Monthly Archives: October 2013

Digital Analytics Fundamentals from Google

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I just finished Google’s “Digital Analytics Fundamentals” course at https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/course. I did OK, too 🙂

The course talks about using Google Analytics to show the performance of your website. The course was a series of short (4-10 minute) videos, with a set of questions after each to let you think about what they just said. In total, it probably took me a little under 6 hours to work through all the lessons: that’s about what Google predicts.

Even though I have worked with Google Analytics for a while, I learned a bunch. Some of the info was about new features they’ve introduced since I last looked; some was about getting more information from the existing tools – better filtering, better reporting. It also told about other facilities that I had never had reason to use.

The course is over closed out now, but they’ll probably run it again. It’s well worth it.

Upgrading to OS X 10.9 Mavericks – (No) Trouble with 5 GHz Wifi

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Update: Good news! I am now able to get onto the 5GHz SSIDs. What changed? I rebooted my router, and it now seems OK.

So I may have cried Wolf about this problem, and incorrectly blamed Mavericks. The problem seems to have gone away after the router reboot. Whew! I still don’t know why I got the message that the previous connection was “open” not wpa2-personal. But I’ll take it.

Original posting follows:

I upgraded my 2.3GHz MacBook Pro to Mavericks yesterday, and had trouble with Wifi on 5Ghz. I’m using a Netgear WNDR3800 using the CeroWrt firmware. It had previously worked great on both the 2.4 and 5 GHz channels for this computer, and the others in my house.

After the installation, I selected one of the 5GHz SSIDs, and got the message, “‘CEROwrt-guest5’ was previously joined as Open, not WPA2 Personal.”

cerowrtpreviouslyjoined

That’s not correct – up until the upgrade, that SSID had definitely been WPA2-Personal. So after casting about (turning Wifi on/off, etc). I finally went to the System Preferences and removed the SSID by clicking the “-” button from the Wifi-Advanced settings.

RemoveOldSSID

But this doesn’t seem to have solved the problem: Now I see a message, “The Wi-Fi network ‘Cerowrt-guest5’ could not be joined.” when I select that SSID from the Wi-Fi menu.

Cerowrt-guest5CantBeJoined

So I’m stuck. 2.4GHz works fine (both on an open SSID, and one with WPA2-Personal), but I have not been able to make 5GHz work. No workarounds yet, and a quick scan of Apple’s forums don’t have any indication of a fix.

See Update above – things are working fine after rebooting my router.

Upgrading to OS X 10.9 Mavericks – Really long install times

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Mac OS X 10.9 came out on Tuesday, and I decided to take the plunge and move my 2.3 GHz MacBook Pro to Mavericks. The price (free) is right and there are big claims for its decreased power demands. You can read John Siracusa’s opus describing all the new features over at the OS X 10.9 Mavericks: The Ars Technica Review, but I wanted to detail some of my surprises/impressions.

First impression: Install time was astonishingly long. I ran the ~5 Gigabyte download overnight. It went fine, and when I came to the computer in the morning, it was ready to install. The window said “44 minutes”, and I said OK – I have about 75 minutes before I have to leave. Here’s the timeline:

  • 6:45am – Start the install process.
  • 7:59am – Still shows 4 minutes. OK. I’ll wait.
  • 8:04am – Shows 1 minute left. I gotta leave for work. At least the battery’s fully charged. I put the computer on the floor of the passenger side and let it finish as I drive…
  • 8:22am – I hear the reboot chime. Whew! The Apple appears, with the spinner
  • 8:25am – Finally, I see an OS window – it says that it needs five more minutes to complete installation.
  • 8:33am – I’m almost to work, installation completes, and shows the “Incompatible software” dialog. (The Flip WMV player isn’t compatible.) I close the lid and carry the computer inside.

So it took almost two hours to complete the “44 minute” task. At least most other things worked smoothly. But see my other posts…

Switching to WordPress 3.7 beta 2

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I decided to take the plunge and switch from WordPress 3.6.1 to the 3.7 beta 2 version. There’s a plugin that is supposed to make this easy – WordPress Beta Tester – but the current 0.97 version of this doesn’t seem to work.

Fortunately, I found a posting on the support forum that suggests that you can use the 0.96 version. It’s at: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/not-updating-from-361-to-37-41 I did these steps:

  • Back up my database (I’ve been using the free UpdraftPlus)
  • Download WordPress Beta Tester 0.96 to my computer
  • Use the Plugins > Add new and find the link on that page to upload the file
  • Activate the plugin
  • WordPress immediately detects that a new version (the 3.7 beta) is available
  • Let the installation proceed
  • Presto! It’s working

The 3.7 beta’s are supposed to check daily for new versions. I now have WordPress 3.7-beta2-25801 – I’ll find out tomorrow if it worked…

Horsing around with Ghost blogging platform

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I had some fun checking out the brand new Ghost blogging platform. Its claims to fame are:

  • It’s a blogging platform that is easy to install and setup
  • It can be customized to look the way you want
  • It uses Markdown for text formatting, with a very sexy real-time Markdown->HTML converter built in. You type Markdown text in the left pane, and the right pane shows a live preview of the posting.
  • It’s free/open source, so you can try it too.

Installation was pretty straightforward. Two comments:

  1. I was confused when I made my first post: after finish entering the text, there’s a “Save Draft” button that has a popup menu that allows you to “Publish Now”. Cool! But it doesn’t actually publish until you click the button a second time.
  2. I also had a problem with running it on my test server. It has dramatically limited RAM (128 MBytes) and it’s also running WordPress, Apache, and a bunch of other stuff. Ghost gave an “weird error 137” message in the console, but I’m fairly convinced that’s just because it’s running out of memory. I wrote it up in  the ghost forums so others can learn from my research. (https://en.ghost.org/forum/installation/1129-npm-err-weird-error-137)

Ghost seems to be a solid initial release, with a dedicated team that’ll drive it forward.

“Hang on a minute…”

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I just ended a call from a telemarketer who was pitching some vacation deal. I just don’t do these things over the phone, so when she paused to take another breath, I said in a kind way, “Thanks for calling, but I’m not interested.”

Of course, they’re (well) trained to answer objections, but I broke in and said, “No, I’m really not interested.” This, of course, led to another question to find out my objection.

So I interrupted and said, “Hang on a minute…” and set the phone down in the other room. About four minutes later, I heard the off-hook tone indicating she had finally hung up.

I’m a nice guy, so I don’t like to swear or slam down the phone. I realize that these callers have a tough job, and I respect that they’re working hard to make a living. But saying, “Hang on a minute…” is actually the worst thing you can do to telemarketers – simply wasting their time when they could be making the next call. If they don’t respect a polite “no”, then I have no qualms about wasting their time.

Post another thought from Fargo

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I’ve been playing with the Fargo blogging software from Dave Winer at Scripting.com It puts your blog info into an S3 bucket, then has links to WordPress, so that you can use Fargo’s outliner to edit your post, then publish it directly to WordPress.

I just found something else that’s really cool. I moved my “Posts” page to a sub-page (after creating a static home page on my WordPress blog) and the postings automatically followed my “Posts” page. Nice job, Dave!