I'm happy to see that the new PC Authority downloads site went live

If you want a similar site, just ask

This very useful dialog pops up when you aren't an administrator on Windows 2003, annoying you until you decide that it's time to reboot. Or find someone that can do it, that is.

I guess it deserves an UI Design Award

A new software reviews site went live recently: Softwarecrew.

In my just-a-little-bit biased opinion, it's looking nice, but I should probably mention that I've worked on the WordPress theme it uses, plus I did write a couple of WP extensions to help the reviewers with their job.

Version 1.23 of LogMiner, my Apache/IIS log analysis package, is now available.

This release mainly fixes some build problem on modern distributions.

Also it finally includes the cleanup function I was talking about some days ago...

Hey, I'm following the live coverage of WWDC and just read this nice detail... that is a good price for a little update, Microsoft should learn a lesson or two...

I was looking for a theme to use in a WordPress blog and I stumbled on this one.

Cool, I thought, I might use it... but... hey... why there's this weird stuff in footer.php?

Uhm... it looks very suspicious. Too suspicious. Let's change eval with die and check what's all that stuff:

Yep. It definitely looks like a backdoor.

It seems that you can never be too much careful...

(it seems like the first version I've download is different than the one on the site mentioned above, although there's still something evil in footer.php)

mod_tunnel is a simple Apache module that can be used to create TCP tunnels using your Web server. It is useful to expose services which can be reached through a proxy, bypassing firewalls.

After only 4 years since the previous version, you can now download version 2.0 which works with Apache 2.2.x (and maybe 2.0.x, but I haven't tested it).

You'll find it on sourceforge.

I've just added LogMiner to Ohloh, a site that offers an interesting feature: it can analyse a project source code and estimate how much it would cost to hire a development team to recreate the project from scratch.

I think that it's a simple way to estimate the effort you put over the time in open source projects.

Here's the resulting figure for LogMiner:

I've noticed that some people use the blog search box to look for MP3 Cat, finding exactly 0 results...

This article might point them to the right place

Version 1.21 of LogMiner, my Apache/IIS log analysis package, is now available.

This release sports a new report: Networks.

It allows you to monitor where your visitor come from, in terms of organization and network. To use this report, you need to define a list of organizations and a list of networks owned by them.

For instance, if you wish to check how many hits you get from Google's crawlers, you can define a Crawler network owned by Google with the address 66.249.64.0/19 (this is just an example and may not be entirely correct, although my logs always show GoogleBot coming from that IP range).

Version 1.20 of LogMiner, my Apache/IIS log analysis package, is now available.

This version doesn't require anymore libpqxx 2.5.5: it compiles as well with version 2.6.9 (I don't understand why they had to remove a couple of really useful functions in the 2.6.x series, though).

The other most important change is that in case of SQL errors while inserting data into the DB, LogMiner won't abort the parsing of the log. Instead, it will record the error and skip the log line that caused the problem. This fix has actually been inspired by lame spammers who keep on trying to exploit the contact page on this site; too bad that they didn't study HTTP well enough: the content of a POST request follows the headers, it doesn't precede the method. They were causing LogMiner to try to fit the spam body into the varchar(32) method column.

Version 1.19 of LogMiner, my Apache/IIS log analysis package, is now available.

Peter Witkop contributed some code to let the log parser process all the log files inside a directory. This means that you can have a configuration like this:

[Site www.site.com]
; this is a single log file
Log = /var/log/httpd/site-access_log

[Site www.site2.com]
; this is a directory containing some log files
; (note: no trailing slash)
Log = /var/log/httpd/site2


By the way, I've also added libpqxx 2.5.5 to the sourceforge project: LogMiner doesn't compile with versions 2.6.x of this library.

Apple has just released a beta version of Safari 3, both for Mac OS X and for Windows.

I've tried a little the Windows version: I didn't like it. Ok, I don't like much the Mac version as well (Firefox is my preferred browser on both platforms), so I'm a bit biased, but the Windows one really feels rather unpolished.

Also, being a beta, it's not bugs-free: the most annoying bug I've found is that it crashes whenever I try to look at my bookmarks (or do any other operation on them). It actually makes the whole thing useless on my system.


Rendering is another area that still needs some work: look at the screenshot and spot what's missing

I've just released a new version of LogMiner, my Apache/IIS log analysis package.

This release features the following changes:

• the log parser has been fixed to deal correctly with negative time zones in logs


• the Navigation graph has been made clearer by ignoring query strings


• the "Response codes" report lets you find all the requests that gave a certain code

In the past 10 years or so, I've wrote several software applications in my spare time.

Some of them I've released as freeware/open source/giftware: they're mostly applications I wrote because I needed them and I felt that other might find them useful too.

It also happened that I developed other pieces of software with a different goal in mind: to make some money. Everyone's got to earn one's income one way or the other.

I don't expect people to agree with me on the price I ask for these applications or to be happy to pay for them, and I'm ready to listen to any constructive critic. I just don't tolerate the lack of respect for someone's work (especially if that someone is me ).

In the past week I've received a couple of mails about TabView that crossed this boundary (or got very close to).

The first ended up directly in my "ignored" mail folder. It didn't deserve anything better. But let me quote a paragraph of that poem:

Fuck you and your shitty tab program..I was excited to learn a song and of course some STUPID WINDOW pops up for me to PAY for this..ARE YOU KIDDING.WHAT! THE ! FUCK!...You are such greedy fucks and all you care about is making more money. I'm a young musician WITH NO CREDIT CARD YOU FUCKING RETARDS. HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO USE TABS ON MY MAC THAT I JUST SPENT $1500 ON. yOu ingorant bastards. I was feeling very inspired for my guitar playing about 5 minutes ago now im ANGRY.

Perhaps he should have spent $500 on a Dell notebook and saved some money for the software? I'm also curious where those $1500 come from, as apparently the concept of working to earn some money seems alien to the guy.


At least the second mail was nicer and with a bit of humour:

Dudes,

[...] if you were cool, you'd make it free too, cause you'd be cooler if you did.

Sorry, pal. If I had to make it free, I would abandon it too.

Please, if you're going to write useless rants, at least make me laugh