Category: Answers

How to Remove Someone from a Skype Chat

Ever created a group chat and then had to remove someone from the conversation?

Sure, you can just start a new chat and leave them out of the invite, but now you have two chat histories, two chat groups with the same topic, and more.

Turns out that Skype has some hidden commands that you can use ala IRC.

Specifically, to boot someone from a group chat, type:

/kickban skypeusername

This will remove the specified skyper user from the group chat and prevent them from getting back in. Please note that you need to type their username, not their display name. You can find their username by hovering over their display name in the contact list or viewing their profile.

Everyone in the chat – including the person you just booted – will see a message that you have ejected and banned said user, so it’s not a secret, but it does the job.

Restarting the Dock on OS X

Everyone once in a while things go awry for me on OS X.

Symptoms often include hot corners suddenly no longer working, and spaces not switching when I switch applications.

Turns out the restarting your dock can fix this in a jiffy.

I’m a command line kind of guy, so open up terminal and type this in to restart the dock:

killall -KILL Dock

It looks pretty scary (“Kill! KILL!”), but all it’s doing is telling OS X to kill the Dock process for you, which it will auto-restart. Your dock will disappear for a moment and then come back in working order.

Google Analytics Custom Variable Tracking Code Using The _gaq Global Object

Google Analytics Custom Variable Tracking Code
Google Analytics

This evening I was experimenting with adding custom variables to my Google Analytics tracking code, but when I checked Google’s custom variable documentation, it didn’t match the analytics code that I had.

Google Analytics changes their code for you to copy and paste quite often, seemingly every time I setup a new site to track.

The latest version of the analytics code that I was given used a new format, notably:

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
 _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'youridhere']);
 _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);
 })();

The docs say to put the _setCustomVar code in before pageTracker._trackPageview() … but I no longer have that older style setup.

After a bit of digging around, I came up with a solution from documentation on the _gaq Global Object. The _setCustomVar code can be added as follows:

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', index, name, value, opt_scope]);

Just put this after the last push line up top and you’re good to go.

Hopefully Google Analytics will update their docs to reflect the newer code style using _gaq, but in the mean time, this is working for me.