May 2006 archive

Apache Logs on Ubuntu

Quick summary: Apache logs on Ubuntu—the default setup isn’t near as nice as it was on Mandriva.

Mandriva came with this spiffed up version of Apache called the “Advanced Extranet Server” that had some nice bells and whistles. One of them, I discovered this evening, was the automatic creation of log files for each named virtual host. It used an environment variable set in the VirtualHost section, and a perl script to split up the access logs into separate files, each uniquely named for the virtual host and date. I didn’t even know what I was doing, but I had included the Setenv VLOG directive in each virtual host I created, and the log files magically showed up.

The reason I discovered this is because this evening I took a gander at the apache log on my new Ubuntu setup, and it was nearly empty. It wasn’t logging anything for my virtual hosts. Turns out you have to manually put the directive, CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined, in each VirtualHost section, and maybe make up unique filenames in each one yourself. How manual.

This lack-of-feature in Ubuntu wasn’t all bad. I opened up the Apache docs for the first time ever, and they weren’t half-bad. I can actually look up what all those directives in the apache configuration files mean! You’d think I’d figure that kind of thing out sooner ;-)

Posted by Bryan on May 31, 2006 | Filed under: Geek | 0 comments

Sandbox, More Wildlife

After a week of sunshine where the boys played in the dirt on the side of our house all day every day, Ily was ready for a sandbox. So, with the help of mom and dad, and some neighbors and friends (and their truck and shovels), we put a really nice one together this weekend. I put the wooden sides together on the back patio because it was level and there was more room to work. We’ve been telling the boys how we’ll have to be careful to keep a cover on the sandbox because cats like to use them for a potty. We hadn’t been in the house after putting it together for more than 20 minutes when I looked out back and there was a cat crouched in the empty sandbox! Just trying it on for size before the sand arrived, I guess. This morning when I opened the back blinds, the cat was there again!

At this point I should mention the birds that have taken up nest in our backyard. We have a covered patio with some honeysuckle growing up the side. It has gotten pretty thick at the top of the patio and these pretty blue and white birds have built a nest up there. We’ve tried to discourage them, and even cut away a bunch of branches that they were using at first, but they just kept coming back. Now we see the daddy bird flying around gathering food and bringing it up to the nest all the time. He never stays in one place very long, but this morning he put on quite a show while I ate my breakfast.

I didn’t notice at first until he started squawking right outside the window. I looked up and he was perched on the edge of the sandbox, looking right at the cat and chirping loudly. I’m not really up on my bird, but I think the translation of what he was saying was something like, “You come 'round my 'hood cat, you better represent! You wanna piece of me? Huh? You wanna piece?” He even bent over and pecked the sandbox to emphasize his point. He hopped from the sandbox to the patio chair to the ground chirping at the cat like this the whole time I was eating. The cat just crouched low like he was about to pounce, or maybe he was trying to hide. A couple times the bird flew in and swooped right over the cat’s head, like he was attacking. The cat could only manage to duck for cover and then bat at the bird futilely after he passed. I tried to take a movie with my digital camera, but it was through the window and didn’t turn out well. I did get a good picture of the bird finally. Exciting breakfast.

Anyway, back to the sandbox. This evening some buddies and I moved the sandbox into position and hauled the load of sand into it. Before it was even finished the boys were up to their necks in the sand and wouldn’t come out for bedtime until I dragged them. As Ily and I put them to bed this evening all they could talk about was how they were going to play in the sandbox all day tomorrow. I think the project was a success.

UPDATE: WhatBird helped me figure out that the backyard nesters are Western Scrub-Jays. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

Posted by Bryan on May 30, 2006 | Filed under: Family News | 0 comments

Isaac Soccer Movie Test

I’ve found a new way to put videos on the web. There’s a website called YouTube that let’s you upload videos and then everyone can stream them from their fast servers instead of my slow one, all for free! Check out Isaac’s big kick from this last soccer game (he’s got the white long sleeve shirt under his red uniform):

I don’t know a good way to integrate this in with the photo album yet, but it seems to work a lot better than how I’ve been posting movies here. Leave a comment and tell me how this works for you.

Posted by Bryan on May 14, 2006 | Filed under: About This Site Family News | 3 comments

Korean Treat

Our next door neighbors are Korean.
They’ve been in the U.S. for about 4 years. The parents hardly speak
English, they always have their 17 year-old son translate, and he’s
still learning himself. I was doing a little patching up of
the fence between our yards today because there were a couple
windstorms this winter that hadn’t been too nice to it. Isaac was out
helping me, and the mom came out with a hand full of some kind of food
in red wrappers and gave them to Isaac. Very nice of her, I thought.
Later when Isaac and I tried them out they turned out to be these
delicious chocolate covered marshmallow things. I was very impressed, especially since I had been half expecting some kind of cabbage or seafood treat ;-)

According to the package they are Lotte Chocopies. The wrapper says,
and I am not making this up:

The Lotte Chocopie is soft biscuit with
the good taste of enrobing chocolate and more chewing marshmallow. We
are happy to serve the Lotte Chocopie with your pleasure. All your
base are belong to us.

OK, so I added the last sentence myself, but the rest really is taken word-for-word from the wrapper. And they really were good tasting and more chewing. And did you know that enrobing is almost a real word?

Posted by Bryan on May 13, 2006 | Filed under: Family News | 0 comments

Ubuntu--It's the Little Things

Real quick, two nice little things about Ubuntu that I have neglected to mention, but that show just how fine a Linux distribution it is.

I installed it on a second hard drive, along side my Mandriva install on the first hard drive. Ubuntu actually detected Mandriva there, and copied the grub entries into the Ubuntu grub.conf, so I could still boot Mandriva after installing Ubuntu. I could have done that my self easily enough, but that just made life that much easier.

The other I just noticed this morning. After all my messing around with mondo (which I have working quite nicely now, by the way), Ubuntu includes a Simple Backup Suite (nice write-up here). It’s a nice little GUI app and the default settings are exactly what I would want. How cool is that?

Posted by Bryan on May 10, 2006 | Filed under: Geek | 0 comments

Potential

Being in the Elders Quorum presidency for my ward, I had the opportunity to attend our Stake Priesthood leadership meeting a couple weeks ago. What was really special about this was that Elder Russell M. Nelson was there. We were getting a new stake presidency and he and Elder Gibbons came to make that change.

It was an amazing meeting. Elder Gibbons taught us first, and he was very good. Then Elder Nelson stood up and told us he didn’t know why he was assigned to come to our stake, we were doing jus fine. Then he said that the chance of having a member of the Quorum of the Twelve coming to your stake conference is getting so rare that he just wanted to give us a chance to aks him questions. Wow.

The first question he answered was how to find balance in life. He said he was still trying to figure that out himself, but then gave a good lesson on giving your career its due, putting family first, and all that good stuff. The next question actually ended up being the last. A young mens leader stood and asked, “How do you get a young man to see his potential?” Elder Nelson quickly quipped, “It’s for you the old man to see your potential!” But really, he assured us, this was a wonderful and insightful question. It must have been, because he spent the next 45 minutes answering it. He took us through all kinds of scriptures, shared stories from his service as an apostle, and spared nothing to make sure we understood our potential. It was amazing and I furiously took notes as I tried to drink it all in. Eventually he looked up at the clock and said, “Well, there was a long answer to a short question for you. You have more questions you would like to ask, and there is a lot more I could say, but we better end now …” As we sang the closing song the message that I had been totally unaware of my potential, and had allowed myself to be caught up in all kinds of little, inconsequential things, flooded me. It was powerfull and I still can’t get over it. And that’s a good thing.

Today was fast sunday and my turn to teach the Elders Quorum lesson. I didn’t think I could do any justice to it, but I couldn’t think of teaching anything other than Elder Nelson’s lesson on potential. I was able to find a couple past talks of Elder Nelson’s where he said almost exactly the same things he told us, which greatly helped to fill in where my notes were lacking. I studied lots and tried to boil it all down, and I think it went pretty well today. You can see my rough lesson notes if you like (html version too). They might not make complete sense to anyone other than me, but who knows.

(Now, don’t think I spent a whole lot of time making those lesson notes all pretty and cross referenced, and doing the conversions to html and pdf. I used a great tool called LaTeX to type them up and generate the different forms of output. It’s an ancient computer program that’s awesome for that kind of thing, and I think everyone should use it.)

Posted by Bryan on May 7, 2006 | Filed under: Religion | 0 comments