I can’t stand the taste of coffee – neither American, nor Italian – it all tastes like dirt to me.

However, I too occasionally need a kick to keep me going even when I’m tired, and I’ve found just the thing here in Austria. Red Bull is the most famous Austrian “caffeine/energy drink”, but they also have a variety of similar products, which sell at lower prices. Recently, I noticed that you can even get the stuff in 1.5 liter bottles, rather than the more expensive 1/4 liter cans. Be careful though: I had a bit too much the other day, and my wife had to detach me from the ceiling.

If I had a good head for business, I’d find a way to make money exporting the stuff. At a bit more than a Euro per liter, it’s way cheaper than expensive cans of Red Bull.

This was a pleasant surprise:

La Sardegna adotta il software libero

What that means is that the region of Sardinia (Sardegna, in Italian) will be adopting “software libero” for their IT infrastructure.

A quick note: I’m going to be in Oslo from the 20th to the 22nd of October. I probably won’t have time to meet anyone, unfortunately, but if you are up for it, send me an email with a cell phone number and we’ll see what can be arranged.

Also, I’m trying out Dopplr. I’m not a frequent traveller, but I really like to meet people when I do go someplace new:

http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/davidnwelton

I use Google’s Analytics system for several web sites I run, but find it a bit cumbersome for just getting a quick overview of what’s happening. For years, I’ve used my friend Salvatore’s visitors program to analyze web logs. It claims to be a “fast web log analyzer” and it is blazing fast – so fast that for all the sites I run, it only takes a few seconds to process a year or two’s worth of log files. For instance:

3724130 lines processed in 68 seconds
55 invalid lines, 0 blacklisted referers

And that’s not a particularly fast server that it’s running on, and of course it’s running with a high “nice” value. Visitors is probably not suited to huge sites, as that’s its only mode of operation – it doesn’t save data – but it’s a great option for everything but the biggest of log files.

Using it every day, there are a few things that I wanted to improve or tweak, so with Salvatore’s permission, I went ahead and put the code under version control over at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/visitors/

Ok, my apologies, the Latin is incorrect, but the idea is this: I have run into an important limitation of Google’s domain registration system. Buyer beware.

Lately, I have been using Google Apps to register domains. At $10 a year for new domains, which come with all the nifty Google applications, email and so on, it’s a really good deal. However, there appears to be a potentially crucial problem: you can’t sell or transfer the domains, as far as I can tell. I would love to hear that I am wrong on this, but the person helping me through Google’s support channel first told me to “enter the new credit card details in the Google Checkout account associated with the domain”. Uh, sorry, but I want to transfer the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel. After another round of email, I got this:

To assign a different Google Account to the subscription you’ll need to
modify your billing information by following the steps listed below:

• Enable automatic renewals for your account.
• When you receive email notification of the impending charge, visit the
  link to the ‘Ordering page.’ – Authorize a new purchase for your domain
  registration renewal. This will replace the old subscription and charge
  your new billing information on the subscription expiration date.
  Automatic renewals will also be enabled going forward.

If you don’t have automatic renewals enabled, your email notification
won’t include an ‘Ordering page’ link to change the Google Checkout
account and purchase or renew Google Apps. You must first enable
auto-renew to be sent this link.

I don’t want to have to wait for the email notification, though! The domain won’t be automatically renewed until sometime next spring.

Hopefully this is either an oversight on my part or something Google will fix soonish, as buying a domain name that you can’t sell or otherwise give to someone else is of very limited use for some things. No, I haven’t gone into business as a domain name speculator/squatter, the domain in question is InnsbruckExpats.com, a site I registered for a friend a bit more than a year ago.