Crazy Or Genius?: Category Geek

Google Analytics

Sean — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 16:45:00 +0100

Like other people I know, I have been testing Google Analytics. There are some good things about it, but overall I am not really impressed.

The Good:

Content Summary. Specifically the percentages that content get for a time range. I love easily seeing how traffic is growing or subsiding for individual (well, the top 5 anyway) articles. Hey! Recently my TurnItIn.com article traffic was up 50%! Instant, easy to read feedback like that is awesome.

Variable time range. I like being able to see data for time ranges other than a month (which is the standard for things like Webalizer). Google makes this simple to do.

Date Storage. Some free web site statistics programs only keep data for a certain amount of time, and only show you a limited range of that. For example, the free version of StatCounter only tracks 2 weeks. Analytics stores….... probably all information it has ever received, which really ties in with the variable time range above.

It IS powerful. If you have the time and desire, I am sure you can massage the data to give you tons of information (to bad I don’t care about most of it).

The Bad:

Does not integrate with other Google products. Google Sitemaps integration seems like a no-brainer, given that it is for related data. Google Maps for the map overlay would seem to make sense as well, so that I could actually zoom in on an area, rather than seeing a large grouping of dots along the east coast.

All the Ad related stuff. Ok, I understand that a lot of people want to track their ad revenue, $ index, whatever. But what about those who don’t? I personally find all the ad related stuff clutters the interface I am trying to use.

Unintuitive. The breakdown into Executive, Marker, and Webmaster sections makes finding things difficult. For a while, I couldn’t find a simple referring pages list. More recently I found it under Marketing Optimization -> Visitor Segment Performance -> Referring Source. I couldn’t figure out filtering for a while. Clicking a graphic to change it from exclude a filtered item, rather than filter by it didn’t seem obvious.

Flexible in some ways, obtuse in others. A lot of places, you can display up to 500 records. For the content summary, you only have the top 5. Sure, you can get most of the same information under Content Optimization -> Content Performance, but that section is missing the percentage changes over time (you know, what I thought was GOOD) that the summary has. Also, the referrer information only gives me the domain name, not which page the user came from.

The (Possibly) Ugly:

Google stores all this information, and uses it for their own purposes. ome individuals understandably have privacy concerns regarding this. As Ian said, it’s basically a toss up. Decide if its right for you.

Conclusion:

For something free, Analytics is better than some packages. I personally feel that I am presented with way more information than I really want. For something more revenue related, your milage may very.

Finally Giving In

Sean — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 18:03:00 +0100

Over the last few years I have been asked to present something at various local conferences (mostly just CEOS). This has always ended up with me saying, “sorry, I don’t have the time”. Recently, I have come to the realization that I am likely going to always be “busy” with various other things. So I made a decision.

More recently, I have been asked to give a talk at DevEast. Rather than my traditional “sorry I don’t have time”, I decided to give in and accept. I am now going to be giving a talk about Ruby on Rails that will encompass a lot of the basics, as well as sharing some of my own experiences with it over the last year.

Win, lose, or draw, at least in a few days I will be able to say I’ve tried.

Using Ruby And Rails On Torch

Sean — Mon, 15 May 2006 23:35:00 +0200

So….... I have noticed a few people have been searching the internet for ‘rails on torch’. So, I thought I would answer this question for them.

The Easy Answer:

It is already installed! Just start developing following any of the many, many tutorials out there. Or alternately you can just download, configure and run one of the many pre-existing projects in existance

The Slightly Less Easy Answer

Assuming you are doing development, you will soon likely run into a problem. Two of them actually.

The current version of Rails is 1.0.0, meaning you are missing out on the latest and greatest features.
You aren’t able to install, let alone update, gems. (And do we REALLY want to bother the admins every time we want to try a new, or update an old, gem?)

But there are a few options here:

Download gems and use ‘gem unpack’ to unroll them into your application. Note, this is really tedious and lacks most of the advantages of using gems in the first place.
Install your own instance of rubygems. The process is documented here. I use this on the server where I do most of my development.
Even easier, just set up your environment to store the gems in your home directory. The process, which involves simply editing a file called .gemrc in your user directory is fairly well documented here. For those who just want a quick fix, you can use the below.

# simple .gemrc for usage on torch
gemhome: /users/cs/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE/gems
gempath:
- /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8

Review - Metroid Prime: Hunters

Sean — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 19:48:29 +0200

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine showed off Metroid Prime: Hunters on his Nintendo DS. Playing it for a few minutes, I have to admit I was hooked. Using the stylus to aim and select things just seemed so SIMPLE, the gameplay itself was good, and it has multiplayer capability!

I picked up my own copy shortly after finishing up Compiler Construction, and I beat the game today. A few things of note:

Short game – 7 hours game time got me to the end (66% of items/lore/etc)
Hand cramps – Stylus good, holding the DS with other hand not so good (I suppose this is one of the reasons the DS Lite was created).
?? – That is an actual column in the ‘Records’ section. Yep, there is the regular bout of Nintendo unlockables. Awesome (and at least with the short game time, I don’t have to rewind through 20+ hours of gameplay
Missiles – Really, I know they are in all the other games, but I felt that they were useless here. USELESS.

Haven’t really had a chance to try out multiplayer (don’t have wireless), so I can’t really comment on that. Overall, I am really liking the game though. Nice amount of exploration with some fast and furios bounty hunter on bountry hunter action. Now all I have to do is figure out what ???? is …....

Roombanomics 101

Sean — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 14:37:24 +0200

Back when Oliver and I submitted the Roomba to MakeZine, I noticed that Make was accepting proposals for projects to present at Maker Faire. And by accepting, I mean ‘oh, proposal deadline is in 3 hours. Maybe we should send something off quickly?’. So we did, and we waited expectantly for the March 21st approval date. Said date came and went without any word, so we thought that nothing had come as a result.

Until Oliver got an e-mail today asking for a picture that they could put on this site. So we were apparently accepted and have a table there. And there are less than 2 weeks to said event. And we are just finding out now, due to the original e-mail disappearing somewhere somehow.

So…... we’re actually going to see if we can make it down. We just need to put together enough funds to travel there, find a place to stay, put together an actual presentation…......... sounds possible considering we should probably get back to them in 48-72 hours, right?

Ah…... end of term can never be simple, can it?

TurnItIn.com - Beating The System Part 4: Denying Our Corporate Overlords

Sean — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 12:14:00 +0100

As many of you might know, a while back Mike Smit started taking a hard look at TurnItIn.com a while back. For those of you who follow his site, he has more recently begun an information campaign, pointing out failings, problems, and concerns with the service. Even outside of his site, the issue has been getting a lot of attention, including being covered in the current issue of the Dalhousie Gazette.

One of the things Mike is doing is investigating how effective it is, and how difficult it is to trick the system. Currently has mentioned three ways to beat the system. One involves his own program that manipulates the document to make it pass. The second involves using MS Word’s built in hidden text feature. The third to date is using MS Words built in macro functionality. “How can we trick the system with free tool that are readily available?” However, not everyone can write software, or own MS Word. I began thinking to myself ‘how can I trick the system with free tools that are readily available?’. First step: take a look at OpenOffice. Can the same hidden text trick work? A quick test shows…......... no. Hidden text is a field attribute in OO, and a character attribute in MS Word. The two are not compatible. Macros? Keeping the macro as is and saving as a MS Word file doesn’t work. This is largely due to MS Word using their own scripting language or VB for their macros, while OO has their own scripting language, as well as using javascript and a few other options. Either way, the macro option is out, especially since TurnItIn.com doesn’t accept OO documents, making an effort to create a similar macro for OO pointless (at this time).

But wait…... what formats DOES TurnItIn.com accept? A quick check (verified by Mike a second later) gives me the following list: MS Word, WordPerfect, PostScript, PDF, HTML, RTF, and plain text. Plain text is out for obvious reasons, MS Word is being hammered by Mike’s own tests….... wait…... HTML? Instantly a few ideas come to mind. Idea the first: What happens if I replace all the spaces in a document with a & nbsp;? Thankfully TurnItIn.com DOES convert these to spaces. I would have laughed my ass off if they hadn’t.

Idea 2) What about inline style tags using spans? For example, this document. Note that this is what the professor would see. Now view the page source. You should see a number of lines like this:

<span style="position:absolute;left:-10000px">fgahlhgk</span> “What is sad is the fact that we are not even trying hard yet.”

This basically takes these characters and shifts them WAY to the left out of site of people like your prof.

Result? 0% plagiarized according to TurnItIn.com. Total time required to figure this out? < 5 minutes. Tools required? Your favorite plaintext editor. So not only can cheap windows users use this technique, but now Linux users can too!!!

What is sad is the fact that we are not even trying hard yet.

Let's Get Ready To Roombaaaaaaaa!!!!!

Sean — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 01:06:56 +0100

So, lately I have been spending some late nights on campus. I mean LATE nights, 1….. 2….. almost 3 in the morning. Have I been spending late nights working on my schoolwork? Ok, you can stop laughing now. No, instead I have been doing some hardware/software hacking with a Roomba. My friend Oliver and I have been busy putting the Roomba together and doing cool stuff with it. Ok, ok, Oliver did most of the hardware work, I just provided ideas and suggestions along the way. End result: A Roomba being controlled using a USB Gamepad over the wireless network in the Computer Science building. Over the break, several individuals from tech support came to take a look at it cause it sounded cool, and we even showed it off to the high school students that showed up at the Open House last Saturday (they also thought it was cool. Right now, we have the movement controlled via one of the analog sticks, though we have a lot of cool ideas (which I am sure I will write about as they are accomplished).

More information (as well as pictures) can be found at Oliver’s site here

Additionally, Make Magazine has already featured it in their Make Blog. How cool is that?

Because Screwing Up Only One Server At A Time Is Child's Play........

Sean — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 00:51:00 +0100

So the Dal-ACM hosted another Installfest on Saturday. Rather than be a simple spectator of cool stuff and mooching off the nice spread of snacks, I decided to be an actual PARTICIPANT this time.

So, the Dal-ACM has this ‘development server’ (of the desktop machine variety) called mblast. In times past (2 Installfests ago) Gentoo was installed on it for some reason. Every time this was upgraded, something broke. More importantly, since almost everyone could sudo su - for root, packages were installed and upgraded with impunity, resulting in things breaking often. Funnily enough, the DSU opt-out site was run from this machine, and someone actually upgraded it while the opt-out period was running.

So, flash forward back to the present. Since the Dal-ACM aquired slammer, more people have shifted their user accounts to that machine, leaving mblast somewhat underused with the exception of some of my own work. I figured, since with the exception of a few Ruby On Rails Cookbook tutorial instances, I was the only person using the machine, I could wipe it and play with a few things I have been thinking about for a while (and yes, I asked to make sure there was nothing critical and performed a backup anyway).

So, what did I end up doing? I decided to try my hand at virtualization. Set up Debian Stable as a host machine, installed Xen, set up a host server from disk, and started that up…....... two machines running on one machine’s hardware. It was pretty sweet to get running. Of course, it wasn’t as easy as reading those lines. I somehow screwed up a minimal Debian install, had problems with mblast’s hardware, some misinterpretation of the hardware, and oh yeah, the pain in the ass of backing up everyone’s data before wiping that sucker the first time.

In the end it was done, it was cool, and as soon as I figure out how to install other operating systems besides Debian (since I used debootstrap for that) and to have the virtual hosts actually accessible to the internet, I will be able to set up any operating system (well, linux or bsd really, unsure about Solaris) for people, and then they can screw it up to their heart’s content without affecting someone else’s work (assuming that work is on a different virtual server). Yeah, learning all that is what reading week will be partially for.

The other cool thing at Installfest was Roomba hacking. Several people in the CSB, including my friend Oliver, bought a Roomba (a programmable robot vacuum cleaner) a wireless router, and other items. Their goal is to power the router from the Roomba, install linux (WRT Firmware) on the routers, and then be able to control the Roombas remotely via wireless. Add in some USB ports on the router and you can do a lot of things with that.

At the installfest, most of the time was spent deconstructing the Roombas without breaking them. Towards the end, they actually experimented with powering the router from the Roomba. One problem: the router partly starts up and then…. dies. The Roomba is currently blamed, the theory being that, while the specs say 2 amps of current can be drawn from the Roomba, there is probably some regulator somewhere that doesn’t allow more than a percentage of that out of the power interface they are using. A set back to be sure, and I am looking forward to seeing how they solve it, and having those Roombas running around the CS building.

Nintendo DS: First Thoughts

Sean — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 03:58:55 +0100

A few weeks back I bought myself a Nintendo DS for my birthday. Now, normally it is usually hard for me to play anything more than ‘twitch’ games on my main PC, due to my regular busy schedule. However, I noticed that I generally have down time between tasks that is spent just sitting around or aimlessly surfing the web. I figured I could use this time to play games with one of the current gen portable consoles. But why the DS and not the PSP? Several reasons really: I have fond memories of my old Nintendo products. Nintendo seems to innovate in gameplay more than the competitors (and dual screens seem cool). Oh, and Final Fantasy and Shining Force (in various incarnations) are/will be available for it. Coincidentally, the Mario Kart/DS bundle came out shortly before my birthday, and my friend has been going on about how awesome that game is, so I got that too. <!~~-more~~-> Initial impressions:

Right now the dual screen doesn’t do much (in Mario Kart). Then again, I used to hate pausing to view a map, so we will see how future games handle it.

I hate the fact that there is no battery indication. I hate playing a game and all of a sudden my DS going dead. I mean, they have a flashing light for testing Wi-fi connectivity, why not have one of them flash steadily when the battery is low? At least then I would know that I need to wrap things up, maybe save, and then exit gracefully.

Range of the Wi-fi connection seems a little slow, and I have had some problems getting connectivity over the internet, but some of that might have to do with the set up of the access points I have been connecting to over the DS itself.

Doesn’t support the GBA link mode. For example, in Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced you could link two GBA units and do co-operative and competitive missions and get extra stuff. Not so with the DS. The rest of the backward compatibility works fine, but I thought doing this for the DS over WiFi for GBA games would have been a no brainer. I suppose the most likely cause is hard coded hardware information in the GBA cartridged, but it still would have been nice to have.

All in all I am enjoying my purchase. Mario Kart is a blast and I am loving going retro and playing some of my favorite older games. The fact that Final Fantasy 3-6 are coming out (4 is already out) only strengthens my decision in my own mind. Suddenly, waiting doesn’t seem as boring any more…......

Home For This Site

Sean — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 23:21:00 +0100

As time goes on, I feel that I should give this, my little piece of the internet, a real home with a real domain name. A place where I don’t have to worry too much about anything. A place where I can actually see my own log files. A place where I can actually have more than one mysql account that has my name. But, honestly, I have no clue on a) what hosting services are good (though I could get this baby hosted on the Dal-ACM production server and get all of the above). b) What domain name to get. Since I want it to be somewhat professional, and my name is already gone six ways from Sunday, I am aimlessly kicking ideas around.

Anyone have any thoughts/comments either way?