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 !

set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated

Hello,

If you’re using Zend Framework 1.7.x (I was using 1.7.4), PHP 5.3.0 and Zend_Cache, you’ll probably see an error like set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated.

You can easily fix this error by editing Zend/Cache/Backend/File.php and in the _fileGetContents method commenting the following two blocks of code:

if (function_exists(’get_magic_quotes_runtime’)) {
  $mqr = @get_magic_quotes_runtime();
  @set_magic_quotes_runtime(0);
}

and

if (function_exists(’set_magic_quotes_runtime’)) {
  @set_magic_quotes_runtime($mqr);
}

Additionally you could search for all the set_magic_quotes_runtime function calls and comment them out.

You could also update to the latest Zend Framework (which now is 1.8.4) which has this issue fixed.

As usual feel free to drop any thoughts in the comments section of this post !