Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

Site statistics are back

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It took a while, and I had to reset my server logs to do it, but the site statistics page is live again.

Getting it running was a bit of an adventure, that’s for sure. It’s something of a geek milestone for me, however — in the process of getting Analog up and running, I ended up doing my first compile of a *nix command-line program from source code!

A bit of background…

I generally like to have Analog set to run daily at midnight on an automatic schedule, so that my statistics page is automatically generated every day, and I’ve always got the most recent statistics available to me (or anyone else, if they’re that bored). However, until now the only version of Analog I’d had was the Mac port, where it had been given a (minimal) user interface. Nothing really wrong with that, and it is more familiar to long-time Mac users, but it meant that for me to run it, I had to leave my webserver logged in under my username, as the Mac port wouldn’t launch while the machine was sitting at the login prompt. It was only a minor security risk, sure, as the webserver itself resides in my apartment, but hey…I wanted to “do it right,” so to speak.

I knew that the original version of Analog ran from the command line, and that I’d be able to have it run in the background no matter what state my server was in…but I wasn’t sure how to go about getting it running. There was a pre-compiled command line version for OS X, but when I first started looking at this there was a typo on the page and I wasn’t sure if it would work for me. I e-mailed the guy behind the pre-compiled OS X version to ask (and he’s since fixed the typo that had me confused), but in our correspondence he recommended that I go ahead and give compiling Analog myself a try. Well, heck, why not? Ya gotta learn sometime, right?

So, yesterday evening, I spent a few hours installing the developer tools onto my server (necessary to compile software under OS X), downloading the Analog source code, mucking about with configuration and make files…and ended up with a working version of Analog that I built myself! Sure, by many geek’s views this is simple, entry-level stuff…but I hadn’t made that entry yet, so I’m pretty happy that I managed to get it all working.

I did end up nuking the Apache log files in the process of this (quite intentionally), so at the moment, the statistics page looks pretty empty, but it’ll become more useful over time.

So…that’s my latest excursion into geekdom, and my initation into compiling source code. Fascinating, I’m sure….

Update: The site statistics discussed here were for my old webserver. While it’s still up and running, they no longer have any real sigificance to this weblog. So it goes….

Smileys!

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I found a fun little hack for MT over on So Very Posh today, and thought I’d give it a shot. So — my site now has smileys! :D I can use them in my posts, and they’ll also show up in comments — read on for instructions.

So here’s the deal. Using the hack has allowed me to set up certain text strings that my server will automatically translate into graphical smileys whenever they’re used — in my posts, in people’s comments, wherever. To use each smiley, just type the code for the smiley, and the rest is taken care of automagically!

Addendum: As of August 30, 2002, the available smileys and the codes to use them changed. If you’ve stumbled upon this post, please jump on over to the updated list. Thanks!

Update: Now that I’m on TypePad, I’m not using this hack anymore. ’twas fun while it lasted, though.

New toy

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This is too cool. Yesterday evening I was talking with Melvin (my landlord), and he gave me a new toy to play with! We were talking about Palm devices, and I mentioned that mine died a while ago. Turns out that when he got his post here at the Park Seneca apartments, the company gave him a nifty little cell phone/Palm combination device. The thing was, he already had one — so he gave me his old one! Really surprised me, but he had no use for it anymore, so he figured he’d rather have it be used by someone than just sit unused in a drawer.

This thing is a nifty little toy, too — it’s a Kyocera SmartPhone. I’m not using the phone part of it yet — I’ll have to call Qwest when I’ve got some more stable income and investigate that — but for now, I’ve at least got a very functional PDA again.

When Elephants Dance

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Michael Fraase’s ‘When Elephants Dance‘ is an excellent summation of the current flap over digital rights and the dangers in the entertainment industries current drive to control everything. This should be required reading for anyone who listens to music, watches movies, or uses a computer.

This CBDPTA bill is scary

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Just in case folks haven’t figured out how sweeping the Hollings-Feinstein bill, aka CBDTPA is, well, keep reading.

The CBDTPA says that if I were to write and sell this BASIC program…

10 INPUT A$
20 PRINT A$

…after the regulations take effect, I would be guilty of a federal felony. That’s up to five years in prison and up to a $500,000 fine. Distributing my two-line application without charging for it, either via handing out floppies or by posting it on a website would be at least a civil offense and, depending on the circumstances, a crime as well.

It’s no joke. CBDTPA regulates ‘any hardware or software that reproduces copyrighted works in digital form.’ My program above does that, especially if my BASIC interpreter permits arbitrarily long strings.

— Declan McCullagh, in ‘CBDTPA bans everything from two-line BASIC programs to PCs’

The rest of the article is well worth reading, also. This bill is just plain scary.

Copies are evil

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Aw, crud. Republican Alaskan senator Ted Stevens has joined the (if you’ll excuse me) idiots backing a bill that would ban the sale of all electronic devices without embedded copy-protection chips, according to this WIRED story. This is a Bad Thing, for reasons which Cory makes clear over at Boing Boing.