1)      Make sure you have the most recent Google tracking code (called Asynchronous Code) in the head of every pages having links you want to track. Should look like this:

script type=”text/javascript”>
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-XX']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
(function () {
var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true;
ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’;
var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
</script>

2) Right after the above code, insert the following javascript function (the name of the function could be changed to your liking)

script type=”text/javascript”>
function recordOutboundLink(link, category, action) {
try {
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', category, action])
setTimeout(null, 100)
} catch (err) { }
}
</script>

The function has 3 parameters:

-          link: the link itself

-          category: the category in which the event will be classified in Analytics

-          action: the action associated to the link

I used “push” method and it worked right away, but “getTrackerByName()” may also do the trick but haven’t investigated it yet…

The second line delays the click for a fraction of a second to allow the page to fully load the tracking code. I’ve used “null” as first parameter, otherwise the page wasn’t opening in a new window.

3) Then on the link you want to track, add the onClick event calling the above function:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com” onclick=”recordOutboundLink(this, ‘Outbound Links’, ‘www.yoursite.com’); window.open(this.href); return false;“>www.yoursite.com</a>

When the above link gets clicked, recordOutboundLink is called with the link (this), the category (This is an outbound link) and the action (I used the URL to which the link points to).

Make sure “return false;” is the last statement. If you want the page to open in a new window, add “window.open(this.href);” after the function call, just before “return false;”

And that’s it! Event tracking in Analytics should start to get some data!

Using this method makes it easy to track all sort of different links across your website. Simply call recordOutboundLink javascript function on the link you wish to track and pass a different category and action to it. Whether it is a video, a mailto or an image, you can now have a better idea of what your users are up to when visiting your website!

References:

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=55527

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html

http://www.stepforth.com/blog/2010/outbound-link-tracking-event-tracking-google-analytics/

The plan is simple: push my way from Christchurch to Queewstown and have fun in the process! Christchurch – Geraldine – Lake Tekapo – Omarama – Wanaka – Queenstown is the itenerary. Because I am going for such a short period, I’ve decided to rent a bike rather than going through the pain of boxing, dealing with the box at the airport, unboxing, assembling and doing the same process all over again before coming back. I gearer up on clothing though, bringing all I need to stay warm and dry.

Something I missed in my previous bike trip was video. So this time, I won’t be empty handed on that side. I just got a GoPro Hero which I will mount on the front of the bike or my helmet. Can’t wait to see the results!!!

Passed the junction of road 44, the river is still there but now goes upstream which basically means an incline terrain. Even an inclination of 0.5% is enough to slow the pace down from 27-30 km/h to 17-20 km/h. And mentally it is very hard because I really wanted to make it to Gangnueng and I wasn’t doing the necessary mileage to get there. To stay positive, many times I told myself there was no wind and the scenery was fantastic, looking down the road looking at the litter (I spotted a green mantis!) and trying to learn Korea… I should know the numbers by now!

After about 4h30 of riding and pushing pretty hard by moments, my bike computer gives up on me: no more battery. That really pissed me off as I needed to know the speed I was doing to work out where I’ll end up sleeping tonight. By then, it showed 72 kms with a total ascent of 1310 m. That was about 2 hours before I got the hardest climb of the day: a 1089 meters climb of which I already probably did 300 meters. The incline was also pretty sleep with a constant degree of 10%. I could smash that at the start of the day, but after about 6 hours of riding, that wasn’t very much welcomed. Right at the start, my heart rate monitor gives up on me for some reason… Not great for motivation purposes! I stopped 3 times to catch my breath and give a short rest to my burning and tired legs. The second time I stopped, I could feel my heart ready to explode off my chest. Just before the last turn, a young guy on his motor bike passed me and stopped at the top. He had a very basic english but enough to have a conversation. This surprised me a bit as Korea are very shy and rarely reply to my annyeong asseyo! went I come across them. When I told him I started my day at Chuncheon, he didn’t believe me: he mentioned it was 150 kms away! He was also coming from Chuncheon and he was heading to Gangneung… I might come across him tomorrow as I am heading there!

Stats of the day are approximate:

160kms, 5000 cals, ascent 2300 meters, avg speed 14km/h

Anyway, back to business. I arrived in Chuncheon last night at around 19h after a first moderate day of riding. That included beautiful stretches along a river surrounded by mountain forming an amazing scenery, some climbs and downhill streches and a police arrest because of my crazyness… From Seoul, I followed the bike track along the Han river (which is abolutely beautiful) until I could jump on the highway leading to Chuncheon. It turned out to be a good idea as it was fast until I got pulled over by the police! They excorted me to the next exit where I could jump on road 391 to catch road 46, a secondary road leading directly to Chuncheon. They didn’t gave ne a fine but stringly insisted I never get on highway anymore… Tha lady at the exit gate was yelling “you will die!! you will die!!!” which I found amuzing. After about an hour of riding on the 391, I stopped at a tiny little shop where I could eat a piece of pastry, drink a nice cold gatorate, fill in my water bottle and ask a bunch of ladies what direction is Chuncheon. That’s when I realized the map I had wasn’t detailed enough. I have very good orientation skills and I rarely get lost, but I can’t get around Korea with that map especially because I need to use secondary and country roads. That was confirmed when the road signs didn’t match my map: road 46 is shown as a primary road or highway on my map which means no bike riding or get arrested again while the road sign was showing it was the same type of road I was actually on. I decided to keep going on the road I was instead of making a right and jump on the 46… After about 20km of beautiful scenery and easy cruising riding, I stopped at a petrol station and “ask” around if I could take route 46 instead of my the originally planned road 75. By the reaction of the couple working at the station, it was abvious that using 75 was out of question… So I turned around to use road 46 and from there, all went smoothly. But first thing I did in Chuncheon is to get a detailed map. Of course, no english here; only korea maps but as long as the road number are shown, no worries.

Stats for the first ride:

120km, 7h00 of riding, 3400 calories spent, 2 road kills (1 small snake and a moth or a cricket, not sure), pulled over by 3 cops (2 cars), sunburn on my forearms.

Tomorrow is Chuncheon to Gangneung which I expect to be a long and hard ride, but let’s see how it goes……

- Front (white) and rear (red) lights

- 1 tube

- Puncture kit + Tyre lever

- Repair toolkit

- Lube

- Swiss knife

- Cable wraps

- Heavy duty tape

- 15mm cone spanner

- Small pump

- Lock

- 2 saddle bag mounted on each side of the back rack

- 1 bag mounted on the top of the rack

- 1 bag mounted on the front handle bar

- 1 water bottle

- Bike computer (Garmin Edge 500)

- Helmet

- Gloves

- 1 (or 2?) pair of cycling pants

- Rain coat

- Compression pants, mainly for recovery

I didn’t include all the clothing gear I’ll carry, but the cycling pants are a must while the compression pants is good to help recover after a hard day pushing and the rain coat can be nice to have.

I’ll be packing this into a bike box picked up at a bike shop, wrapping this baby up and off I go!

Time has come to do this again, this time in South Korea. Seoul to Busan through the east coast sounds like a plan. If anyone has any advice on what the best roads are or if you ever did this trip, drop a comment!

After creating your database, open a new query window in SQL Server Management Studio and create a table for the countries…

USE YOUR_DATABASE_NAME; GO

CREATE TABLE Countries(
CountryID            INT             NOT NULL IDENTITY (1,1),
CountryName            VARCHAR(256) NOT NULL,
CountryCode            VARCHAR(256) NULL,
CountryDescription    VARCHAR(256) NULL
CONSTRAINT CountryPK PRIMARY KEY (CountryID));
GO

then a second table containing the states.

CREATE TABLE Country_States(
StateID                INT             NOT NULL IDENTITY (1,1),
CountryID            INT             NOT NULL,
StateName            VARCHAR(256) NOT NULL,
StateCode            VARCHAR(256) NULL,
StateDescription    VARCHAR(256) NULL
CONSTRAINT StatePK PRIMARY KEY (StateID),
CONSTRAINT Country_StatesCountryFK FOREIGN KEY (CountryID) REFERENCES Countries (CountryID));
GO

Once the tables are created, stored procedures are used to fill in the tables. I left the country description blank.

Populate Countries Script

Then populate the country_states table…

Populate Country_States Script

There are some drawbacks with this structure.; There can be states in different countries having the same state code. For example, WA stands for Washington state in the US but is also used to denote WesternAustralia state in Australia. When building your application or importing data from that needs to compare the statecode, make to consider the country in which the state is or simply change the state code.

In the process, I looked through the IIS logfiles using logparser (see at the end for the link) to track down any unusual activities on the website. Log parser is amazingly useful to analyze IIS logfiles.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed logparser 2.2, you can analyze any logfiles generated by IIS.

1. In IIS, right-click on the website you wish to analyze the logfiles
2. A new window opens; in the ‘Enable Logging’ section, click Properties
3. Go in the directory shown at the bottom of this window and copy the logfiles you want into logparser root directory (Usually C:\Program Files\Log Parser 2.2)
4. Execute logparser; a command prompt window will open
5. It’s time to run queries to analyze the log files!

Log parser commands are just like SQL commands. This

logparser “SELECT DISTINCT date, cs-uri-stem, c-ip, Count(*), AS Hits, FROM ex*.log GROUP BY date, c-ip, cs-uri-stem HAVING Hits>50 ORDER BY date, c-ip, Hots DESC”

will give a list of the how many times an IP address has hit a file on one day. Only hits over 50 will be displayed.

IIS log files are structured by columns with headers. For example, columns c-ip represents the IP address. To know more on what field to display, just open a logfile into notepad and look the headers.

You can then lookup the IP doing a whois or tracert in the command prompt or just visit a website such as http://cqcounter.com/whois or http://whois.domaintools.com

Log Parser 2.2

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=890cd06b-abf8-4c25-91b2-f8d975cf8c07&displaylang=en

Karloo Pool

Today, I woke up early and looked at the weather forecasts; fine, late afternoon showers or two. I decided to go for a bush walk in the southern suburbs as trackworks were underway in the northen suburbs. I bought the Syndey Morning Herald bush, park and city walks acouple weeks ago as it seemed to be well written. Karloo Pool through the Bottlebrush Forest looked nice, so I decided to go at 10h30ish.

I got the train to Heathcote station and followed the instructions in the book… It says to go over the tracks and make a right on Wilson Parade. There’s no indication to tell the name of the street I am walking on, so I keep going and going and going way passed 100 metres without any “supposed to be there” sign indicating the start of the track. After walking in circle for about an hour, 20 of which was raining, I saw a sign saying “Wilson Parade”, which is on the other side of the train track!!! The book I have is not very clear on exactly where to go when you get off the train and I lost an hour walking around like a moron. To anyone doing this walk, if your coming from the city, DO NOT cross over the train tracks, go right instead, heading to the fire station. This is Wilson Parade. If your coming from Waterfall, cross over the tracks. Make a right on Wilson Parade and you will see the sign making the start on the track.

The walk is great and not that difficult. The landscape is superb and Karloo pool is great! It’s winter time, so noboby was swimming having dip, though I can imagine that’ll be awesome in the summer. I’ve met 5 people

Karloo Pool

during my journey, only one person were sitting on the rocks where the pool were… After a couple of pictures around I made my way at the pond and he was gone, leaving me alone for the whole time I spent in this lovely area. I sat down a bit, took some pictures and can easily imagine myself swimming around there in summer! The walk back was good and I got back just on time ti catch the train back in the city! That was a sweet day…

Karloo Pool

Crow

Karloo Pool

Karloo Pool Bush Walk

Karloo Pool Bush Walk

Karloo Pool