Pipe Viewer is a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline. It can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, how near to completion it is, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion.
If you’re reaching the limits of your Apache server because you’re serving a lot of dynamic content, you can either spend thousands on new equipment or reduce bloat to increase your server capacity from 2 to 10 times. This article concentrates on important and weakly documented ways of increasing capacity without the need for additional hardware.
These are worth keeping an eye on: Structure Synth is a simple language for writing recursive scripts that can generate complex structures. Think of it like Processing, but in 3D. Sunflow is a rendering engine that excels at realistic lighting. [via]
A family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
As a programmer/web-designer I dip into a diverse range of programming languages and frameworks. I often find that I get locked into a specific coding grammar/syntax and that it is then difficult to switch to a new one. This is when I find the following cheat sheets invaluable (and indeed comforting).
ARPWatch/Log Watcher — A tool that monitors your network activity and keeps a record of IP/Mac address pairings and firewall logs. It will give a warning when it notices any suspicious activity, like any changes in Mac address or any connection attempt to the firewall.
I must confess that I am an addict. I have become addicted to creating computer-generated images. Having recently posted about Processing and Oxidizer, I have found another image generator called “Context Free.”
Context Free “is a program that generates images from written instructions called a grammar. The program follows the instructions in a few seconds to create images that can contain millions of shapes.”
Creating images with the software is a piece of cake. One can download from a gallery of “grammar” files or create your own scripts. Downloaded scripts can have their output modified by entering a three-character code into the Context Free application, leading to millions of permutations of the work.
It’s a fascinating program to play around with and some of the output is simply stunning.
Best of all — the software is free, open-source and is available for Windows, OS X and various flavours of Unix.
A simple console shell which allows you to run SQL queries against an Apache logfile, something that can be very useful - especially at getting information which is not easily available via static logfile analysers. [via]
