Memos from November 2005

The Journey to Update Firefox from 1.0.7 to 1.5

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Just a few weeks ago, Mozilla released Fire­fox 1.5 RC3. This seems to be the same as the final release. So, if you haven’t con­verted yet (mostly IE6 users) nor have tried out Fire­fox, now is the time.

Mozilla Firefox

I finally decided to update my Fire­fox ver­sion from 1.0.7 to the newest 1.5. I will be imple­ment­ing this on my work PC as it has the most exten­sions installed. This should be interesting.

Here are the extensions:

  • Web Devel­oper 0.9.4
  • Wizz RSS Reader 1.1.0
  • gTrans­late 0.2.6 gTrans­late 0.2.7
  • ShowIP 0.7.11
  • Col­orZilla 0.8.2 (New ver­sion: 0.8.3)
  • Grease­mon­key 0.5.3 Grease­mon­key 0.6.2
  • fireFTP 0.88.3
  • Site­bar Side­bar 1.02
  • Tab­browser Exten­sions 1.14.2005092501 (New ver­sion: 2.0.2005113001)
  • View Ren­dered Source Chart 1.2.03
  • Screen­Grab 0.6
  • HTML Val­ida­tor 0.7.6
  • Aut­ofill 0.2
  • IE Tab 1.0.5 (New ver­sion: 1.0.6.4)

Here goes noth­ing, or some­thing. To be con­tin­ued…

Updates
The striked-out exten­sions above were noted as incom­pat­i­ble with Fire­fox 1.5. Fire­fox Update auto­mat­i­cally “dis­abled [them] until com­pat­i­ble ver­sions are installed.” I then noted the newest, avail­able ver­sion of the exten­sion that is com­pat­i­ble with Fire­fox 1.5, as stated by Fire­fox Update.

Also to note, I needed to update my theme “Noia 2.0 (extreme)” as it was caus­ing a dis­play bug on the URL-address bar. This went from 2.88 to 2.991 and appar­ently fixed the dis­play issue. This took a while to fig­ure out. Maybe in the future, Moz-dev team can have a note to check one’s theme if there are any dis­play issues being encountered.

All in all, the update went quite well. It seems that Fire­fox 1.5 loads a tad faster than its pre­de­ces­sor. I’m just bummed about not hav­ing some exten­sions: Site­bar Side­bar (which is my links depos­i­tory) and Grease­mon­key (which is one of the best exten­sions to have for a Fire­fox user).

Note: Grease­mon­key 0.6.2 seems to be hav­ing bug issues at the moment. Peo­ple have been address­ing this issue, so there should be a fix soon. It’s prob­a­bly going to roll out with ver­sion 0.6.4 of the extension.

Try Ruby!

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No, not the stone. I’m refer­ring to the pro­gram­ming lan­guage.

Ruby is the inter­preted script­ing lan­guage for quick and easy object-oriented pro­gram­ming. It has many fea­tures to process text files and to do sys­tem man­age­ment tasks (as in Perl). It is sim­ple, straight-forward, exten­si­ble, and portable.

Any­ways, here’s a nice inter­ac­tive demo on what Ruby can do. Good job whytheluck­ys­tiff on this project. Very enter­taint­ing. I’m sure this will open some eyes and get some peo­ple to learn more about it.

Note: For those non-technical peo­ple, don’t be scared to try the demo. It’s clear enough to fol­low. Just read the tips below the command-prompt area and you should be good to go.

H&M San Francisco, Just Your Average Opening?

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/stechico/64822899/
H&M SF Grand Open­ing by stechico.

Talk about your reg­u­lar Sat­ur­day morn­ing… I went to the city to hang out with some peeps and roll to the H&M Grand Open­ing (150 Pow­ell St.). I got to Pow­ell St. ter­mi­nal via BART around 9:45am. As you walk up the hill, you can already see the chaos. Hun­dreds were already lined up antic­i­pat­ing the store’s rib­bons to be cut.

The cops, heli­copters and secu­rity guards were out in force to keep an eye on things, and keep order. It was no sur­prise that this thing was a great Grand Open­ing. H&M did a won­der­ful job spread­ing the word about their first instal­la­tions on the west coast.

They kept the crowd (lined up around the block, lit­er­ally) in order by hav­ing secu­rity guards act as “line mon­i­tors” perse. This gave cut­ters the wrong idea, and kept things fair for every­one who have been wait­ing there for a long time. I over­heard peo­ple say­ing that the aver­age wait was 1–2 hours dur­ing the morn­ing. That’s just too crazy.

So, I skipped that morn­ing fiasco and headed over to grab some brunch at King of Thai (aka. King Thai, or Pur­ple Thai between my cowork­ers and I). After get­ting some chicken satay, hop­ing over to the dif­fer­ent stores in the area and some refresh­ments, we headed over to the H&M line.

The time is now 2:30pm. It wasn’t as bad as the secu­rity guard said it was about a 10 minute wait now. But low and behold, we got in the store in less than 5 min­utes. The inside, well… that’s another story.

It was just com­plete pan­de­mo­nium. Imag­ine shop­ping dur­ing Christ­mas Eve, only in Novem­ber. It was freak­ing hot, humid and stuffy. It felt like Sum­mer time all over again.

Mean­while, after an hour of brows­ing the men’s sec­tion, I came up empty handed. Noth­ing really caught my eye, except for some nice suits that were just not jus­ti­fi­able for me to get at the moment. I haven’t even worn one since Liz & Joel’s Wed­ding two weeks ago, and dur­ing my inter­views back in February-March.

Any­ways, I fig­ured that every­one who shopped today at H&M would prob­a­bly be wear­ing the same clothes this week. That’s just gonna be hilar­i­ous. So for those who work and live in/near the city, be on a look out for peo­ple wear­ing the same H&M cloth­ing next to each other. Take a photo if you can. HA!

Data Aggregation of Measure Map While Google Analytics Waits

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So it has been only 3–4 days since I’ve installed gAn­a­lystics and Mea­sure Map to gather infor­ma­tion on this site’s traf­fic. The biggest con with gAn­a­lyt­ics would prob­a­bly be it’s time-period to gather the lat­est infor­ma­tion from your site(s). It says that it takes 12 hours but it seems that it’s more than this some times.

Webmaster Overview - Google Analytics

Mean­while, while gAn­a­lyt­ics comes short on update time, it sure does make up for it on the report­ing side. I have mine set to Web­mas­ter View and this bad boy just list the following:

  • Web­mas­ter Overview (Vis­its and Pageviews, Vis­its by New and Return­ing, Geo Map Over­lay, Vis­its by Source)
  • Con­tent Sum­mary (Top 5 Entrances, Top 5 Exists, Top 5 Content)
  • Defined Fun­nel Navigation
  • Entrance Bounce Rates
  • Goal Track­ing
  • Con­tent by Titles
  • Web Design Para­me­ters (Browser Ver­sions, Plat­form Ver­sions, Browser & Plat­form Com­bos, Screen Res­o­lu­tions, Screen Col­ors, Lan­guages, Java Enabled, Flash Ver­sion, Con­nec­tion Speed, Hostnames)

Yes, that list should be enough for the above-average Web­mas­ter. If this ain’t your cup of tea and just need some­thing to keep a track of: vis­i­tors; links com­ing in from other blogs; com­ments posted; posts that are being vis­ited; browser data from those vis­its; coun­tries from which those vis­i­tors are from; and the time of day those vis­its came … then Mea­sure Map is your soup-of-the-day. Not only that, it’s hands down sex­ier than gAn­a­lyt­ics and more user-friendly. What else can you expect from a prod­uct built by one of the top user-experience firms of our times, Adap­tive Path.

So whether it be get­ting down and dirty to ana­lyze all those mar­ket­ing data, or sim­ply check­ing out which of your blog posts are the most inter­est­ing, these two appli­ca­tions should do the trick accord­ingly. Besides the FREE-ness, you can have both of them run­ning simul­ta­ne­ously to cover all your bases. If I may sug­gest a fea­ture to leave of with, I’d like to see Mea­sure Map offer a way to track mul­ti­ple blogs. This would just be dandy instead of mak­ing dif­fer­ent accounts. That, or sub­mit­ting dif­fer­ent emails in hope to get addi­tional invites =)

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