What now !?

I haven’t been posting in a long while now, so I thought to write a few lines and share some things I’ve been doing:

- I visited USA, which was a big to-do on my list; I was in Philadelphia and New York… it was really impressive and I definitely want to go again !

- I took some time off and played a few games like the Tales of Monkey Island (the first 4 episodes) and Machinarium;

- I saw a few series from Dr House, which is one of my favorite TV series

- I planned a few projects at work

- I found a few ideas for different web projects and then took them apart when adding the money factor into the equation

- I plan to develop a structure and CMS over the Zend Framework, with which to easily build websites and web applications

- I plan to learn Flex and Actionscript 3

- I learned a few things about Objective C 2.0 and the Cocoa API and was preety impressed after succeeding in creating a simple application in a mere 6 hours timeframe (during one night )

- As always I want to take some certifications, like the Zend Framework Certified Engineer and maybe the Certified Mysql Developer certification, although I’m not sure about the last one since it’s more expensive at the moment and not really used in recruiting.

I guess we’ll see what happens next! I’ll keep you posted!

I am GAIQ

Yes ladies and gentlemen, from this day on I am GAIQ (Google Analytics Individual Qualification).

I have passed the exam two minutes ago and you can see a copy of my certificate below:

Unfortunately Google does not provide a GAIQ certification logo like the one for Adwords Qualified Individual.

Overall the test was preety easy and if you’re using Google Analytics on a daily basis you should do ok. I studied for a weekend and passed with 98%. Also I should note that basic knowledge of the Google Adwords product and some advertising/online marketing terms will come in handy !

During the online exam the following will be useful to have a tab away:

1. A working Google Analytics account with some data in it (preferably with a profile that has E-commerce, Site-search and Adwords reporting enabled)
2. Search and replace filters
3. The Analytics Help website
4. The filter RegEx tool
5. Google Conversion University materials (which I watched two times before taking the exam)
6. optionally you could also have the Google Analytics Tracking API reference (I didn’t need it)

The exam has 70 questions in 90 minutes, of which some are multiple-choice multiple-answers, some are choose-two answers and most are single choice answers.

I found the time to be more than enough, having enough to review all the answers one more time before submitting. Upon graduation you’ll receive a downloadable PDF from the test website, which by the way is google.starttest.com. The certification is valid for 18 months since the passing date.

Good luck to anyone that’s attempting the GAIQ certification exam and drop me a line if you have questions, if you have passed the exam or if you think I can be of any help !

Updating the iPhone 3G to the new 3.0 firmware

I recently updated my iPhone 3G to the new 3.0 firmware.

The process went very smoothly involving the following steps.

1. I synced my iPhone to iTunes in order to preserve my contacts and App Store installed apps;
2. I updated the iPhone to the 3.0 firmware using iTunes;
3. At this point my iPhone got locked and I had to activate it using an Orange SIM card (the Jailbreak process should fix this step for you, but it didn’t work for me; it’s a safe bet to have an appropriate SIM card around);
4. Jailbreak using PwnageTool 3.0 for Mac; first I tried using expert mode and toying around with the settings… that didn’t seem to work and iTunes gave me the infamous 1600 error; I restarted the PwnageTool process using the default settings, putting my iPhone into DFU mode and uploading the custom firmware through iTunes;
5. Bingo, my iPhone was now Jailbroken but not unlocked; I added the repo666.ultrasn0w.com into Cydia, searched for and installed UltraSn0w and rebooted the iPhone;
6. I now had a running jailbroken and unlocked 3.0 iPhone 3G !

You can see the official iPhone 3G and UltraSn0w tutorial on iPhone Dev Team’s blog.

Please share your Jailbreak experience with us in the comments section !