Antispin

A typical install of logstash-forwarder (lumberjack) is configured to watch a set of files in specific locations and often playing with that file is impossible. However, you might need to load a file into it that it doesn’t typically monitor. In another situation, you may need to load historic logfiles into LSF. This can be problematic as LSF keeps track of its position in a given file and will often recognise the file as one it has already processed and won’t reimport events it considers as “old”. ...

Given the amount of data that we post about ourselves online – on Facebook, on Twitter, Tumblr, blogs, etc, the dataset that effectively describes you as an individual continually grows. With some clever analytics and sufficiently large sample size, trends can be inferred with alarming reliability and predictions about individual behaviour can be made with a frankly scary degree of accuracy. Jennifer Golbeck describes how scientists, governments and companies make use of this data to profile individuals and build a comprehensive picture of you based on seemingly unconnected events, actions and trends. ...

Bonobo’s Late Night Tales set is definitely “music worth staying up for”, as the Late Night Tales folk say.

After a conversation with a friend about the best way to go about setting up a NAS for your home, I thought I’d relate some of the things I’ve learned over the few years that I’ve been working with ZFS at home and at work. Specs If you’re going to be building a homebrew NAS box to use as your media/file storage, streaming server and porn dump, you’ll need to think about what sort of kit you need. ...

For the past six months or so, I’ve been running an ELK stack setup in our hosting infrastructure at work to monitor, among other things: HTTP requests coming in Nginx response times System loads Sendmail and Postfix activity Disk IO and related metrics To do this, I’ve had to evolve the infrastructure somewhat. Here’s a brief overview of what happened. v1 Logstash was installed on a single box using its built-in Elasticsearch server to store data. ...

Steam, Valve’s content delivery network, games marketplace and cloud savefile storage system, among other things has supported having multiple install locations for your games library. As SSDs become more and more prevalent and cheaper, many people are looking to install their stuff on the much faster SSD. To create a new installation location for *future* installs – this article doesn’t cover moving your existing Steam library – simply open your Steam settings, hit the “Downloads” tab and click “Steam Library Folders” ...

Just what I need for the afternoon! Kite String Tangle!

This remix of Cavalier is very nicely arranged and unlike a lot of others doesn’t try to completely re-do the track..

I took apart an old, old 10GB IDE laptop hard disk. Pretty!

Apologies for those affected (like three of you, probably) by the 2-3 hour outage. This was caused by a WordPress upgrade which crashed the PHP process. Obviously I monitor the site closely and fixed it immediately three hours later when I noticed.

A friend of mine created a “street harassment form” to print out and hand to people who catcall/yell at you/objectify you in the street. Presented without further comment. ![]

Last month, London Fire Spinners performed for the #TheMovement global launch party at ZSL London Zoo. It was a lot of fun for all concerned and we had a great time. I took some photos, so here they are!

Found this gem yesterday in the midst of a mix. It’s great.

I’ve been hunting for this song for the best part of a year. Imagine my delight at having found it, at last!

I’ve not the time right now to write more in the Logstash series, but as a quick interlude, I’d like to link to my ever-expanding Gist containing some useful Logstash GROK patterns for Postfix and Sendmail. Good, comprehensive sets of these are a bit of a slog to find online, so I cobbled together some from posts on the Internets, GitHub Gists and some tweaks of my own to make them work. ...