I have often wished I could have a real-time visual indicator of what my web server is doing. I never really got past simply using a tail command piped into a grep command so I could see interesting things. But Erlend Simonsen came up with a very cool program called glTail. It’s a Ruby script that analyzes your log files and shows you what is happening by whom on which web site. I put my 10 most popular web sites into the script, and it runs beautifully. I just looked and I’m already 3 versions behind the times, so I’ve just upgraded.

I did have to install Ruby, and RubyGems onto my Powerbook. And that took a while, but the instructions at MacOnRails.com made it pretty easy, although I didn’t quite understand everything they were saying.

You can read about how Dougal Campbell is using glTail.

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My wife and I run a podcast/blog/wiki covering live theater in the Washington DC area I just spent the last 25 minutes editing the audio for a review for a show we saw on Thursday night. We use Audacity to record our conversation about the show. Audaucity lets me see our words, and it is quite easy to remove the umms or other hiccups that hit when we are recording.

Now Laura gets to do the transcript of our conversation. She uses Transcriva to type the transcript. Transcriva lets her hit Apple-Enter to slide the audio back a few seconds, and then easily switch between different speakers.

It’s taken us a while to work out a system, but the process we are using is great.

I have the following screen savers installed on my Powerbook:

• GPULife the game of Life rendered using only your video card
• Electric Sheep distributed computing sued to create what computers dream of when they are asleep
• Fracture creates fractals. View the gallery of fractals created with Fracture
• Chemical Burn a traffic estimator
• Soundstream responds to sounds in the room

In Classic Goes Out with Nary a Whisper Chris Adamson wonders if anyone will really miss Classic mode on the new Intel Macs.

I don’t think most people will miss Classic. I had to rebuild my Powerbook a few weeks ago, and I decided not to install Classic at all. There were a handful of games I wanted to be able to play, but I really haven’t missed them at all.

There are ways to run Classic on Intel Macs. One useful page is VNC, Basilisk II, and SheepShaver: 3 Ways to Run Classic on an Intel Mac.

I cleaned my Powerbook’s desktop off this morning. The script is now posted at: Making Webloc Archives. My script merely reads the .webloc files, extracts the url, grabs the site’s favicon if there is noe, then uploads the link to a web site.

Here is my list of my favorite free Mac software:

• Audacity
• Chicken of the VNC
• Galerie
• NetNewsWire Lite
• Chax

I change the items in my menu bar every few months. As of March 8, 2006 this is what I had:

From left to right:

• GizmoProject: VOIP client, $5 month for an incoming phone number, portable to any computer
• iKey: keyboard macros
• DeskTopple: hides my desktop’s icons (a bit better than Backdrop)
• NetMonitor: shows my network throughput,a nd my IP address info when I hover over it. I like it’s output a bit better than MenuMeters’ outout
• ClamXav Sentry: anti-virus monitor
• Boinc: a distributed processing client looking for new planets
• Spirited Away: hides applications that haven’t been used in the last few minutes
• SSHKeychain: manage keys for connecting with ssh servers
• Slim Battery Monitor: (no icon when plugged in) more useful information than the built in battery icon
• MenuMeters: shows disk activity, plus optional modules showing memory, cpu, and network info
• Keychain Access: allows me to easily lock my screen when I leave the computer, without the annoyances of starting the screen saver by hitting a hot corner of the screen accidentally
• iChat Apple’s AIM client
• System clock, part of OS X
• Airport status, part of OS X
• Spotlight, part of OS X

I also use Quicksilver, but have the menu icon turned off.

I used to have the Speaker Volume icon up, but removed it and don’t miss it. Same thing with the Displays icon. I have two different monitors I plug into (home and work), and the Mac just remembers which is which, so I removed the menubar icon.

-Redacted-

I needed to run the Dantz Retrospect Backlup client onto my new Apple XServe G5. The problem is that the G5 doesn’t have a monitor. You can install packages through the command line on the server. Simply ssh into the box, then run the installer command. If you want to log into the box with a graphical interface, as is required for programs that don’t provide a package, Apple recommends you buy the $299 “Apple Remote Desktop.” That is a lot of money for a one time use.

Then I remembered that OS X 10.4 includes a VNC server in the system. On Tiger clients, its in the Sharing system preference pane. On Tiger server, however that option is not available. So I decided to install a VNC server.

1. Download the OSXvnc server application. http://www.redstonesoftware.com/vnc.html

2. Copy the OSXvnc application to your XServe’s /Applications/ folder. I did this by sharing the root level of the hard drive, logging into the XServe (Apple-K) from my computer, and copying the application into the /Applications/ folder. Then I disconnected from the drive, and turned off the sharing of the root folder.

3. Ssh into the XServe.

4. I then ran the OSXvnc program by typing “sudo open /Applications/OSXvnc.app/” You should be prompted for the system password.

5. Then using a VNC client (I recommend Chicken of the VNC, available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/) I connected to my XServe. I was prompted with a standard OS X login box. I logged in as a user with administrative privileges.

6. Then I ran the Retrospect Client installer. It prompted me for for a few things (Retrospect password) and then restarted the server. Once the machine restarts, you will be disconnected from the VNC server. You’ll need to re-enable it if you want to log in again through Chicken of the VNC. You can enable OSXvnc to come up automatically when the server starts up, but be sure to set a password if you do that. You can also change the port that is used.

That’s all there was to it. I saved $300 through two open-source applications.

I’ve updated my script to grab the site’s Favicon. I’m now cleaning up the script, and will post it shortly. The page it uploads is at http://www.planetmike.com/urls/.