People frequently complain about cookies. They don’t like the idea that their actions are being tracked and watched, so they disable cookies outright. The thing is that cookies are really the least of your problems.

Cookies may be a good way to track people, but they are at least a known way. You can clear your cookies, disable them, manage them—and if you know enough, edit them.

[More]

A little bit of futurism for the day. Yesterday I was reading an article on a blog that I've forgotten saying that Google Wave is going to fail as an email alternative. I'm going to go out on a limb here and agree:

Google Wave is going to fail as an email alternative.

But I'm playing with words a bit here. You see, having used it for a while I've come to conclude that it probably was never meant to be an email alternative.

[More]

"The biggest hurdle, particularly with large companies, is convincing them that they don't have to run everything themselves." said Nicholas Carr in the beginning of 2008.

In his interview with Edward Cone of CIO insight he argues that "just as the electric grid [...] led to all sorts of knock-on effects: the way society is organized, the way we think about education, the way we think about consumerism. We'll see similar effects as we're all essentially hooked up to this one huge worldwide computer, this Internet-based supercomputer that all of us share."

10 months later Google is pushing Google Apps, Microsoft has released their own cloud based services, Adobe has Photoshop online.

[More]

compare apples to apples

We have a client whose IT department is stating that AWStats should be sufficient for their Web Analytics needs and questioning whether GA is really necessary

The problem arises, in part, out of the problem that the client has a large contingent in Germany and the IT department has questioned whether GA is in compliance with the "Bundesdatenschutzgesetz" (German Data Protection Law)?

The client is Widgets Inc.!

I am shocked that AWStats has even been compared with GA! AWStats itself does not make the comparison.

I responded along the following lines.

[More]

Caution, this post definitely contains mature subject matter; reader discretion is advised.

Frustration with the tiny little fields in GA, particularly in Goals and Filters and in the inline filter box reached a climax this weekend.

So I wrote this little Greasemonkey script (below) and called it gaDeAnalyse to remove these anal restrictions.

It increases the size of the in-line filter fields and others by 100% or more - guaranteed.

[More]

In writing today's murderous post on Google Analytics Cookies I happened to plug the value 1234567890 into my "Unix time stamp" converter, and what did I find?

Try it:

Timestamp converter

Happy Valentine's Day!!!

Its not a bird nor a plane, etc. but it is one of the most intriguing Google Analytics sites I've encountered. Could this be one of the QA sites used by a GA development team?

[More]

Look closely - they're choc-full of info

Last time on "As the cookie crumbles", we featured the friendly cookie monster rescuing an eCommerce site on steroids.

Having been formerly introduced to the cookie monster, we can now talk about his body parts.

While we deal with all the values stored in the main GA cookies, we will show the Domain hash is the ultimate aid to GA QA and quick debugging.

[More]

I recently came across Ask500People.com, a great website that allows you to submit an opinion poll and receive real time answers from people across the world. Ask500People (created by fellow BCers, Wondermill) works off the Google Maps API; you can see where in the world people are voting from. Users vote on a number of user-generated polls and help push the polls they like to the homepage by giving them 'points'. Once a poll receives enough points to make it to the top of the homepage it gets distributed across hundreds of websites in site's polling network. Ask500People.com has a growing community of users who, for the most part, offer interesting questions and pretty engaging discussions in the comment sections of the polls. (more after the jump)

[More]

Recently I've just installed the Quantum DB plugin for Eclipse. So far, in my limited usage, it seems great. Being able to work within the same IDE for different types of development is great.

We primarily work with MS SQL Server 2000+ and MySQL databases and there are JDBC drivers available for both of these.

I thought I'd blog about the installation (in case I need some help again in the future)

To try out Quantum DB yourself, the first thing you need to do is install the Quantum DB plugin for Eclipse.

The following instructions are based on Eclipse 3.3+

To install Quantum DB, you first need to install the GEF plugin for Eclipse

To do this: 1. Open Eclipse and go to: Help -> Software updates -> Find and Install... -> Search for new features to install

2. Select the checkbox next to the Europa Discover Site and click next.

3. Select the default mirror to check.

4. On the result page that lists the new features, expand Graphical Editors and Frameworks and select the Graphical Editing Framework option (you don't have to select the SDK, but you could select that as well if you want).

5. Go through the rest of the installation process and restart Eclipse.

Now you are ready to install Quantum DB.

To do this: 1. Open Eclipse and go to: Help -> Software updates -> Find and Install... -> Search for new features to install

2. Click the button for "New Remote Site", then type the update URL as follows: http://quantum.sourceforge.net/update-site

3. Click next and go through the rest of the installation process.

After the installation and Eclipse restarts, you now have Quantum DB installed.

To get Quantum DB working with MySQL and MS SQL Server I had to download and install the JDBC drivers.

For MySQL, you can download the MySQL Connnector/J from: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/ You don't need to register to download the connector, just click the link at the bottom that says "No thanks, just take me to the downloads!"

For MS SQL Server, you can download the SQL Server 2005 JDBC Driver from: http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/jdbc/

Download and extract these to their respective folders and put them somewhere on your hard drive. I put them in the root of the Eclipse folder.

For MySQL, you should find a file called like: mysql-connector-java-5.0.7-bin.jar For MS SQL, you should find a file called something like: sqljdbc.jar

To add support for MySQL, you need to do the following:

1. Go to eclipse and switch to the view "Quantum DB" by going to Window -> Open Perspective -> Other..

2. Add a new bookmark by right-clicking inside the left "database bookmarks" panel and selecting "New Bookmark"

3. Now click "Add driver", from the dropdown list called "type", choose MySQL.

4. Now click "add external jar", point to the file mysql-connector-java-5.0.7-bin.jar (or whatever your jar file is called)

5. Click the "browse" button for the class name "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver", then go on clicking many "OK" buttons.

So, now that you have the driver installed, you need to add a bookmark for the database you want to connect to.

1. Right-click in the "database bookmarks" panel again,

2. Select the MySQL driver and click Next.

3. A dialog will be shown for you input the connection information for the database you are connecting to. Enter, this information and click Next.

4. Now enter a name for the bookmark and click Finish.

The MySQL bookmark for your database is now setup.

To add the MS SQL Server driver and bookmark, repeat the process above for adding a driver and creating a bookmark using the appropriate MS SQL file and database information.

Hope you find this useful!