Category: Miscellaneous Whatnots

Is Skrillex Dubstep? I say no (in an open letter)

... In which Christopher, after being shown a video making the case for the current brand of dubstep, and why using the term "real" music is stupid (by composing a poorly considered cat-based analogy), adds his 2p to the ongoing debargument around the evolution of genre-defined music, where one genre ends and another begins... And why Skrillex is rubbish. Read on for the juicy bits

Tiplet: monitor realtime web site traffic on a Linux server with tmux and tail

I run a VPS which has numerous sites on it. Whilst I was trying to pin down the root cause of sporadic hard lockups and runaway memory usage, I settled on a somewhat inefficient (yet very handy) line of code which I run inside a tmux session over a PuTTY SSH connection (two other panes run iftop and watch --interval=0.1 iostat -m for realtime disk I/O).

An aside: tmux is like screen on speed, way more extensible and SO MUCH EASIER TO USE, I highly recommend you give it a try if you're a commandline warrior. There's some highly useful tutorials to help you get up to speed - google "tmux tutorial", Hawk Host's two-parter has some good stuff in it.

To accomplish this I'm taking advantage of the fact that DirectAdmin (which by default provides a base of Apache 2, MySQL and PHP 5) stores its httpd access logs in a common folder: /var/log/httpd/domains/<virtualhost>.log</a>. I'm combining the tail command with grep's egrep functionality (grep -e) and some pattern matching. It's not perfect: I have to occasionally Ctrl+C and restart the command as it stalls out, but it does everything I need.

Full command and my somewhat explanatory breakdown after the jump

Rosetta@Home cruncher? Don't worry, the project's still going! (Server migration update)

I noticed last week that my BOINC client wasn't connecting to the Rosetta @ Home server to report completed Work Units. I emailed David Baker, manager of the R@H project and this evening received a reply:

Very unfortunately, we had to move the servers from one location to another, and it is taking much longer than we thought to get everything back up again. We hope to have this complete in the next day or two. Please do notify the community that we are working as hard as we can on this, and we thank everybody for their patience. We have a big set of exciting jobs we will be sending out as soon as everything is up and running.

So hold tight everybody, R@H hasn't disappeared - just hold tight and wait for the server migration to finish.

A note to other Christophers -- this email address is MINE!

For the past few years, I've sporadically received email destined for other Christopher Woods around the globe. I have the GMail address christopherwoods@gmail.com (which incorporates all variants like christopher.woods@gmail.com... In fact, any permutation with any number of full stops in the name; see this article for why that works and can be quite useful). If you don't want your important email correspondence to disappear into the black hole of somebody else's inbox, make sure you have your recipient's email address spelt correctly!

Examples of what I've received in the past twelve months:

  • Criminal Records Checks for slightly dubious looking individuals
  • Correspondence for University Campus groups
  • Australian pre-pay mobile telephone account details (including personal details and telephone numbers)
  • Canadian mobile telephone account details (including personal information and telephone numbers)
  • Birthday greetings, sadly not on the correct day
  • Microsoft XBox Live activation emails
  • Microsoft Windows Live activation emails (immediately cancelled)
  • Pictage emails for someone's wedding
  • Science Center of Iowa mailshots
  • Someone's Foursquare account emails
  • Tuxedo hire information
  • Various invoices for purchases, including some antique furniture
  • Pharmaceutical company meeting detail emails

... Plus loads of things like home addresses, relatives' names,  telephone numbers etc. I email back to the people where I can to advise them of incorrect details, but I can't believe so many people can make such a fundamental mistake as to get their own email address wrong if that is not one of the reasons to hire a divorce lawyer! Anyway...

Monday rant over...

I ♥