Sunday, December 28, 2008

I can see you -- Google Analytics:

What are the three most important thing in the retail business? Location, Location, Location.

By contrast in the decision making business, the three most important things are:Data, Data, Data.

A great way for websites to gather this kind of data is Google Analytics.

If you've never heard of Google Analytics I highly recommend you learn what gets tracked by watching this video.

To see if the site you're on uses Google Analytics. Download the webpage and search for gaJsHost::
 
C:\TEMP>h:\bin_drop\wget http://ig2600.blogspot.com
--11:38:04-- http://ig2600.blogspot.com/
=> `index.html.3'


11:38:10 (67.29 KB/s) - `index.html.3' saved [20285/20285]

C:\TEMP> findstr /i gaJSHost index.html.3
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));

From the above you see that ig2600.blogspot.com uses Google Analytics, and thus collects all sorts of interesting data about its viewers.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Rock Paper Scissors in SilverLight

Back in 1997 I wrote my first web Game. It was tic-tac toe, used CGI and was written in C.

Now, 11 years later -- I create my newest masterpiece: Rock Paper Scissors,

Play Rock Paper Siccors

Uses silver light and C#.

Saturday, November 29, 2008

Listen to music from your web browser.

There are two excellent choices:

GrooveShark:

You pick the artist or album and GrooveShark plays it. GrooveShark does not suggest music you will like - you need to know what you want to hear.

Pandora:

You pick a song and it finds and plays similar songs to the one you picked. Pandora does not allow you to select specific songs to listen too.

To my surprise I've found that Pandora , even though it doesn't allow me to choose specific songs, is usually the player I prefer to use.

So far, both of these services are free.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

VIM and firefox - atlast

If you think VIM is crazy stop reading now.

There is excellent VIM integration in firefox using the vimperator plugin. I run this on all my firefox instances and am very happy with it.

It works superbly on static web pages, but has trouble with dynamic web pages that do keyboard remapping (GMail/GReader/etc). For such pages you can hit C-Z to go into passthrough mode which allows you direct interaction to the page.