This week I found a gem (literally) called glTail, it’s a log file visualizer using the tail command. All you need is Ruby and RubyGems. If you don’t have either of those (Ruby or RubyGems), follow this tutorial first.

It’s a very simple install process, and I made it much harder the first 10 times I tried. I can’t get this to work on a Macbook, but on a Mac Pro, iMac, or Macbook Pro this works fine.

First check to see what version of Ruby you have, open Terminal.app and type:

ruby -v

It should return something like:

The-Kid:~ garrett$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.6 (2008-03-03 patchlevel 114) [universal-darwin9.0]

Next you need to check which version of RubyGems that you have, again type:

The-Kid:~ garrett$ gem -v
1.3.1

If it’s anything else, I suggest upgrading it:

sudo gem update --system

After that you should be good to go to install the required gems.

sudo gem install net-ssh -v 1.1.4

sudo gem install ruby-opengl file-tail

Just to be safe we will install the glTail gem on it’s own after the previous gems were installed correctly.

sudo gem install gltail

After it is installed, simply go to your home directory, (run the command cd ~/) and install the yaml file (you can name it whatever you want).

gl_tail --new config.yaml

And this will place an easy to understand configuration file where you told it to, in this case it will be located at ~/config.yaml. Now lets open up the config file, and add/edit our first site.

mate ~/config.yaml

A quick note, you will regret using any tabs inside of here, just use space whenever you want to indent. Additionally you can add the port option if you need to connect via a certain port.

servers:
    customsitename:
        host: site.com
        user: username
        password: password
        command: tail -f -n0
        files: /var/log/apache2/access.log
        parser: apache
        color: 0.2, 1.0, 0.2, 1.0

That’s all you need to do, now lets run the command (make sure you are in your home directory first):

gl_tail configfile config.yaml

Now you should see something along the lines of:

That’s all you need to do, if you want more configuration, read on. Instead of just using the apache log, you can use any of the supported parsers; apache, iis, mysql, nginx, pix, postfix, postgresql, pureftpd, qmail, rails, squid, tshark.

I currently take advantage of my MySQL slow query log, and using my production log for my website. You should be able to drag the corner of the glTail window to make it bigger, but there is a specific config option inside the yaml file.

config:
    dimensions: 1200x600

I can’t offer too much help if anything goes awry, seeing as I can’t get this to work on my Macbook, but if something goes wrong go ahead and post your log and I will try to help.

This is an easy thing but I never took the time to figure it out because I use phpMyAdmin so much. Exporting a database is easy with phpMyAdmin, but importing if it is large can be hard because a lot of times your connection will time out or PHP is restricting how big you can upload or whatever. If you can SSH, this is easier:

mysql -u USER -p DBNAME < dump.sql

If you are on Media Temple’s DV server, like us, you can do this:

my DBNAME < dump.sql

So much easier!

While researching shoe brands for a client recently, I stumbled upon a subculture i have never been aware of before. Sneaker culture. I can’t say that I wasn’t aware of it, but had no idea how deep that rabbit hole went and how many cultures it crosses. Growing up I remember right around middle school all of a sudden NEEDING the latest Jordans. It was a must. I didn’t care if i had clothes at all, as long as i had THE Jordans. Thats how i remember the sneaker craze. It started all with Jordans for me. At some point the sneaker craze passed me by, probably about the time i had to start shelling my own money out for new shoes. While my need for the latest Jordans subsided, the true sneaker freaks continued to crave the next big thing. The sneaker culture is interesting enough when strictly looking at a large group of people who collect shoes. But the really interesting thing is how this subculture has successfully bridged so many gaps in society over the years. A former colleague Chris Francisco has been at the heart of this culture growing up in the Bay Area. Chris got his start as a young graffitti artist, b-boy and sneaker freaker and eventually landed a career in graphic design. He introduced me to this subculture and explains it much better than i ever could:

“In one word “CONNECTED” It’s all connected bro, from your sneaker freakers to your toy collectors to Hip Hop Culture to fashion to action sports to revolutionaries…that shit is all connected. One bigass network, they all intermingle with one another. It’s always been connected, it’s only now that folks are starting to see it come together due to physical products that are produced and cater to the followers of the underground scene. Folks label them as markets, “Streetwear”, “Action Sports”, but in reality they’re all just underground heads who follow an artistic movement that revolves around independent self expression and free spirit.”

That being said, its quite amazing to see how people come together from many walks of life to admire each others artistic expression. One way this is being done is through underground art shows and product unveilings. Its probably one of the few places you’ll see an indie hipster mingling with a hardcore action sports rider while jamming to some crazy beats being spun by a local MC. Its truly a melting pot of people, passion and art. And all of this from a love of sneakers.

Check out more at this great e-zine:

http://www.inqmnd.ca/site/#editorsNote

On a current project we wanted to restrict a vendor’s access to our SVN to a specific directory. We host our SVN repository on Dreamhost because they make it easy to administer and give you an F ton of space. Their SVN user creation system doesn’t let you setup any specific access control per user. Ben found this great link that describes how this is accomplished with SVN.

How you do this on Dreamhost is to first create all the users you’re going to need, regardless of access level. Then you log into your Dreamhost account by ftp or ssh. Lets say your repo is called myrepo. /svn/myrepo.access is what you want to edit. Here’s an example of what you might put in there:

[/]
robert = rw
ben = rw

[/Site]
vendor = rw


This would give vendor only access to the /Site subdirectory of your repo. Thus, they would access your repo by going to http://yourdomain.com/myrepo/Site. If you update this repo’s users via the control panel, though, this will be overwritten and vendor will get access to the root.

I’m really liking the genius feature and it’s pretty dead on. But check out what it came up with for Cassius 1999:

Ghostland Cetera, then 2 Peter Ceteras, Mr. Mister, then Phoenix …. huh …

I’m somewhat of an armchair physicist. I don’t play the game myself, but I read the easier books, and attend the more general public friendly lectures. Today is what one might consider the beginning of the play-offs for physicists (I can’t believe I just used a sports analogy).

Just hours ago, CERN successfully tested their Large Hadron Collider. This test consisted of shooting a bunch of Hadron particles down a -271°C, 27km tube at nearly the speed of light. In the next few weeks they will begin shooting particles down a tube in the opposite direction. These tubes intersect at four points in the circle. When particles reach these intersections they smash into each other. It’s not very much unlike Hot Wheels Criss Cross Crash, accept the Hot Wheels are very tiny, and they are much hotter, and much faster, and there are a whole lot of them.

The crashes are also more frequent and MUCH bigger. In fact, the point of the whole experiment is to recreate the conditions just trillionths of a second after the big bang occurred. Studying what happens to these particles when they smash into each other at such high rates of speed will shed much needed light on our fundamental ideas about the way the universe is and behaves. This research may lead to the discovery of a grand unifying theory for electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, and gravity. We may also be able to see dark matter, and discover additional dimensions to the universe. This is a big deal.

This morning, CERN successfully tested the machine in one direction. Next they will test the machine in the other direction, and in a couple of weeks, the collisions begin!

An interesting aside that attests to the infinite world changing possibilities in performing these experiments, CERN essentially created the World Wide Web to provide a more efficient way for scientists to communicate with each other on this project. This project has already changed our world, and they just turned on the machine this morning.

I’ll admit that growing up I was like most 13 year old girls. I was boy band obsessed and I had my bedroom walls, cd collections, and band paraphernalia to prove it. Honestly though, I thought my fanatical boy band obsessing tendencies had dissipated with age and evolving music trends. Unfortunately, as I found out on Saturday, those feelings had simply been in intense hibernation. When we were first told we would be seeing the Backstreet Boys I was pumped, but when I realized there was a slight chance that we would meet them, the “crazy” in me quickly surfaced. Last week flew by quickly and by the end of the week I was a full on Backstreet Boys fan again.

Saturday was absolutely incredible Marylee, my roommate and I arrived several hours before the show. After finding our amazing seats ( Eddie totally hooked us up, we were 6 or 7 rows from the stage) we quickly spotted Matt and were taken backstage and met up with Eddie. Eddie introduced us to several BSB band and group members, who were all cool as shit. I’m not going to lie, I had a hard time keeping my cool, I kept reminding myself that we were with our client and that it was necessary to balance my lunatic fan antics with my desire to remain calm and professional. I think I did o.k. until I asked Eddie if we could get a pic, I felt like a total idiot, but I think I would have regretted it if I hadn’t. Regardless of the fact that this is an unflattering photo and that I have a dorkie love struck smile on my face, this is easily my favorite picture of all time.

The concert kicked ass. The Backstreet Boys put on an amazing show, it was filled with solo performances from each of the guys and a mix of material from their newest album “Unbreakable” and their greatest hits. I’m still on this crazy high from the show. Most importantly we got some pretty decent pics to document the entire evening! Thanks for everything Eddie/BKWLD!!!!

Great article on styling file upload fields. Still, seems better to avoid if you can. Can’t believe he’s trying support netscape 4! What a champ.

Robert, Mai, and I went to this office party last night. Not only is the office amazing, but they have a rotating art gallery. There was a lot fresh artwork in there, but these were my favorites. They are stencils on fencing…Heck yes!

I refreshed my knowledge today about sitelinks, the subnav that appears beneath some site’s search results in google. According to google, you can’t force them to appear. It’s been suggested that having too many links in the nav may work against you. Having your navigation in text (as opposed to flash) is required. And you must be the top search result. One site says that your site must be older than 18 months. Other sites agree, age and trust matter. Lastly, here’s a last link, this is all making my head hurt.