Here's a code fragment to track outgoing links with Google Analytics.
As usual, use it at your own risk. I can not give you support for
Google products, for obvious reasons.To use it, you <me>need at least understand where to put it (call it
in a try-catch in onLoad) and how to adjust the variable name of your page
tracker (I'm not using the default).function trackLinks()
var as=document.getElementsByTagName("a");
var ig=["mydomain.tld","google-analytics.com"];
for(var i=0; i<as.length; i++)
var ignore=false;
var oc=as[i].getAttribute("onclick");
if(oc!=null)
oc=String(oc);
if(oc.indexOf('urchinTracker')>=0
oc.indexOf('_trackPageview')>=0
oc.indexOf('javascript:')>=0)
continue;
if(as[i].href.indexOf("mailto:")<0)
for(var j=0;j<ig.length;j++)
if (as[i].href.indexOf(ig[j])>=0)
ignore=true;
if(!ignore)
as[i].onclick = function()
var o=this.href.replace(/:\/*/,"/");
pt._trackPageview('/out/'+o)+";"
+ ((oc!=null)?oc+";":"");
;
This code tries to attach an onload handler to any outgoing link, ignoring
internal links or links that use JavaScript. If such a link is clicked,
it generates a virtual page access with an "/out/" URL that can be analyzed
in Google Analytics.A side benefit (apart from knowing which links are interesting to your
visitors) is that you should get more accurate "time on page" statistics for
your pages.
Some time ago we decided in phpMyAdmin team to create yet another team meeting
(after five years) at FOSDEM 2010. It took some time, but now I should have
all travel things arranged (thanks to my employer who sends me there).
So if anybody wants to meet there, just drop me an email and I will try to put
you on my schedule.
If you use a script to do some customisations run via
preseed/late_command then don't do it the following way:
As an aside to yesterday s Another Network Begins note, I should mention that one of the challenges of running any inter-business project is paying for it. It surprises some people that many great cooperative projects are running on very small budgets, whereas it looks like some Social Enterprise groups are awash with cash.
How can this be, when it still looks like cooperatives are stronger financially than social enterprises? A written answer in Parliament on Monday suggests one possible reason: Co-operatives UK and The Plunkett Foundation together get 164k of Cabinet Office funding, while the Social Enterprise Coalition alone gets 488k and there are other SocEnt groups on the pay list.
Once again, I m surprised by the way the Labour and Co-operative government is behaving, like I was on the way the real help initiatives exclude cooperative partnerships, while being open to both private sector employers and social enterprises. I m all in favour of intervening in markets, but this doesn t feel like it s making things fairer.
Three strikes, funding social enterprise in preference to cooperatives would a Conservative or Liberal Democrat government really be worse?
Lil is white trash. She does not live in a double-wide and
make hot dog casserole, and in foreign lands she could easily
pass, but she is white trash nonetheless.
Lyle is white trash. He does not buy potted meat or have
a car up on blocks in his yard, but he is white trash nonetheless.
One day Lil and Lyle met, and something drew them together.
Perhaps it was a disturbance in the philotic web, or maybe
a magical Jungian archetype of a dirty rag as a gas cap
that resonated in their minds, but whatever it was, they
decided to keep in touch online and get to know each other
better, with clear non-platonic overtones.
Lyle had a penchant for underdressed girls with a modest
amount of tattooes and piercings and a full-on bent for
drunken promiscuity. While Lil did not fit this stereotype
well, she played up her sexual indiscriminateness and
made up a few fetishes to impress him.
Lil needed a boy who would not judge her for all her faults
and long history of poor decision-making. So Lyle pretended
not to judge.
One-third deceit, one-third misinterpretation of Internet
ambiguities, and one-third imagination led them to develop
unrealistic perceptions of each other. Since they also had
unrealistic perceptions of themselves, were fairly narcissistic,
and were almost totally caught up in their own private melodramas,
it took a while for the veil to come down.
Come down it did, like an avalanche of Kraft Dinner boxes falling
off a Canadian supermarket shelf. Then they were angry.
Then they were sad. Then they brushed on fresh new coats of
self-delusion and heated up some chicken nuggets.
Yesterday, the German magazine freeX published its December issue. It includes an three-page article about vbox-sync, written by me, that is even mentioned on the cover page. After my article on the Cross-Site-Authentication attack that was published in the German Linux-Magazin and the international Linux Magazine in 2005, this is my second publication.Vbox-sync is a tool to distribute VirtualBox images via apt-get that Phil Kern and I wrote as part of our work for itomig.de, a German Free Software consulting company, and the LiMux project. I also held a talk about it at the Debian Conference in Extremadura, Spain, in 2009.
When you just read the following sentence:
"usage of a software, that can only be used together with the Internet Explorer".
You already know the consequence that several hundreds Wienux boxes are gone. It was great to meet the newest member of our co-op yesterday and discuss a new ethical business referral network, but I ve barely spent any time back at home and I m heading out again, partly to visit online09 and IMS, partly to collect some things from the co-op s founder and also to do whatever else I can do in London in the time available.
I was unable to attend yesterday s #koha IRC general meeting because of the terrible state of mobile internet coverage in rural Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, where I was at the time. Apologies for not sending apologies beforehand, but I thought it would work. Mobile internet is so frustratingly patchy outside the big cities. It works, but not reliably when I m moving fast, which seems like part of the point of mobile .
Once again, I m surprised that the U2Com free wifi network still has only one London hotspot. It makes finding wifi in Bristol and Somerset so much easier (as well as attracting me to Bath Ales) and there was even a node in Manchester yesterday. Is there another free wifi network in London that I don t know about? The Londonist Free Wifi map doesn t show if they re in networks.
Great, I spent a few hours today to set up a nice OpenVPN server. Nice in that I wanted the (Windows) clients to be able to access the company network like they were connected locally.
My idea was to use the OpenVPN tap mode and let the DHCP server at work assign IPs to the VPN clients.
This turned out to be a dumb idea. After I got everything going, I noticed the following message in syslog (which probably scrolled by previously in the debug drivel):
NOTE: your local LAN uses the extremely common subnet address 192.168.0.x or 192.168.1.x. Be aware that this might create routing conflicts if you connect to the VPN server from public locations such as internet cafes that use the same subnet.Hmm, sure, I guess that will exclude every second incoming VPN connection. Summary: Think about IP space clashes before setting up a VPN.
Next Saturday a group of more than 20 women that work with Free Software
in Argentina and Uruguay will gather to speak at a Free Software event in
Buenos Aires, called Software
Libre, Pasi n de Mujeres.
It's your typical Free Software event, with talks related to the
philosophy of Free Software and the Free Culture in general, and also
technical talks related to using and developing Free Software. With one
important difference: all the speakers will be women.
This might sound shocking to some people and normal stuff to some
others, but the reaction created by the call for talks of this event
was definitely not something I expected. Women from all over the country
(and many also from other Latin American countries) have contacted us, to
tell us about what they do in their daily lives with Free Software and how
they would like to share their work with others.
The event is open for both men and women to attend, however, of the more
than a 100 people that have already pre-registered, more than half are
women. A ratio that is more than amazing when you have been to a Free
Software event before. I think that the fact that all the speakers are
women is really encouraging for many women to attend, who otherwise
wouldn't.
Debian will be sponsoring the event, by paying the bus tickets of the
speakers that come from the whole country, which is a great help in making
this event a big success. I really expect the event to be a fantastic
opportunity for the women in our country to finally show all the great work
they are doing... I'm very excited about it :)
PS: Somehow, I screwed up Planet Debian, filling it with old
posts. I'm sorry! :-\
After reading Christian's
post about the new ISO 639-3, I thought about the "what is the country
in the world which as the highest number of languages listed in ISO 639-3"
question, and thought, "It must be India or China", and
sure enough they both have a high language count (428 and 236
respectively).
However, after clicking around a while, I found out that Nigeria has
510 languages. I thought I had found the highest one for quite a while,
until I got to Indonesia,
which has 742 languages, and I thought "it's not fair, that's much more
than just a country, it's a huge group of islands". Not having learned my
lesson, I was quite astonished when I finally found out that the country
with the highest number of languages is Papua New
Guinea, a neighboring group of
islands (although not so big as Indonesia), with 830 languages!
In Europe, the coutry with the highest number is Turkey (36), followed by
Italy (33)
and France
(32). It looks like Europe has gone a long way after that stupid Babel
incident :).
In America, I thought Argentina
would be quite up in the list, since we do have a lot of native groups, but
it turns out we only have 27 languages and we are on the 9th place. The
country with the most languages is Mexico (298),
then USA
(238), then Brazil (235).
And, after all that clicking around the site, I found a very interesting map, that has one
red dot per language in the primary location of each living language.
It's quite amazing to see the big red New Guinea island. I wonder what
happened there that led to the creation of that many languages.
Finally, after more than a year of preparation, and six months of very
very hard work, DebConf8 has come
and gone. Even if I'm not yet completely recovered from all that stress,
I'm good enough to feel really happy about how things turned out.
DebConf8 was a great success. We had great talks, many opportunities
for developing interesting ideas, a lot of social interaction, an awesome
video team that allowed more than 200 people from all around the world to
be part of the conference even if they weren't in Argentina, and in
general almost everyone had a very good time. It was really nice to have so
many people from Debian over here, and it was specially nice to see them
working and enjoying themselves so much.
This was all possible thanks to our sponsors, thanks to the many hours
spent during the previous months both by the DebConf orga-team (the usual
suspects) and specially by the local team, which includes
Tincho,
Dami n,
Romanella,
Maxy,
Sebas,
Zero,
Mendieta,
Dererk,
Melisa,
Angasule,
Lisandro,
Nueces,
and also thanks to the all help of the volunteers that came to work with us
during DebCamp and DebConf, which include
Tom s,
Tinchito,
M nica,
Lucas,
Germ n,
Diego,
Fefu,
Nicol s,
Mart n,
Marcos,
Hern n,
Alejandro,
Mat as,
Rodrigo,
Alberto and
Joaqu n,
and finally, DebConf wouldn't have been the great event it was without all
the people that managed to travel thousands of kilometers to get here. To
all of them, thanks, for making DebConf8 such a great conference
Now, at last, DebConf8 is over (although there is some stuff that we
still need to do before we can really forget all about it), and life goes
on. Today, I did my first NMU after a long time. I'm particularly
glad to have time for fixing bugs again, but I won't lie, I'm also
extremely satisfied with how DebConf8 turned out.
See you in Extremadura!
Caution: Latin American rant ahead.
With my Latin American Spanish keyboard (xkb code "la") I can type in:
Last year, after many years of peacefully living the whole year in
GMT-3, our government decided that Argentina should use DST again. This
was done in a rush, but patches were written and applied everywhere to have
a correct timezone.
Fixing the problem was not enough, tzdata's upstream decided to predict
the future:
# From Paul Eggert (2007-12-22): # For dates after mid-2008, the following rules are my guesses and # are quite possibly wrong, but are more likely than no DST at all. Rule Arg 2007 only - Dec 30 0:00 1:00 S Rule Arg 2008 max - Mar Sun>=15 0:00 0 - Rule Arg 2008 max - Oct Sun>=1 0:00 1:00 SWell, back in December 2007, October 2008 might have seemed like a long time in the future, and they assumed that sometime in the middle the correct date would be announced... But, predictably (knowing Argentina's current government), no DST has yet been announced. However, Paul Eggert's guesses had propagated to almost all UNIX distributions, so that at 0:00 Sunday Oct 5th, all our computers were suddenly one hour ahead of time. Affected systems: Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Red Hat, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Mac OS. Devices: ipod, maemo, Nokia N95. Websites: Clarin (a major newspaper - still broken 36 hours later), Gmail. And probably many others that I don't know of. I even read that Windows was affected, although I don't know how that might be possible, since as far as I know they don't use tzdata. Anyway, not satisfied with how they mistakenly predicted the future before, a few weeks ago (not enough time in advance to fix almost any systems, only sid had this release), they added this change:
# From Alexander Krivenyshev (2008-09-05): # As per message from Carlos Alberto Fonseca Arauz (Nicaragua), # Argentina will start DST on Sunday October 19, 2008. # # http://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/dst_news_argentina03.html # http://www.impulsobaires.com.ar/nota.php?id=57832 (in spanish) Rule Arg 2007 only - Dec 30 0:00 1:00 S Rule Arg 2008 max - Mar Sun>=15 0:00 0 - Rule Arg 2008 max - Oct Sun>=15 0:00 1:00 SSo, they decided to take the word of a guy from Nicaragua (no bad feelings against Nicaragua, but I think that this kind of stuff should be informed by people from the affected country), and from a couple of articles that say that "According to some sources, we might have to change our clocks on the third Sunday of October". Would you change tzdata sources with such information? I definitely wouldn't. Anyway, Aurelien Jarno has already uploaded fixed packages, with no assumption regarding when the DST will happen, which is the sensible thing to do in a case like this. Thanks Aurel!
This post is about Barbara Liskov, for
the Ada Lovelace Day.
Barbara Liskov is the first woman in the United States of America that
obtained a Ph.D. from a Computer Science department, in 1968. However,
this isn't by any chance her greatest achievement.
She's the creator of the CLU
programming language, a language created in the mid-70s, that we would
find crufty and ugly nowadays, but that with its strong emphasis in
abstraction, the use of clusters (basically equivalent to what we
call classes today) and iterators, was to become the rock foundation of
Object Oriented Programming.
Apart from that, she worked in the design of a timesharing operating
system, called Venus; designed another programming language, called Argus,
that was oriented to distributed applications, and also set the foundations
for much of what is currently done as distributed computing.
Aged 70, she's currently still working at MIT, as the leader of the Programming Methodology Group,
researching ways to tolerate byzantine faults.
For all this work, she received the John
von Neumann medal in 2004, and the Alan Turing
award in 2008.
All in all, what I find the most inspiring of all her life, is the fact
that she was able to pursue her career, working on a new way of creating
programs, while she was also a wife and a mother; and that today, aging 70,
she's still researching, leading a group, and working towards making
computing better.
Next.
