Codesta Weblog

In December, Google released a major upgrade to their Google Analytics tracking code, switching from the old urchin.js code and migrating to ga.js. While Urchin can still be used; the new ga.js code will have support for newer functionality. Shortly after the new Analytics version was released we noticed that we were having poor reporting results from a website that was using Google Analytics. Using Apache's mod_proxy and Firefox's Live HTTP Headers tool we were able to see that the calls to Google Analytics were not being sent. When working properly you should see a GET request to google-analytics.com in the access logs or headers, something like: http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmwv=4.1&... GET/__utm.gif?utmwv=4.1&utmn... HTTP/1.1 Host: www.google-analytics.com Debugging this problem was difficult until we discovered,...read more

I was at QCon London a few weeks ago, and once again I had a fantastic time. I'm always impressed by both the quality and diversity of the speakers at this conference: Banking, Architectures, Future programming languages, Agile, DSLs, and the list goes on. I once again attended QCon as one of the people stage-managing the show. This time my job involved coordinating all 16 interviews and conducting 7 of them myself. It was quite a bit of effort - we had two cameras this time, and we opened up the interviews to conference attendees so that they could also ask questions of the person being interviewed. The new format was a smashing success - many very good questions were...read more

Over the past year I have done quite a bit of work using the .NET Framework on various projects, so when the opportunity came up to try a project in PHP I thought it would be a nice change of pace. The project involved modifying an existing open source project for internal use. The project was built on a XAMP stack using a custom built PHP framework. After a few months of craziness the project was completed but at the end of it all I was left wondering if there was a better way to complete a PHP project. The custom PHP framework was a mess. It had huge switch statements that served as controllers, a templating engine that was...read more

In less than 2 weeks, I'm going to be heading up the interview track at QCon London. It'll be my first time in the UK, so I'm looking forwarding to visiting. I'm also looking forward to it because, once the conference starts, the planning is mostly complete! From speakers to scheduling and equipment logistics, there's definitely a lot that goes on behind the scenes to ensure a successful conference track. It's all worth it though, and I find these conferences to be a very interesting and rich learning experience. This year, I have the privilege to interview 7 outstanding people about some very interesting technologies, such as (in alphabetical order by last name): Jeff Barr - We'll discuss Amazon services...read more

Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) has the goal of providing flexible computing capacity in the form of a service. This service provides the user with the ability to quickly scale to the demands of an application by booting or shutting down servers in a matter of minutes. Since all these machines run in a virtual environment, you only need to pay for the resources you use. More detailed information can be found on Amazon’s EC2 home page - http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ Much of the documentation provided by Amazon was straightforward and easy to follow so for a full walk-through see http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/2007-08-29/GettingStartedGuide/. We will assume that the reader is familiar the basics of EC2. This article focuses on the problematic aspects of EC2...read more