Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Or “Buh-bye Google Analytics”.

As most of the commentary on my previous post about some statistics from this site (as reported by Google Analytics), the figures seemed… wrong.

Even though the Google Analytics code is included on every page I serve, the two obvious causes were:

Seeing as I have full access to my server logs, I decided to go directly to the proverbial horses mouth and see how the numbers work out from there.

The results are interesting to say the least.

Note: These statistics are purely for the same period – January 2008 up to the date of the this post. This means there may be some discrepancy between the GA figures in my other post and this one.

MPB (Most Popular Browser)

Bit of a difference, isn’t there?

Operating Systems

Hmm. Some confusion there.

…and the moral of the story is:

Look before you…

No, wait, too many cooks…

That’s not right. It’s never work with animals, children, or a third party statistics package that relies on JavaScript. Especially when you have access to your own logs. So the real moral is don’t be lazy. Here endeth the lesson.

Target Market?

Cartoon courtesy of Hugh MacLeod.

It would seem my assumptions about the target market for this site are a bit off.

I skim through my report from Google Analytics every day or so to observe traffic, but I had a bit of a closer look today and noticed something interesting: Safari is the most popular browser to view this site.

Here are some of the more pertinent figures:

Read the rest »

Initial thoughts on Prism

Prism – from Mozilla – tries to integrate web applications with your desktop by giving you an icon and dedicated browser window for each application you configure. That’s it.

I saw Prism when it was first announced, but never got around to looking at it. Then a recent post by Lee Tambiah reminded me about it and I actually got around to looking at it just now.

Installation is simple:

Nice and simple, eh?

There’s not really a lot else to say. It’s Gecko based, so it will work as well as Firefox. There’s no tabs, Extensions or Flash – I’ll let you decide if that’s good or bad.

For sites like Twitter, Pownce or Google Calendar (and at a pinch, Facebook) it’s great, but without tabs I couldn’t imagine using it for Google Reader, or Launchpad.

How to enable sound in Flash on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) has an annoying problem: if you install the `flashplugin-nonfree` package you get no sound. This is documented in bug #29760.

Fortunately the fix is easy:

Step 1. Install the `alsa-oss` package:

$ sudo apt-get install alsa-oss

Step 2. Edit `/etc/firefox/firefoxrc` to match the following:

That’s it! Restart Firefox and away you go.