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.

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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#.

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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.

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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.

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What are ShowMeDos and screencasts?

ShowMeDo is a web site that hosts screencasts. A screencast, is simply recordings what you're doing on the screen. This is awesome for training, or for showing someone how to do something. For example, someone asked me how they could save my flickr pictures to their local computer. I tried to explain, but they wouldn't listen, so instead I created a screencast that showed how it is done.

To create the screencast, I use camstudio ( get version 2.0 for windows it's free), and then I upload it to google video so that any one can view it.

The video I need to make is here.

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Laptops owners with 2 Gigs of RAM can finally hibernate.

After years of not being able to hibernate, MS finally released a patch that fixed my issue with hibernation.

If you're wondering who needs hibernate? I do, and here's why:

1. Booting my computer is slow
• I have corporate software that needs to scan my system on startup. booting up and logging in can take upto 5 minutes
2. I often don't use my laptop for days.
• Standby needlessly drains my batteries. Nothing worse than pulling out the laptop only to find standby has reduced my batteries to 10%.
3. I have multiple batteries
• Hibernate lets me change batteries without rebooting my system.

Good Sleeping

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A funny API decription

Maybe I'm weird, but I giggle when people talk about databases crying. The Flickr search api justifies a requirement as follows:

Geo queries require some sort of limiting agent in order to prevent the database from crying.

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