overall I am quite pleased with the console, although a bit disappointed after finding out that most games are not 1080p as Sony wants people to believe, but 720p, which is comparable to many Xbox 360 games. After upgrading my TV to a 40 inch Full HD LCD I’m quite pleased with my current setup.

That’s it for a brief update on my doings, I’ll start posting a bit more often from now on, and hope to finalize my new design sometime…

Just as a reminder, all views and opinions expressed here are my own and not my employers.

Overall very good service. Everything arrived in a huge box within a week of ordering.

If Amazon could deliver to Mexico City this efficiently and at this cost (free!) I would certainly buy more from them.

• I was involved in a huge Proof of Concept, focused on WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Business Monitor
• I did some remodelling at home, and had to rearrange everything and get rid of a few things.
• I got an iPhone, and after going through the unlock procedure it’s working with the Telcel network. The only issue so far is that SMS messages from Telcel or from my bank appear empty or garbled.
• Upgraded to Leopard.
• Been playing The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for Nintendo DS, as well as Bioshock on Xbox 360, and Mario Galaxy on Wii

The point of this post was to note that finally some California based companies are finally turning their heads to Mexico.

The first case is Google Maps, which now includes street level maps for most of Mexico. Some rural areas are still not mapped, and as of this post address search is not working. You can search for a business and if you’re lucky enough someone might have added it. Because of this, I decided to add a new geolocator to my custom implementation of Google Maps. I found a geolocator with pretty good results at map24. I added a new control to my map to select a geolocator, and the results are pretty accurate. Try it out by typing address, zip code and city into the query field (comma separated works best), selecting the map24 geolocator and pressing on search maps:

Global Access Maps Now with map24 geolocator! (but still alpha code)

The second case is Apple that finally opened an online store for Mexico. This is great news for all Apple fans in Mexico. Prices are much more reasonable than what you’d find in any physical store that carries Apple products. There’s also much more variety, for example, I wanted to buy a new Apple Keyboard with Spanish layout and had been unable to get one so far. The other great feature is build-to-order, which until now was impossible in Mexico. All prices appear in Mexican Pesos and with tax (IVA) included. I made an order today, and I’ll update this post with any additional details once it ships.

Apple Online Store Mexico

My guess is that the iTunes Online Store should follow sometime soon.

1. When I was in highschool, I used to write the names of girls I liked (usually encoded somehow) in my notebooks during classes.
2. There’s one Windows feature that I like best over the Mac OS X implementation: copying and pasting folders. In Windows if you copy a folder and it already exists you can merge the contents. In OS X, the folder gets replaced.
3. I hate slow drivers! Which sometimes causes outburst of road rage…
4. My music library includes a song by Celia Cruz (La vida es un carnaval) rated with 3! stars. I guess it’s got good rhythm.
5. I’m only posting this in hopes of getting some earthly delights (just kidding) (or am I?).

Now it’s your turn neop, you’ve been tagged!

Frequent readers of my blog might remember the Maps project, which is on hold for a while. It’s a very demanding project, particularly since Google keeps adding features to the API which I obviously want to try out, such as the geocoding and zoom. I will most probably work on this project again a few weeks before my trip to NY (more about this on a future post), to start planning the best places to visit.

With the maps project paused, I decided to revisit a personal project that involves the analysis of my site’s visitors. This project, codenamed GATracker (GA meaning Global Access) is fairly old, I started it on February 2003 and have only made minor updates since then. Back then my site was completely hosted on mac.com, and I didn’t have access to HTTP Server logs, so I created a perl script (hosted on another site) that was called each time a page was loaded, sort of a counter. The script recorded log style information into a flat file, which I periodically downloaded and inserted into a MySQL database for some mining. Now that my site is hosted at gbtopia.com I have a servlet that logs every visit into a MySQL database directly.

The GATracker project consists of a bunch of JSPs and Custom Tags that extract information from the MySQL database and generate different reports: Sections visited, Browser and Operating System, Country, Referers, Date Analysis and Search Engines. I’ve found that several people are amazed by all the information that I’m able to retrieve with these simple tracking tactics, which shows that most people aren’t aware of all the information flowing through the internet when they visit a site. This tracker currently runs on Tomcat 5.5 since unfortunately there’s no WebSphere Application Server for Mac OS X.

I am working on the following improvements:

• Ability to import Apache access logs, which will let me obtain more accurate statistics, but limits the amount of information that I can gather from each visitor, so I’m keeping the counter and using this simply as an additional source for data.
• Performance improvements. The current code is quite old and has some scalability issues, which I’m fixing by introducing parallel processing. I will use Message Driven Beans (MDBs) to enable parallel analysis of logs, which should help reduce the time taken to analyze large logs.
• Since Tomcat is just a Servlet Container and I’m now using MDBs, I switched to Geronimo.
• Beautify reports. The current ones are just plain ugly: all function, practically no style.
• Make it universal. I’m considering making this a project available for download, but this requires some documentation and minor alterations to support any website.
• I’m also evaluating Derby (previously Cloudscape) to replace MySQL as a database, but this move will largely depend on performance.

I got inspired by some friends who recently started their blogs, Yamil and Huibert.