I was curious if anyone was using an iPhone to read my blog yet, I'm sure before too long we will all be optimizing our sites for 3.5" displays. To find out I did a little grep on my Apache log file and piped it to wc to count the number of matches:

fgrep 'iPhone;' access.

Here's a handy trick for monitoring log files on unix, linux or mac's.

SSH on to your server then type:

tail -f /var/log/httpd/access_log

The above command will show you the last few lines of the log file, this is no suprise if your fimiliar with tail command.

Do you have access to a shell account on a unix server with some spare space? If so it's pretty easy to incrementally backup your files securely with SSH.

Every time I want to setup public key authentication over SSH, I have to look it up, and I've never found a simple guide, so here's mine.

Generate key on local machine

ssh-keygen -t rsa

It will ask you for a password but you can leave it blank.

The unix text editor vi probably has more features than Microsoft Word yet I've only been using about 5 of them. Recently I've been learning a bit more about it.

I learned something new from my brother the other day about unix job processing. We had written a script to do some specific analysis of the logs for dealazon.com, and it would take about 30 seconds to a minute for the script to complete.

SANS has published a list of the top 20 internet security vulnerabilities of 2005. The list is not however cumulative, it features security vulnerabilities that have been the most prevalent within the past year and a half.

Lets face it, unless you have a photographic memory, no developer can remember all the different functions, options, tags, etc. that exist. Documentation can be cumbersome at times, thats why I like cheat sheets.

Learning UNIX is a seemingly daunting task, there are thousands of commands out there, each with hundreds of options. But in reality you only need to know a few of them.

I use unix quite a bit, usually either on one of our Linux servers, or on my Powerbook with OS X.

I work with unix operating systems quite a bit. So when I'm using Windows I'm often missing some of the handy little command line unix tools that are ubiquitous to unix but no where to be found on Windows.

Just today I was wanting to use the GNU find utility.

There are a lot of free http log file analysis tools out there that haven't been updated since the mid 90's, awstats however is both free, and up to date. It looks a bit like web trends (though I haven't used web trends in several years). Here's an online demo.