Makura no Soshi

Names and numbers are important but invaluable resources in IT (e.g. URIs, IPs, e-mail adresses). Their consideration nicely distinguishes techies (for lack of a better word; everyone with certain technological experience and proficiency) from non-techies (e.g. management :->).

Non-techies see these resources as abundant and dirt-cheap because they do not cost any money. – Whereas techies regard them are scarce and expensive because no amount of money can completely revert a bad allocation.

A quick reminder: the application deadline for GSoC2010 is this friday.

I highly recommend to participate because it is a great opportunity to get the experience of working with a mentor in a large open source project.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just to preserve it, here’s a useful shell command line to print a histogram of frequent log events:
grep -h 'expr' files | cut -d ' ' -f 1,2 | uniq -c | awk '{step=5; bar = ""; for(i = $1; i>=1; i = i-step) bar = bar "#"; printf $2, $3, bar; }'

Read the rest of this entry »

Given a multiuser webserver with PHP and error logging to syslog. Problem: how do you correlate error messages with users? This patch lets PHP call openlog() with a configurable program name. Read the rest of this entry »

I finally checked how the Solaris kernel assigns message IDs to its log messages.

Read the rest of this entry »

Plakat der Chemnitzer Catering-Tage (Photo: Roman Hanhart)

Gerade wieder zurück von den Chemnitzer Linux-Tagen 2010.

Recently a friend showed me the tool MailListStat to generate mailing list statistics and I thought it would be much easier to implement this in Perl or Python instead of C.
So I tried and the result is Py-MailListStat 1.0 (I am not very creative with names). Maybe someone finds it useful…

• Py-MailListStat 1.0
• example output for the amavis-user list
• [Update:] git repository