I had a chance to play with a developer’s install of Leopard recently. I like some of the new features, but there are others such as Time Machine that I won’t be able to fully review until my copy of Leopard arrives on October 26.

If you read my previous article about malicious files masquerading as completely innocent JPEGs, Excel files, etc., you may have thought to yourself, “I would never fall for that!”, or “I take precautions like browsing the filesystem in Column Mode.” Unfortunately, it turns out that Leopard appears to be taking a step backward in revealing to users the true nature of their files.

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I’ve been participating in the Folding@home project for a while now. It gives me a sense of helping out while also providing a sense of competition. While Folding@home pretty much gets out of your way while you do “real” work, it also causes some computers’ fans to run more than normal. This is nothing to be worried about, but the added noise can be bothersome. So, scheduling when to run Folding@home is ideal in this instance.

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At one point I decided to have the web server email the day’s access_log to me. Instead of emailing the entire log, I grep’ed through the log to only get “today”, piped that to grep again to exclude entries that contained the IP address of the Intermapper server, and then piped that to mail. So, everyday I have the previous day’s log waiting in my inbox.

#! /bin/sh

today=`date +%d/%b/%Y`

/usr/bin/grep "$today" /var/log/httpd/access_log | /usr/bin/grep -v 192.168.1.70 | /usr/bin/mail -s "access_log for $today" me@email.net
exit 0

I save this shell script and schedule it with cron to run ever day right before midnight.

59 23 * * * /bin/sh /Library/Scripts/mail_log.sh