Simone 'Wiz' Tellini - Software

How much would it cost to rewrite it?

nospam@example.com (Simone) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:13:44 -0700

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:

MP3 Cat has moved

nospam@example.com (Simone) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:55:00 -0800

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

LogMiner 1.21

nospam@example.com (Simone) — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 13:26:58 -0700

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).

LogMiner 1.20

nospam@example.com (Simone) — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 14:25:00 -0700

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.

LogMiner 1.19

nospam@example.com (Simone) — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 14:52:06 -0700

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.

Safari arrives on Windows

nospam@example.com (Simone) — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 09:55:00 -0700

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.

Safari 3 beta on Windows

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

LogMiner 1.18

nospam@example.com (Simone) — Mon, 28 May 2007 10:54:28 -0700

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

Respect, ever heard of it?

nospam@example.com (Simone) — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 18:31:12 -0700

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

Back from the future: STFax 2007

nospam@example.com (Simone) — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:39:29 -0800

Back in 1997, I released STFax: it was a little program for Amiga computers that allowed them to send and receive faxes with an appropriate modem.

Amiga users liked it. Thus, in the following 2 years the product evolved, supporting a wide range of modems and becoming a commercially distributed application. Its last version wasn't limited to fax functions, but it also handled all the typical functions of an answering machine, and then some.

Ten years later, I've found myself involved in the development of a new version of the application to be ported on AmigaOS 4, Mac and Windows.

Actually, I've been long gone from the Amiga scene and I don't have an Amiga any longer... this new adventure carries a bit of nostalgia...

Orion goes open source

nospam@example.com (Simone) — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:38:48 -0800

It's been over an year since I've done some actual work on Orion, my IRC client.

Actually, I've lost any motivation on keeping on developing it: it's been ages since I've logged on to an IRC channel and spending time on Orion doesn't seem to help to pay the bills.

Anyway, now the sources are available for anyone interested in them: I've chosen the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 license for them. This broadly means that you can modify the code as you wish as long as you don't use it for commercial purposes and you release any modification with the same license. If you really can't help using my code for a commercial project, get in touch and we'll work something out.

The sources compile well with Borland C++Builder 3. There are a couple of sub-projects created with Visual C++ too. A couple of support libraries are not provided in the zip: you'll have to get them somewhere else (e.g. PCRE) or remove any reference to them (this is the case for the Wiz*.dll's, which I'm not willing to disclose at this point).

The first ideal step would be to port the code to Turbo C++ Explorer, a free IDE from Borland. It's actually a rebranded C++Builder version, so porting the code on it shouldn't be too hard. This will allow anyone to contribute on Orion without needing an expensive (and outdated) C++Builder license.

Enough words for this evening. If you do anything with the code, please let me know.

Dim Vista

nospam@example.com (Simone) — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 17:44:40 -0800

Only in Windowsland will you find howlers like a Safely Remove Hardware button for memory card readers that happen to be hardwired into your computer.

LOL

This article about Vista is truly funny. I guess I will install Windows XP on my new office PC.

LogMiner 1.17

nospam@example.com (Simone) — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 22:19:16 -0800

I've just released a couple of bugfixes for LogMiner.

Nothing major... it simply failed to work on new setups due to an out-of-date DB initialization script Whoops.

Thanks to arsonx for reporting the problem.