U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently granted Microsoft a patent on a “personalized version” of the sudo command with GUI. Sudo is a command that has been in use since 1980′s or even before by Unix and other operating systems to allow running other commands with elevated privileges. For one, why would Microsoft try to patent something like this? Secondly, does USPTO grant patents on anything you ask them for?

We are witnessing a time in the history of technology when there is more free (open source or otherwise) software available than anyone ever cares to know, and it’s increasing at a higher rate than anyone can even keep track of. For any application that one can conceivably imagine, chances are that there is a free alternative out there. Why in the world then a company such as Microsoft would patent tiny things such as sudo commands, especially when they “borrowed” the original idea from elsewhere anyway? On one hand we see companies like Google releasing entire programming languages into open source, and on the other hand companies like Microsoft acquiring patents on simple sudo commands… we live in truly amazing times don’t we!

Groklaw has much more detailed information on this story. You can also find the original Microsoft patent at the USPTO here.

Google Wave – a game changer that will change the very fundamentals of communications and collaboration over Internet as we know it today. If this technology takes off, as I believe it will, tools like e-mail and IM that we have grown to love and depend upon will gradually cease to exist. Other collaboration tools such as discussion forums, social networking, and blogging tools will change dramatically.

If you have not done so yet, checkout the Google Wave preview video here.

It’s not what product you use to collect and analyze web site usage data.  It’s not about counting the page views, click-throughs, unique vistors, or hits.  It’s not even about pretty pie charts, bar graphs, or heat maps.  What web analytics is about is the “process” to collect and analyze usage data in order to gain solid, actionable insight into your customers.  This insight when used properly can easily translate into significantly higher conversion rates.

Avinash’s book explores the essential process of web analytics and how you should use it to your advantage.  It doesn’t matter whether you use Google Analytics or a home-grown software to collect and analyze data (Avinash does tend to favor Google Analytics though), since technology is just an enabler, which will keep evolving. Process, on the contrary, will remain the same for a long time and will keep helping you make better informed business decisions.

Avinash’s book teaches you how to think like a web analyst and how to use both quantitative and qualitative analysis in context to gain actionable insight that can be used to make timely and necessary business decisions.

The book avoids the unnecessary jargon, so it’s an easy read for both technical and business readers alike. The tone is friendly and humble so you will actually enjoy reading it.  Tips, tricks, and techniques mentioned in this book are easy to follow and can be implemented relatively easily.

The book comes with a CD, which includes some useful information, such as presentations and MP3 audio files from the author.

Web Analytics An Hour A Day from Amazon.com

Web analytics is the science of collecting and analyzing your web site usage data so that you can optimize your site for best results. For example, if you analyze the click behavior of your web site users, you can learn how to best place links on your site to encourage most sales. Similarly if you learn about the demographics of your users, you can target marketing campaigns to those demographics that yield most results.

There are several tools that can be used for web analytics. Some of these are paid, while others are free. Below I will discuss some of the most useful tools available.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most widely used free web analytics platform. Integration with any web site is as easy as copying and pasting a few lines of JavaScript code into your web pages, and Google takes care of the rest.

There are tons of available features including, automatic integration with Google AdWords for analyzing advertising ROI, benchmarking with industry standards, advanced segmentation, goal-driven reporting, custom reporting, and motion charts.

2. Piwik

Piwik is an open-source web analytics platform created using PHP and MySQL. It closely mimics Google Analytics with pretty much all the major functionality provided by Google.

The big difference is that Piwik is hosted on your own servers, which is great if you do not want to share your data with Google for any reason. Also this allows you to have real-time access to your data, which is a feature that Google still lacks.

Moreover, Piwik is a plug-in based platform, which means that you can easily extend the out-of-the-box functionality by creating new plug-ins. Piwik also provides complete API access, which means that you can consume data collected by Piwik in a non-PHP based application. For example, if I want to create a SharePoint web part that displays the top 3 keywords used to land on my web site, I can easily do that.

3. ClickTale

ClickTale is a unique web analytics tool that records the actual browsing sessions of your visitors in real-time, which you can then view as a video at a later time. Every single mouse movement, click, and keystroke is recorded to recreate the user experience for you to analyze.

ClickTale pricing plans range from free to about $800/month depending upon the amount of activity recorded on your web site.

4. Clicky

Clicky is also similar to Google Analytics in that it provides simple integration with any web site and hosts data on it’s own servers. It provides a clean and modern web interface to access and analyze your data.

Clicky is tailored for small- to medium- size web sites, and provides plans that range from free to $49/month. It has some nice features, such as Google Maps integration, real time statistics, and plug-ins for easy integration with WordPress and other popular applications.

5. Snoop

Snoop is an interesting application that sits in your Windows system tray (system status bar for Mac) and alerts you of events on your web site in real-time. For example, it can notify you when someone makes a comment on your blog or creates a sales order.

At the time of this writing Snoop is still in beta and registration is via invites only. You can register your e-mail address at the Reinvigorate web site to be notified when an invite is available.

There are several other free and paid web analytics solutions out there that help you analyze your visitor behavior and usage patterns so that you can tweak your site or advertising strategy for better conversion rates.  There are also companies that provide more comprehensive solutions, such as Omniture and Unica, that are tailored for large web sites and high-dollar marketing budgets.  For most small to medium sites, however, a combination of free and cheap solutions does pretty well.

Sign-up to be notified when this free service is made available to public

Developer Express and Microsoft provide a new version of CodeRush licensed exclusively for C# developers working in Visual Studio. The new product is called CodeRush Xpress, and it includes a slew of useful features to boost your productivity under Visual Studio.

You can download CodeRush Xpress here.

There is however Bootdisk.com, an essential resource when we find ourselves in such situations.  This site has ISO images for all flavors of Microsoft operating systems from DOS to Windows 95, Windows 98, NT, 2000, and XP.

I have used ISO  images from Bootdisk.com a few times without a glitch, and I have it bookmarked in my Emergency Repair Resources folder.

I wonder why any version of Windows has never had an undelete utility to recover files that you accidentally deleted.  We all do that, or have done it at least once in our lifetimes (if you have not, you will!).  It’s a more essential utility than some that Windows installs by default.

But no sweat as long as we have the freeware recovery software called Recuva!  Here’s some information about this great utility straight from it’s developer’s web site:

Recuva (pronounced “recover”) is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer.  This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players.  It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses!

I have used Recuva on Vista x64 where some other file recovery utilities fail (even though they say they are Vista compatible), and had great results.  I had accidentally deleted some of my family pictures, and Recuva recovered them for me in a snap.

The latest beta version of FxCop 1.36 was recently made available for download. This new version includes various features and fixes that include:

• 200+ bug fixes that reduce noise, missing analysis and rule crashes
• Support for analyzing anonymous methods and lambda expressions
• New option for skipping analysis over tool generated code
• Better support for C++/CLI and the Compact Framework
• Language ‘friendly’ API names in the UI and resolutions
• New globalization, design and usage rules
• Performance improvements that cut analysis by 2x and use half as much memory
• Documentation that is now available on MSDN

FxCop is an excellent free static code analysis tool from Microsoft that checks .NET managed code assemblies for conformance to Microsoft’s .NET Framework Design Guidelines.

SubSonic is an excellent open source DAL generation tool developed by Rob Conery that has been around for almost a year. In most cases SubSonic can just be added to your project, pointed to a databse, and you magically and immediately gain access to a rich and strongly typed object model that can be used to query and persist data to and from your relational data source.

SubSonic also has a cool feature called the REST handler that essentially allows one to use HTTP protocol as an interface to data stored in a back-end relational database. It is URI based and returns data back in XML format. This data can then be used by decoupled client applications as they see fit. If you have never looked at SubSonic, you owe it to yourself to checkout this very cool tool.

Recently Microsoft unveiled their plans to release similar features codenamed Astoria and Jasper with .NET framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. The CTP of Astoria and Jasper are available for download from Microsoft.

Jasper is described by Microsoft as:

Project Jasper is geared towards iterative and agile development. You can
start interacting with the data in your database without having to create
mapping files or define classes. You can build user interfaces by naming
controls according to your model without worrying about binding code. Project
Jasper is also extensible, allowing you to provide your own business logic and
class model. Since Project Jasper is built on top of the ADO.NET Entity
Framework, it supports rich queries and complex mapping.

Pablo Castro, the mastermind behind Astoria describes it as:

The goal of Microsoft Codename Astoria is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within a corporate network and across the internet. The data service is reachable over HTTP, and URIs are used to identify the various pieces of information available through the service. Interactions with the data service happens in terms of HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, and the data exchanged in those interactions is represented in simple formats such as XML and JSON.

The Astoria web site also includes sample online services that showcases how this new technology can be used. It also allows anyone with a Passport account to design and host their own experimental data services .