tools

A glimpse into Google Analytics power

For a few years now I always recommend Google Analytics to anyone who is looking for a statistical / analytical package for their web site. While there are a few alternatives, I think that almost none of them can match Google Analytics in both ease of use and analytical power.

Easy installation (a copy-paste of provided JavaScript snippet), web-based reports available from anywhere, multi-user access, schedule reports, exports to several formats such as CSV and PDF, schedule reports, customizable dashboards, multiple site and profile management, A/B testing, goal conversion tracking, and much more – and all of it for free. That’s hard to compete with.

And if you want to see how much you can get out of it and how easy that would be to configure, consider a recent example posted in Google Analytics blog – “Advanced: Structure Your Account With Roll Up Reporting And More“.

Gmail gets Tasks/TODO

Many of us, Gmail users, have been waiting a really long time for this, but now the wait is over. Gmail blog announced task manager / todo list in Gmail via Labs extension.

We put your tasks in the same kind of window as chats, so they’re visible while you’re scanning your inbox, reading mail, or searching (and in Settings, too!). Just pop your list out into a new window to use Tasks outside of Gmail.

To enable Tasks, go to Settings, click the Labs tab (or just click here if you’re signed in). Select “Enable” next to “Tasks” and then click “Save Changes” at the bottom. Then, after Gmail refreshes, on the left under the “Contacts” link, you’ll see a “Tasks” link. Just click it to get started.

Excellent news for this morning.

Fixing RT3 on Fedora 10

We upgraded our development server to Fedora 10 over the weekend. Among other things, it runs RT3 – excellent support, issue management, and bug tracking tool. Once the upgrade was over, we ended up with a semi-working setup of RT3. The emails were going through just fine, but the web interface was giving out a blank screen with no content or errors or warnings.

Googled a bit, but that didn’t help a lot. Went through server logs and found an out of memory shout from Storable.pm:

2325:Callback called exit at 
../../lib/Storable.pm (autosplit into ../../lib/auto/Storable/thaw.al) 
line 415.

Googled for that, but it turned out that quite a few people have the problem with this module running out of memory. And not only in RT3.

So I left it where it was and had some good night sleep. And it helped. In the morning, englightment came in, and I tried reloading the page with cookies and cache cleaned. It worked. And then it didn’t work again. Cleaning cookies was helping for a couple of page views. So I dived back into the RT_Config.pm file to see my options. There it was.

=item C<$WebSessionClass>
C<$WebSessionClass> is the class you wish to use for managing Sessions.
It defaults to use your SQL database, but if you are using MySQL 3.x and
plans to use non-ascii Queue names, uncomment and add this line to
F<RT_SiteConfig.pm> will prevent session corruption.
=cut
# Set($WebSessionClass , 'Apache::Session::File');

Once I enabled Apache::Session::File, the problem went away. We are now back to work, enjoying the new web 2.0 round corners interface, pastel colors, and more.

Google Reader updated interface

Google updated the design and interface of the RSS feed aggregator – Google Reader. Here is a really small screenshot of how it used to look (stolen shamelessly from Google Reader front page – it seems like they forgot to update it):

And here is a really small screenshot of how it looks now (I made this one, you can make your own):

In my opinion, the old interface was much better. Colors and borders helped to visually separate the sidebar from the main content area, as well as news items from each other. The new design is much “separated”. Also, there are a few minor quirks and bugs here and there, which will hopefully get fixed in the next few days. However, one thing is great about this new release – speed. The new Google Reader is much faster than the old one. Extra responsiveness can’t hurt, especialy thos of us who go through hundreds and thousands of posts in a fast paced manner.

On remote logging with syslog

We’ve been doing some interesting things at work, as always, with yet more people and Linux boxes. And of the side effects of mixing people, Linux boxes, and several locations is this need for some sort of centralized logging. Luckily we have either syslog-ng or rsyslog daemons installed on each machine, so the only two issues seemed to be reconfiguration of syslog services for remote logging and setup of some log reading/searching tool for everyone to enjoy.

As for log reading and searching, there seems to be no end of tools. We picked php-syslog-ng, which has web interface, MySQL back-end, access control, and more. There were a few minor issues during setup and configuration, but overall it seemed to be OK. I also patched the source code a bit in a few places, just to make it work nicer with our setup and our needs (both numerical and symbolic priorities, preference for include masks over excludes, and full functionality with disabled caching). In case you are interested, here is a patch against php-syslog-ng 2.9.8f tarball.

Once everything was up and running and we started looking through logs from all our hosts in the same place, there was one thing that surprised me a lot. Either I don’t understand the syslog facilities and priorites fully (and I don’t claim that I do), or there is just too many software authors who don’t care much. Most of our logs are coming in at priority critical. Even if there isn’t much critical about them. Emergency is also used way too much. And there is hardly anything at debug or info or notice levels. (RT, SpamAssassin, and many other applications seem to be using critical as their default log level). Luckily, that almost always is trivial to fix using either the configuration files or applications’ source code directly.