ben robison
when only more words will do
Subscribe to RSSJust Enough JavaScript to be Dangerous
Working at Omniture means that I have fairly easy access to SiteCatalyst. I’ve been running Google Analytics on my blog for over a year now, and I’m nearing my one year anniversary of starting at Omniture (April). I figured it’s probably time for me to take my own medicine.
I haven’t done any real programming since leaving school and even then it was Rails or Java. I’ve dabbled in PHP, but I’ve never done JavaScript. Ever. Turns out that programming languages are just programming languages. The logic is the same and the syntax is all that changes (this is obviously gross oversimplification, but served my purposes tonight). I looked at the JavaScript on a few of other sites and whipped up my own solution for naming pages and recording internal search terms.
Now there’s no QC department on my MacBook Pro, but I spent about 45 minutes to code, debug, and test my implementation.
Tags: javascript, omniture, programming, sitecatalyst
You Are Not Mr. Ali’s Next of Kin
And neither am I =)
I don’t get mail like this on my Gmail account, but every once someone like Mr. Patrick K. Chan, Chief Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer of the Hang Seng Ltd. Bank in Honk Kong makes it past my Hotmail spam filter.
I realize that phishing is serious business and some of the scams are quite convincing, but this one was just laughable. Any email that starts like this is going to be good:
Good Day,
Greetings to you please do not be surprise by my mail to you as all information contained is real which you will find out for yourself that is why I need your co-operation of which I am rest assured that I will get from you. You should be aware that this mail did not come to you by mistake but rather, meant for you as this project would be mutually benefiting to the both of us. I must advice that you keep this very confidential to yourself and do not disclose it to anyone.
Now I didn’t think I knew Mr. Chan, so it was reassuring to see that his email in my inbox was not an accident and that he had actually sought me out personally for this business deal.
Apparently before the Iraqi war got in a full swing, Mr. Aadheam Ali was a successful merchant and personal client of Mr. Chan. Mr. Ali bought 18 Million Euros worth of bonds, and upon maturity, the bank tried to contact him but found out that he and his whole family had been murdered in a “missile bomb blast.”
Mr. Chan did his due diligence to discover that Mr. Ali never declared a “NEXT OF KIN” and he’s had a lawyer prepare a document that will legally turn my into Mr. Ali’s next of kin so that I can inherit the 18 Million Euros. If nobody claims the money, then:
at the expiration 4 years the funds will revert to the ownership of the Hong Kong Government if nobody applies to claim the funds as the(NEXT OF KIN), this of which is very unjust as the Government will cease the funds and use for themselves and do not account for anything good from such Funds.
Mr. Chan feels that this is unjust, so I should step forward to claim the money, but not tell anyone. In return for all the effort he’s put forth to track me down and for the use of his attorney, all that Mr. Chan wants is a negotiable percentage of the 18 Million Euros. Best of all Mr. Chan guarantees that there is no risk involved. How can I pass this up? This is the deal of a lifetime!
Tags: best of, email spam
Tips for 1st Time Home Buyers
I think I found the Get Rich Slowly blog through the Google Reader recommendations, but regardless of how I found it, I like the way this guy thinks. My father and my father-in-law have very different philosophies on money and how to spend it, but my risk averse nature means that I tend to play conservative when it comes to spending thousands of dollars at a time.
Alison and I are saving money to buy a home. Alison shops around online and keeps an eye on prices in different neighborhoods around the valley. I rule the monthly budget with an iron fist to make sure that a few hundred dollars goes into a house savings fund every month. We’ve never bought a house before, and it’ll be awhile before we can afford it, but for anyone who finds themselves in this situation, this article at Get Rich Slowly offers some advice.
Some of my favorite tips are:
- Get pre-qualified for the mortgage and spend only 75% of that amount
- Make a list of priorities
- Buy less than you can afford
A Use For Game Consoles Even Mom Can’t Argue With
The folding@home project started back in 2000. The idea is that thousands of computers all over the world donate their spare processor time to performing hugely complex mathematical computations that normally take supercomputer strength. People have been using their game consoles for the task as well, and for some reason, (I’ve never understood) PlayStation owners seem to be particularly fond of this.
I thought it was a cool idea (though I’ve never done it myself), but didn’t understand the focus on PlayStations. Now the PS3 has scientists all excited again. Apparently, the calculations required to show the intense gaming graphics in today’s games are quite similar to the ones required by physicists and chemists the world over to model their moving particles (whether atoms or stars). According to the article and the folding@home site, the Cell processor in Sony’s (mildly successful) new console takes the cake in terms of scientific usefulness.
Sony’s latest version of the PS3 software now includes an official folding@home client that allows your game console to perform work in 8 hour chunks called work units. So it’s probably not something you’d flip on during the day, but why not help out at night? Tell mom you need a PlayStation 3 to help make the world a better place.
Some Things I’d Like to Say, But Can’t
The fact that I work for one of the vendors, means that I don’t often write about analytics anymore. There are a few reasons for this: 1) I don’t want to be perceived as an official representative for the company and 2) my site isn’t supposed to be an advertisement.
So I was delighted when I read this article by June Dershewitz over on the Web Analytics Association’s blog. June created a list of the “Top 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started In Web Analytics.” She says a few things that I often think about, but resist the urge to write about. Some of my favorites are:
4. Dirty, dirty, dirty. Numbers won’t match, they won’t add up, they won’t make sense, sometimes they won’t even exist. Know how much dirt you’re willing to live with, then accept it and move on.
5. You will learn to love the query string. You will come to see it as a beautiful haiku…
8. Don’t fall into the “report monkey” trap…
I also got a laugh when she said that CSV files don’t have to be comma-separated. That’s wrong. CSV files still have commas in them, even if they don’t show up in Excel. Those mysterious commas that you don’t see are performing a wonderful technology magic to keep your data organized.
What do you wish you had known before you started doing web analytics?
Tags: excel, top 10, Web Analytics