nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Category computers

More stuffs…

August 22, 2005


Click for more…

Well, as hoped, I got the wort for the Random Vanilla Stout made yesterday. It’s now sitting down in the basement fermenting away. It seems to be fermenting quite quickly, which I’m attributing to the quart starter I’d made along with the addition of a good quantity of yeast energizer and yeast nutrient (2 tsp and 4 tsp, respectively). It’s not fermenting as foamy / vigorously as last time, but it’s still getting on pretty well.

I missed the target gravity of the beer, ending up at 1.062, which was six points off from the target of 1.068. Hopefully that’s not too bad, though. It should still end up being around 6% ABV if all goes well.

But, yeah… Click that image there up top and you’ll be able to see more peeektures.

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In case you haven’t tried it before, Google Desktop is freakin’ sweet. I’ve used it before on my work laptop, but I’d run into some problems with it and my antivirus software.

Well, with the v2.0 release this morning, I dove in and fixed those problems. I’d forgotten how much I like it… If you are someone who uses Outlook for your daily mail uses, it makes searching large archives really, really easy.

See, I personally think Outlook/Exchange works really well — better than any other shared email / calendaring system currently available — but it’s search sucks. Hard. And lots. Well, thanks to Google Desktop I can actually find old stuff in my email. Well, as soon as it finishes indexing…. (I’ve got a lot of work email.)

Now, if only Spotlight worked so well.

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I don’t know why it took me so long, but I finally ‘get’ the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Wikipedia Link). It’s just… yeah. A wonderful counterpoint to bible girl at work. I even acquired this piece of wallpaper which I’m currently using on my work laptop (except with the genitals blurred) and made this much more minimal one. Both are available at 1024 x 768.

beercomputersmoved from livejournal

Apache Logfile Analysis…

August 22, 2005

(First, this is a test post from Semagic behind the work firewall…)

Okay, so I think I’ve got a good way of processing the logs from websites that I host. I’m going to document how I do it here for myself and anyone else who might happen to care.

First off, I’m using Apache 2.0, cronolog to handle log files (essentially rotation… but not), and Webalizer to parse the files and provide reports.

First, each Apache vhost is logged via a pipe to cronolog so that it makes subdirectories for Year and Month, naming the file with Year-Month-Day-access.log. For example, today’s file as logged below would be /var/data/wwwlogs/default/2005/08/2005-08-22-access.log. This is done by CustomLog and ErrorLog lines for each vhost which are similar to this:

CustomLog “|/usr/local/sbin/cronolog /var/data/wwwlogs/default/%Y/%m/%Y-%m-%d-access.log” combined
ErrorLog “|/usr/local/sbin/cronolog /var/data/wwwlogs/default/%Y/%m/%Y-%m-%d-errors.log”

That alone will make it easier to look through logfiles, should the need arise.

Next, a script is set to run once per night which first runs Webazolver on all the log files in order to build a cache of resolved hostnames and then runs Webalizer itself, using that cache. File processing is done with the -p argument in order to provide incremental parsing. As each log file should only be parsed once, the end result should be that each day’s set of data is added to the collective reports.

Here is the script which I call run_webalizer.sh and will run via cron each morning (around 12:30am local time, I’d imagine):

#!/bin/sh

# First, run webazolver to resolve all IPs
for i in /var/data/wwwlogs/*
do CURLOG=`date -v-1d +”$i/%Y/%m/%Y-%m-%d-access.log”`
/usr/local/bin/webazolver -Q -p -N 10 -D /var/db/webalizer_cache.db $CURLOG
done

# Run webalizer with all config files…
for i in /var/data/wwwlogs/*
do VHOST=`echo $i | cut -f5 -d\/`
CURLOG=`date -v-1d +”$i/%Y/%m/%Y-%m-%d-access.log”`
/usr/local/bin/webalizer -Q -p -n $VHOST -o /var/data/www/admin/webalizer/$VHOST -D /var/db/webalizer_cache.db -N 10 -r $VHOST\/ -s \*$VHOST $CURLOG
done

Well, hopefully some people will find this useful. It appears that it’ll work fine for now. I guess I’ll know for sure after a few days…

computersmoved from livejournal

rsync -E on OS X 10.4

August 17, 2005

[Cross posted to and …]

Hey everyone… I hadn’t seen this mentioned yet, so I thought I’d bring it up. In short, I’m writing a new script for backing up everything on both my local computer and my web server. Well, I use rsync for this, and when poking through the rsync man page, I came across the following:

-E –extended-attributes copy extended attributes, resource forks

So, yeah. That’s yet another nice new thing about Tiger… In the past (I wrote this up before but I don’t have the link handy) one had to install RsyncX and use the undocumented –eahfs option and now you can just use -E. Woo!

computersmoved from livejournal

Thanks, Google!

August 16, 2005

Wow, it’s interesting what kind of stuff one stumbles across when searching Google for network information: http://www.usmc.mil/maradmins/maradmin2000.nsf/Date1?OpenView

And here I was just Googling for info on SIPR (Secure IP Routing) with the string “sipr dod”.

computersfound thingsmoved from livejournal

Gallery 2…

August 8, 2005


Click for NEW moblog…

Well, I did it. I went ahead and moved my personal photo gallery to Gallery 2.

It’s quite a bit different, but I’m really liking it… The only issues I’m having are related to uploading photos to my moblog. In the old version of gallery, newly uploaded images were, by default, placed first in the album and set as the album thumbnail. This wouldn’t normally be the expected behavior, but it works out well for a moblog. In G2 images uploaded using the Nokia Image Upload API Module are dropped into the gallery and sorted per the gallery’s rules. Thusly, I had to change the gallery to sort based on ‘origination date’ so that newer photos are first, and I’ll have to go in and manually specify the new highlight photo each time I edit the captions. This really isn’t as big of a deal as it sounds.

I have also left all the photos in place under http://www.nuxx.net/albums for the time being. While not directly browsable, these are still the images that I have linked to in LJ, are indexed via Google Images, and appear all over the rest of the internet. Due to how imaged are sorted on the filesystem level in G2, I can’t make a simple mapping to them any longer. This isn’t a big deal either. I’ll just delete the old image location a bit later.

Speaking of linking directly to images in a manner like I did above, the URL to that image happens to be https://nuxx.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Image_632_.jpg. This could prove to be a problem if that temporary image expires, because the proper link to the original file is actually http://www.nuxx.net/g2data/albums/moblog/Image_632_.jpg. I’m going to have to find a proper way to link to the actual file itself, else I could run into trouble if the resized ones expire. That said, I think that the first URL I mentioned in this paragraph is actually redirected to the proper file by G2 itself, so maybe these links will hang around for a while. I’ll have to look and see.

One last thing, old-style requests to albums such as http://www.nuxx.net/gallery/moblog are automatically rewritten to the new format URLs using mod_rewrite. Go ahead, try it… Click this link and see where it takes you: http://www.nuxx.net/gallery/moblog

Well, now that that’s all done, I think it’s time for me to head home and eat a nice bowl of chili from the pot I made up yesterday. Another late day sitting here, but at least I got stuff done and learned something.

Bye for now. :)

computersmoved from livejournalnuxx.net

Web-based email on rez.nuxx.net…

August 3, 2005

Just FYI, I’ve made some changes to the web-based email (Squirrelmail) on nuxx.net. In the past, it was possible for a user to go to http://mail.domain.ext or https://mail.domain.ext to access Squirrelmail. If a user was using https, they would receive an error about a mismatched cert.

Well, today I signed up with CAcert.org and got a wildcard cert for *.nuxx.net. I’ve used this on both admin.nuxx.net and mail.nuxx.net and set it up so that all http requests forward to the https server. Because of a non-standard root CA a user will still receive an error, unless they agree to trust CAcert as a new root CA. The needed certificates for doing this can be found here. Please note that all requests to http://mail.domain.ext will now forward you to https://mail.nuxx.net so that the cert will work properly.

Additionally, I’ll be using this cert for imap-ssl and pop3-ssl so if you add this cert in a way which your mail program requires and then check your mail at mail.nuxx.net (this works for any domain I host…) using some encrypted method, all your email will be encrypted without your needing to agree to use an odd cert.

Yay!

computersmoved from livejournalnuxx.net

Gurrr…

August 2, 2005

Uggh. There is absolutely no way to take FreeBSD’s rpcmapper and bind it to a specific IP, nor even turn off networking and have it work off of sockets only.

This is really dumb.

computersmoved from livejournal

Apple Mighty Mouse Initial Impressions

August 2, 2005

[Cross posted to and …]


Click for more moblog photos…

I’ve been wanting a new mouse for a while, so when Apple announced the Mighty Mouse this morning, I ran out to the store to grab one. And boy am I glad that I did… It’s really nice.

First off, I called as soon as the Apple store opened, and was told that they have some of the mice, and they are being unpacked while I talked to the person. Based on that, I was assured that there would be some when I arrived later. Well, once I got to the Apple store, it turns out that they had received just enough for in-store display, but none to sell. Fortunately, because I called the employee had set one aside for me. Woo!

After I got back to my desk I plugged the mouse into my PowerBook. It turns out that the drivers for it aren’t included with OS X 10.4.2, so by default it’ll just have the right/left/scroll functionality. After installing the driver, you get this addition to the Mouse section of the Control Panel applet. Settings default to make it act as a slow moving, slow scrolling one button mouse where the side buttons activate All Windows in Exposé.

I changed the settings to be a left/right buttoned mouse and left everything else as is. All the buttons can be set to any of a suite of standard tasks, or they can activate ‘Other’, which allows you to select any Application on your machine. This could be really, really handy…

Now, the feel of the mouse. The mouse maintains the idea where the entire body rocks downward to click. And yes, the mouse still makes a resounding CLICK sound when clicked. There are proximity sensors under each side of the tip of the mouse. If your finger is over the left side when you click, you get a left click. Right side works the same way. If you have a finger over each side and click you just get a left click. As I personally tend to use my left and middle fingers for clicking, this will take some getting used to, but it’s not a big deal.

The scroll ball is rather nice. It’s a slightly firm, smooth rolling trackball about the size of a small pea. It makes no noise when moving, and it’s hard to tell if it’s turning or just sort of rocking to the side. This ball actually works out surprisingly well for scrolling and I took to being comfortable with it almost right away.

Yes, there is a speaker in the mouse which makes an almost ratcheting sound when scrolling, but it’s barely audible — even less so than the mechanical CLICK of the Microsoft mouse that I’m moving from. Additionally, if one clicks down on the ball — which is actually pressing it down which in turn clicks the body of the mouse — a ‘middle click’ is sent. This happens regardless of where one’s other fingers are over the sensor. This works really well as well.

The side buttons for ‘squeezing’ the mouse work out pretty well, too. Ever since I saw the original whole-body-click Apple mouse, I thought those side lumps should do something. Now they do… They don’t move, or really even flex perceptibly, but they do work out well. One also has to make an effort to position their fingers over them and squeeze them, so it’s unlikely that they will be activated accidently.

All in all, this seems like a really great mouse. I’ve taken to being immediately comfortable with it. This should definitely work out well at home.

I haven’t tried it with Windows yet (Windows compatibility is listed on the box) but I can’t imagine it would work much differently…

So, all in all, I have to say that this is a pretty nice product, and a distinct improvement on Apple’s normal one-button mouse while still keeping the original slick look and feel.

acquired thingscomputersmoved from livejournal