Aqeel Zafar

My favourite web analytics software Piwik just got desktop integration.

For those who haven’t heard of Piwik before, it’s open source web analytics software which you can host on your own server. It is still in beta, but I am using it for few months now and haven’t faced any problem. You can try it out using the online demo on their site.

According to Piwik blog, two desktop applications for Piwik are now available, made by piwik users. One of them, Piwik Connector is a simple app that shows hourly visits on all your Piwik websites, it would be useful for people who track many sites and don’t want too much stats.

For power users, Desktop Web Analytics provides much more advanced view, it brings all piwik stats to your desktop. Both these software are still early in development, so, you might face couple of problems, for instance, I wasn’t even able to save my profile in Desktop Web Analytics, but the good thing is work is being done on it.

P.S: Forgot to mention, both these apps are developed in Adobe AIR, which means they are available on Linux, Mac & Windows.

Aqeel General, Linux piwik, software, web analytics

I have (once again) updated / changed couple of things on this blog. Most importantly, I have created a simple Yahoo! pipe to filter my feed, now you can subscribe to upto five different tags / categories, instead of subscribing to whole blog. As basically it’s my personal blog and I post anything I want to, many people are put off by it, now they can just get the updates they want. All you have to do is:

1. Open http://pipes.yahoo.com/aqeeliz/blogfeed
2. Enter any tag or category name in text boxes (one in a box, leave remaining empty)
3. Run Pipe
4. Click on “More Options” and Choose “Run as RSS”
5. Subscribe to the feed.

Secondly, blog theme is updated. Now I have switched to very minimalistic design, which emphasis on content rather than other stuff. Let me know what you think about it, and if you face any problems.

Aqeel General Website

Yesterday I found out about new Adobe AIR Twitter client, TweetDeck, finally an application that makes it possible to cope up with information overload on twitter.

TweetDeck has multi-column view, it’s first column display all latest tweets (like “home” on twitter.com). Other columns can contain replies, direct messages, groups (tweets from selected people), searches and latest twitscoop. Of course if you like traditional twitter clients, you can close these other columns, but then you will not be using it’s full potential.

TweetDeck also features a “timeframe” feature, which allows user to filter tweets by time since posted, from last 1 hour to 48 hours, this can be very useful in filtering already read tweets and eliminating noise. All tweets are stored on local database, which also allows user to browse them while offline, any tweet posted or DM posted in that time are posted when back online.

TweetDeck is currently a beta, and even though it’s version is 0.18, it’s very functional and I haven’t encountered any bug yet. So, if you, like me have been overwhelmed by too much information on twitter and want to ease the load, give TweetDeck a try.

Now all that is remaining is to find a good feed aggregator!

Aqeel General, Linux adobe air, software, twitter

Since I have switched completely to linux, I am always on the look out for native linux games. A genre that is very easily available on linux is First Person Shooters. There are many good quality multiplayer FPS games available on linux, most of these are based on Quake 3 engine, resulting in very good quality even on little older machines.

Even though I used to think all these FPS games are similar to each, they offer very different game play from each other, so, I started the quest to try all of them out. Let’s start with my favorite (for now):

Urban Terror:

Urban Terror is a modern reality based multiplayer FPS. According to their homepage:

Urban Terror can be described as a Hollywood tactical shooter; somewhat realism based, but the motto is “fun over realism”. This results in a very unique, enjoyable and addictive game.

In game, everyone carries knife and handgun (Beretta or Desert Eagle), other than that, you have 6 available inventory slots, 2 for weapons, 1 for grenades and 3 for other accessories (Kevlar vest, helmet, silencer, laser sight, med-pack, extra ammo etc.), out of these 6, you can only use 4 at one time, so, you should choose the weapons/accessories which suits your style of playing and current scenario. Health system also has a touch of reality to it, once you get shot that part of the body starts bleeding, and loses health until you (or your teammate) bandages it. Stamina depends on remaining health, so, if you are low on health, you might not be able to sprint much.

Urban Terror offers different game modes, including Bomb (Red team plants bomb at one of two pre-defined position, blue team has to defend those by either defusing bomb or killing all members of Red team) Free For All (FFA – Shoot everyone, the one with most frags win), Catch the Flag (CTF – Catch other teams flag and take it to your flag to score a point), Catch and Hold (C&H – map has many flags, touch one to change it to your color, you get a point for every minute you hold a flag), Team Deathmatch (TDM – Kill member of other team, the team with more score wins) & Team Survivor (TS – Same as TDM but once kill, you don’t re-spawn till the end of the round). You can read more about these in Urban Terror manual.

Urban Terror is a standalone Quake III Arena mod, though if you already have Quake III Arena, you can just install it as it’s mod, it is available on Linux, Macintosh & Windows. Image is taken from screenshots section on UrbanTerror.net

Aqeel Linux first person shooters, games, Linux, urban terror