The Life & Grumbles of Steve Forster

I have decided to support Lady Haidee on SellaBand.
It is a novel concept where new bands can tout for investment to press a CD.

You effectively buy shares in the album, and get royalties on future sales for two years.

Who knows, LAdy hAidEe may be the next big thing....

Give them a listen, you will not be disappointed.

After battling with Webalizer I realised that development stopped on this in 2002, so I looked at awstats.

Awstats relies on perl-cgi so I had to find a way of making this work with Cherokee.

After much trial and error I found the solution.

Apache using the following directive

ScriptAlias /awstats/ "/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot/cgi-bin/"

To implement this in Cherokee I needed

Directory /awstats {
Handler cgi
DocumentRoot /usr/local/awstats/wwwroot/cgi-bin/
}

and then add the .pl extension support

Extension pl {
Handler cgi
}

I have been using webalizer to produce some statistics for my Cherokee web server running on the nslu2.

This is a great piece of software, but on the slug it did not have the dns lookup enabled. This means that I could only see the IP addresses of people hitting the site, but not the domain name.

I found logresolve, but struggled to compile it for unslung. After much trial and error the following settings worked in the Makefile

CFLAGS = -O2 -pipe -I/opt/include
DBMLIB = -L/opt/lib -lgdbm_compat -lgdbm

I thought that I would give Safari 3.04 Beta a trial on Vista.

I have just tried Flock, but it had a few shortcomings and wouldn't allow me to login to one of my forums - although Firefox would. Considering Flock is essentially a reskinned Firefox, this was strange.

As my laptop can run in tablet mode, and Safari looked so good on the iTouch I wonder if it will work here ?

Step 1 - Install
Chose the option with QuickTime support to install.
I was surprised when I was asked if I wanted to install Bonjour - hell why not
After only one prompt from UAC the install has completed.

Step 2 - Configuring Safari
Not a lot to say here really, all the default options seem sensible, although I would have preferred some skin options to get rid of the iTunes like brushed steel effect.

Step 3 - Using Safari
Well it launches quickly, and is working as I can edit this blog with it

Nice features
Bookmarks are neatly imported from IE and Firefox automatically.

There is an option to check spelling while typing - this is not on by default for some strange reason. At least, they have a spell check feature without using another add-in.

Conclusion
I like this and will try it as my default browser for a while.

Cool resizing of input fields
Maybe the text area youâ??re typing in is a bit too small to read. Or maybe you just have a lot to say. Either way, Safari lets you resize text areas on any website, just by grabbing the corner of the area. Resize and the web page reflows to make room.

Bonjour Discovery
Safari found my Firefly Media Server and all my Soundbridge devices .
With a single click I can manage each device. How easy was that ?

Looks like my ISP has done a deal with Phorm to collect my browsing habits.

This is a another reason why I use OpenDNS - at least this way my ISP will not get their mucky paws on my requests. I suppose they log everything at router level, but I will limit my exposure.

They claim there will be an opt out - time will tell

Update 02-March-2008
BT and TalkTalk customers can opt here. Thankfully Virgin Media have yet to implement this.