I don’t know what they’ve done to improve the memory handling (it’s currently using 394M virtual, 161M resident, 19M shared), but the responsiveness has been awesome. In Firefox 2, my machine would have been thrashing like a dying wildebeest, slogging down the performance of every other app on the machine. But with version 3, Firefox itself has remained snappy, and switching between Firefox and other apps (Thunderbird, Pidgin, Skype, and a handful of terminal windows) has been just fine.

Of course, it could just be the fact that only 6 of my 43 installed add-ons is working right now… I’ll be keeping an eye on that. Maybe I should try running Firefox 2 tomorrow with a fresh profile, and see if the lack of add-ons makes a big difference after an extended session.

There’s also a few changes in the UI, that I mostly like. Such as the ability to bookmark a page by clicking a little star icon on the right side of the location bar. And scrolling through a long list of tabs is much smoother now. Plus, the active tab stands out from the others much better. That’s all I can think of for now.

Anybody else out there giving the new beta a test drive? What do you think?

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This screenshot shows how glTail visualizes a comment spam attack in my configuration.

A few days ago, in my usual daily link browsing, I ran across a link to something called “glTail“, which was described as “realtime logfile visualization”. I’m often keeping an eye on my server logs to catch unusual activity, so I thought I’d give it it a look. There’s a video there that shows it in action — very cool!

For those of you aren’t interested enough to click the link yet, let me see if I can give a description that does it some justice:

• Monitors logfiles in realtime over an ssh connection to remote servers.
• Can monitor multiple logfiles on multiple servers, simultaneously.
• Currently has parsers for Apache, IIS, RubyOnRails, and Postfix logs (and I found that the Postfix parser works pretty good on Sendmail logs).
• Pretty!

It’s written in Ruby, and requires OpenGL. Runs fine on my laptop under Ubuntu. And if you don’t know how to program in Ruby, don’t let that discourage you — I don’t know Ruby, but I’ve been able to modify the code enough to copy the “postfix” parser into a new “sendmail” parser, and customize it slightly. And I’m thinking about trying to write a parser for my MySQL logs. Hopefully, a future version will add more built-in parsers and move configuration into an external file, though.

Currently, I’m using it to monitor three of my WordPress blogs, plus my mail server. Several times now, I’ve easily spotted comment spam attacks, and quickly plugged them in my firewall. I added handlers to pop up notices whenever a comment is posted, and to track the posts-per-minute by IP number. One of my co-workers is planning to use it to see if our load balancer is actually balancing our web server requests evenly. All-in-all, glTail is a nice tool for your sysadmin arsenal.

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ViaList is software that helps your club, group, committee, or family stay organized and up-to-date. It lets you share any kind of list — things to do, contact information, agendas, ideas, whatever you need — as easily as sending an e-mail.

A program that helps you make and share lists may not sound like a big deal, but when you actually use the software and see how intuitive it is, you could very well end up adding it to your list of favorite tools. I often see new utilities come onto the scene for the Mac and think, “I wish there was something like that for Windows.” This is one of those rare programs that turns the tables, and could have Mac users wishing they had ViaList (there are plans to make a Mac client, eventually).

A lot of what I worked on was on the system administration side, configuring the server for email, setting up the bug tracker, creating a “single sign-on” system, etc. But I also worked on a very early proof-of-concept for the web-based list interface. Oh, and with me being a WordPress dev, the site ended up using WP for its blog.

Susan and I have used it to maintain lists of projects around the house, shopping lists, and planning tasks for web sites that we’ve worked on together. This kind of asynchronous planning is very convenient. Anyhow, if you have a need to keep various kinds of lists (to-do, dated events, priorities, shopping, etc.), and especially if you need to coordinate the lists with other people, you should take a look at ViaList.

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I’m one of the lucky alpha testers who have had access for the last six months. I committed to using FeedLounge as my only feed reader, dumping SharpReader and the RSS capabilities of Thunderbird. I’ve watched FeedLounge go through some rough spots, and it always came back better than before. Alex and Scott have done an outstanding job with everything from the great AJAXian user interface to the invisible backend. When the time comes, if the price is right, I’m going to be a paying customer.

But you don’t care about all that, do you? What good is it to read about a service that you don’t have access to? All you care about is knowing that FeedLounge will be open for public beta on January 16, 2006.

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Alex King and Scott Sanders have announced FeedLounge, a “state of the art web-based feed reader.” Alex invited me to be an alpha tester, so I spent some time kicking it around yesterday. Color me impressed.

FeedLounge interface screenshot

Keeping in mind that this is alpha software, I’ll grant you that I found a couple of suggestions to make. However, to echo the sentiments of Geoff, FeedLounge often feels much more like a desktop application than a web page. Clever combinations of Ajax and CSS add a ton of “hey wow” moments when using the system. As with Alex’s other works, the user interface is clean and easy to navigate.

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• Ability to integrate into existing web site (look & feel, events lists on various pages, maybe unified logins, too).
• Single events, recurring events and floating events (same weekend each year type) plus multiple categories
• Separate yearly, monthly, biweekly, weekly, and daily calendar views for each calendar
• Unlimited web calendars on web site for different departments, communities, geographic region, etc.
• Downloadable calendar data available, methods to include: Outlook, PDA, iCal and vCal
• Create RSS feeds of upcoming events

I’m afraid that my calendar-fu is pretty weak right now, so I don’t have any recommendations for him. The server will have PHP and MySQL, of course, but another request was for a system that could work with other databases, or even flat files. Anything based around something like ADOdb or PEAR::DB would probably fit that requirement.

The last time I tried to find a PHP calendar app, the one I looked at was pretty primitive. Surely there’s got to be a decent calendar framework out there by now. So, any recommendations? He’s willing to consider reasonably-priced commercial offerings, by the way.

Online Calendar Schedule Everybody & Everything

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