nuxx.net

Peektures…

August 23, 2005

· The 40 IEEE1394a cables came today, so now I can begin making the iSight Tripod Adapters.
· Cost Plus is a great place to buy good beer for cheap. Their selection swings around, but they always tend to have something that is good. The Arcadia Whitsun was $7.49 for a six pack, and the Bell’s Third Coast Old Ale is underpriced at $8.49.
· Yay! The metadata service in OS X crashed while I was doing the massive sync from nuxx.net. I’m not so sure Tiger can deal with massive influxes of info.

Just FYI, the websites on rez.nuxx.net will be inaccessible for a brief period of time tomorrow. I hope for this to be in the morning, and for under a minute in time. In short, I have to replace the version of cronolog I installed earlier today. The current version (from ports) defaults to writing all files as root, which isn’t good. Fortunately this patch from 2002 seems to have it flop to whatever UID/GID one specifies before writing the files.

I want to move to this version… This should be a quick, seamless switch. Add the appropriate flags to the Apache config files, stop httpd, replace the binary, set appropriate permissions on existing files so they can be appended, start httpd, done.

I’m just paranoid, and I wanted to give people a heads-up in case things seem slightly amiss for a few minutes tomorrow.

Oh, and yeah, the whole new way of rotating logs seems to work great. Parsing all logs generated since ~5pm today took under a minute.

computers moved from livejournal nuxx.net

No Krausen?

August 22, 2005

[Cross posted to and …]

Click for more…

Maybe it’s just weird to me, but something strange seems to be happening with my vanilla stout. I just walked downstairs to take a look at it, and as you can see from the above photo which is taken looking down at the carboy from the top, the krausen is *gone*. The surface of the beer is sparkling like spilled hot soda, and the surface is swirling as if there is an impeller at the bottom of the carboy, but there is absolutely *no* krausen left.

Have any of you seen anything like this before? It strikes me as very odd.

That said, I haven’t used this yeast before (WLP023) so I’m not sure what to expect. However, no other batch of beer I’ve made has behaved in this manner…

Is it possible that due to the quantity of yeast energizer and yeast nutrient used in the batch (2 tsp and 4 tsp, respectively, per directions on the packaging) that the beer is simply fermenting extremely quickly? Temperature down where the carboy sits is right around 70°F on this wonderfully cool Michigan evening…

beer moved from livejournal

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.

—

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.

—

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.

beer computers moved 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…

computers moved from livejournal

Cacti

August 21, 2005

Cut to avoid SSL error for most folks…

computers moved from livejournal

Beer #8 – Random Vanilla Stout

August 18, 2005

So, after getting home from work today I decided to fire up the turkey fryer I had purchased back in December but never put to use. Now that summer is getting a bit cooler, I figure it’ll be fine for me to use it to boil some beer. Well, I calibrated it (at 5, 5.5, 6, and 6.5 gallons) and then picked a spot to do the boiling at. It turns out that the best spot will be just off of my front porch on the sidewalk. I had initially fired it up in the garage, but at maximum flame it kicks out a ton of heat, and I’m also worried about carbon monoxide. I’m probably just being paranoid, but it seems better this way.

So, if things go as I hope, come Saturday or Sunday (it’ll be cooler Sunday… Hmm…) I’ll make up a batch of something I’m currently calling Random Vanilla Stout. suggested that I make a vanilla porter, but I’m wishing to go even darker, so a stout it is. I hope he still likes it. Hell, I hope I like it… I’ve only been shooting about 60% with my beers thus far.

Anyway…

I’ve also started to use a piece of software called Promash for my brewing calculations. It really makes everything very, very easy. Also, playing with the numbers in a piece of software really gives one a better understanding of how things fit together behind the scenes.

After creating the recipe I went ahead and exported it. So, if you’d like to see the recipe, take a look here.

Thus far it’s planned to be a 52.8 SRM beer and 45 IBU. This will be extremely dark, somewhat bitter, and will hopefully, thanks to the addition of two vanilla beans in bulk conditioning, have a nice underlying vanilla flavor.

So, yeah… That’s it. Hopefully it’ll go well. My attempt to buy the ingredients today didn’t go so hot, but that’s because I had forgotten that today is the one weekday I can remember which Cap’N’Cork is closed. This was so they could attend some sort of event or festival… Ah well. I’ll go tomorrow.

beer moved 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!

computers moved from livejournal

Bottles’O’Urine

August 17, 2005

So back in early April while at a theater in Ann Arbor I happened to come across an absolutely completely full bottle of urine. I found it to be a curiosity, so I snapped a picture of it and uploaded it to my moblog.

Fast forward to today, and while watching the log files for nuxx.net I happened to see a referrer from this site, which is the first actual use I’ve seen for that picture. (Scroll down about 4/5 of the way…)

The writer is talking about how to determine bad traffic areas, and they write:

You see, as we were driving the early part of the CBE, we began to see bottles of refreshing Aquafina and Poland Springs and Dasani and other popular brands of water lying by the side of the road filled with a suspicious liquid of different shades of yellow and gold. What I now know is that when there are multiple water bottles full of urine lying on the side of a road – thrown there from car windows – this is NOT the road you want to take if you need to get anywhere in a hurry.

So, Mr. Dave Nalle, thank you for finding an actual use for my silly, silly photo of a bottle of urine. While I don’t completely agree with his analysis (I tend to see these bottles in more rural area where there often isn’t bad traffic) I do think he’s got a valid point. If there are lots of these bottles along the side of a highway, there’s a good chance it’s often backed up.

On a side note, maybe it’s just that I’ve been noticing it more often, but I’ve been seeing similarly full bottles all too often. There was one just outside of the driveway at my condo, one on a random corner I noticed en route to work, and I saw one along the side of I-75 last time I drove it as part of heading to Ann Arbor.

It’s just really an interesting thing… I guess urinating while driving isn’t something I’d thought of. I’d rather just pull over, stand in a somewhat sheltered area, and go.

found things moved 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”.

computers found things moved from livejournal