Todd Huss

We’ve finally hit the point at work where we’re ready to upgrade from MySQL 4.0 to 5. Data integrity has been a problem since I started at this job. Part of the reason is that MySQL 4.0 has an odd (to put it lightly) interpretation of not null and we still have a fair amount of legacy Perl code running the administrative portion of the site that lets bad data through. The lack of subselects for ad-hoc querying, aggregation functions, stored procedures, and triggers has also grown more irritating knowing that MySQL 5 has those features. (more…)

I’ve been using Google Analytics for about a month to track 4 of my sites (and more recently this one as well) and I am impressed! The key (in my mind) to Google Analytics and other high end commerical solutions like Fireclick and Omniture is that they use client side Javascript based tracking which is far less prone to crawler inflation and provides more information (e.g. flash version, screen resolution, color depth, etc..) than log based solutions.

Sure, you lose the 1-2% of users that have Javascript disabled but that’s a lot more accurate than the 15-30% overcounts I’ve seen in many log based solutions. If you’ve ever used AWStats on a high traffic site you’ve likely observed the gross overcounting that occurs from crawlers when AWStats doesn’t know about, spam bots,
etc…

In summary Google Analytics offers a lot of the features of the high end commerical solutions such as site overlay (temporarily disabled), funnel analysis, conversion or goal tracking, cookie based returning and unique visitor stats, detailed client stats, etc… and best of all it’s free. If you’ve got a personal website or are a small to medium sized company you’d be crazy not to at least try it!

That said, there are a few features I would like to see in Google Analytics:
1. Google Analytics desktop dashboard that gives me a quick overview of each of my sites at a glance so I wouldn’t have to login each time.

2. Live traffic data. I haven’t found a way to get up to the minute page view counts which is critical for identifying massive traffic spikes when they happen instead of the next day.

3. Similar to 1 but an aggregate report on the web version that gives me an overview of each of my sites next to each other. As it is I have to drill down into each site to get even basic overview info.

4. The one big feature I would like to see would be on the fly drag and drop pathway analysis like Fireclick and Omniture both offer.

In moving from my old blog at JRoller to one on my domain I had to choose which blogging engine to use. After evaluating a number of systems such as Movable Type, Typo, Blogger with sftp, etc… I ended up with Wordpress. My main requirements for blog software were: (more…)

My first Linux distribution was Slackware installed from 40 floppy disks running the 0.99 Linux kernel. Back then a distribution was just a starting point to get a system up and running. The concept of upgrading to the next release of the distribution was foreign, if you wanted a newer kernel or a security patch you downloaded the source and built it. Distributions were a very personal thing (more…)

I’ve been looking at redoing my website boatblogger.com using Drupal instead of the Roller weblogger. Most of the users that started using boatblogger found roller a little to frustrating and eventually left for the bigger free blogging services. I’m also researching CMS systems to replace our home grown article publishing system at work so it’s a
valuable learning experience in that regard as well!

Anyhow, while my hosted servers run Linux, I use Windows as my desktop so to setup my Drupal dev environment I installed (more…)

I’ve discovered that the only way to really get a good defrag in Windows is in safe mode. Reboot Windows, hit F8 before the starting Windows screen comes up, select safe mode, and then Start -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter. (more…)

In one of my side-ventures, which I’ve written about before, we develop and sell Linux and Java based nmea wireless navigation servers for the marine market. The devices run a small embedded Linux distribution on compact flash so we regularly need to write the image to new CF cards before sending out a new unit.

To setup a new batch of units I’d been using Linux and dd to write an image to the compact flash card. In a pinch I’ve also used VMWare with a virtual machine running Linux to do this job in the past.

However, this weekend I took a few new CF cards that needed to be imaged out of town along with my laptop determined to find a way to do it under Windows directly. Not surprisingly the answer was once again Unix in the form of Cygwin. I couldn’t find any way to do this with native windows tools. So for the 0.001% of you who read this blog and also need to backup/restore compact flash cards, here’s how you do it under Cygwin:

1. Figure out which Cygwin device the compact flash card is. To do this first insert the card that you want to backup and then run cat /proc/partitions. If you have a new 256MB CF card in your card reader you should see an entry like this: 249007 sdb. If could be sdc, sde, etc… but you should be able to identify the device based on the size of CF card in the slot.

2. To backup or make an image of a CF card (assuming /dev/sdb is your CF card) run dd if=/dev/sdb of=somefilename.dd bs=1M. Next do a chmod a-w somefilename.dd so you don’t accidentally overwrite the backup if you switch the if and of parameters in the next step.

3. Now when you get a new CF card that you want to write the image to, put the new CF card in the slot and run dd if=somefilename.dd of=/dev/sdb bs=1M.

Now your new CF card should be exactly the same as the old one. Ofcourse with Mac OS X and Linux, dd should already be installed on your system so you don’t need to install Cygwin.

I’ve had the same @iname email address for about 8 years now. I’ve been using Mail.com’s Iname forwarding service to forward to wherever I’m keeping my mail (usually on a Linux box I host) so that whenever I want to move my actual email account somewhere else I can. However, every year the iname forwarding service seems to get a little worse with numerous outages. Considering Go Daddy offers domains for around 8 bucks a year which includes mail forwarding I decided to make the switch.

Here’s my new completely convoluted setup which I’m trying out instead of iname coupled with SpamAssassin on my linux box (which just hasn’t been cutting it for me as a spam filter, perhaps I don’t have it configured correctly):

I have my new Go Daddy registered domain forward email to my GMail account. My GMail account spam filters and then forwards to my linux box (an address I don’t give out so I can change it when I need to). On the Linux box I use Pine, IMP, or IMAP to read my mail, respond, and compose messages with the From header set to my GoDaddy registered domain.

The main reason I did all of this is so my email address will never need to change again. I thought that was going to be the case when I went with iname but alas vendor lock-in is often problematic over the long haul. With complete control over my mail setup and how I forward it, spam filter it, etc… I’m optimistic that I can happily go about using my new email address for the foreseeable future.

I hate having to test a site on multiple versions of Internet Explorer, not to mention my general dislike for IE as a browser. Anyhow, up until today, I’ve known which machines in our office have older versions of IE so I can use them to test.

No more! I discovered Ryan Parman’s site where he has created standalone IE. You just download the version of IE you want, unzip it, click ieexplore.exe, and you’ve got that version running and it doesn’t conflict with your installed version of IE. Great work Ryan!

I’ll have to try this out with Wine on Linux and see if it works…