• Aug 29, 2004

  How to fold a shirt in 3 seconds

  How to fold a shirt. Watch the video. I need to learn how to do this.

• Aug 28, 2004

  Setting up AWStats on Gentoo

  Some notes to myself on setting up AWStats on a Gentoo box.

  1. First, emerge the awstats package. I added the "vhosts" USE flag because it's listed as a USE flag that awstats reads, and I need support for virtual hosts (although I don't know for sure what it does - I reckon it has something to do with the webapps-config package that's a dependency).

     emerge -pv awstats
     USE="vhosts" emerge awstats

  2. Don't use the webapp-config program that the emerge process tells you to use at the end unless you know what you are doing. There have been reports that it isn't exactly ideal in the Gentoo forums.

  3. Make a symbolic link to the Apache configuration directives we need to add to Apache in a convenient location. You may also want to make the file owner-writable (chmod u+w) since it's read-only.

     ln -s /usr/share/webapps/awstats/6.1/postinst-en.txt /etc/apache2/conf/awstats.conf

  4. I had to add this bit to /etc/apache2/conf/awstats.conf prevent a 403 error when accessing the ScriptAliased /awstats directory.

     <directory "/usr/share/webapps/awstats/6.1/hostroot/cgi-bin/">
     Options +ExecCGI +FollowSymLinks
     AllowOverride None
     Order allow,deny
     Allow from all</directory>

  5. Include the AWStats-required configuration directives in the main Apache config file (mine's /etc/apache2/conf/apache2.conf).

     Include conf/awstats.conf

  6. I'm using name-based virtual hosts, with logs for each of them (they are in the included vhosts/vhosts.conf file). AWStats by default parses the Combined log format and this is what I specify for my access logs as well. An example VirtualHost directive:

     <VirtualHost *:80>
     ServerName chuyeow.wtf
     DocumentRoot /www/codefront.net/htdocs/blog
     ServerPath /blog
     CustomLog /var/log/apache2/chuyeow.wtf/access_log combined
     ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/chuyeow.wtf/error_log
     </VirtualHost>

  7. Now, create an AWStats configuration file for each virtual-host.

     cp /etc/awstats/awstats.model.conf /etc/awstats/awstats.chuyeow.wtf.conf

     Notice that the configuration file name is of the format "awstats.domain.tld.conf".

  8. Edit the configuration file (/etc/awstats/awstats.chuyeow.wtf.conf). The important things to change are:

     • LogFile (point this to your access log)
     • SiteDomain (your site's domain name)
     • HostAliases (any aliases your site may have)
     • DirData (AWStats database where your results will be stored. This has to be writable by the Apache user if the AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser option is turned on.)
     • DirCgi (AWStats CGI directory)
     • DirIcons (AWStats icons directory)

  9. Restart Apache.

     /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

  10. You can access AWStats from www.example.com/awstats/awstats.pl?config=www.example.com.

  11. Set password-protection for the AWStats directory.

  12. Run AWStats from the command line to update it. You'd likely want to set up a cron job for this.

      /usr/bin/awstats_updateall.pl now -awstatsprog=/usr/share/webapps/awstats/6.1/hostroot/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -configdir=/etc/awstats/

  Useful links:

  • AWStats documentation on installation
• Aug 28, 2004

  Half-Life 2 going gold on Monday

  Gabe Newell, head of Valve Software, posts that Half-Life 2 is going gold on Monday, as GameSpot reports. We could see HL2 on shelves in a week!

• Aug 28, 2004

  Wired Firefox, Tired Explorer

  Seen on Wired.com: Wired (Firefox) | Tired (Mozilla) | Expired (Explorer) (via Steve Garrity)

• Aug 27, 2004

  Stupid mistake - fix in 9 hours time

  I made a stupid mistake while backing up my files on the old server and uploading them to the new one. That's the problem when you have 2 similar SFTP windows (1 for uploading, 1 for downloading) and taking part in multiple chat sessions. You tend to not notice that you're uploading to the server you're supposed to be downloading from.

  So this is the default WordPress template you're seeing right now. I remember making another backup copy at work so in 9 hours time, fingers crossed, things will be back to normal.

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