Recently, I had been contacted by one of the Chainsaw’s developers - Scott Deboy (no blog yet). He asked if I had any feedback on the tool’s new iteration as it would seem to be a good match to my interests and blog’s goal. I had looked at the Chainsaw a while ago, but it was not quite up to scratch then. Looking at it again, the tool feels much better and if you have to look at the log files, I strongly recommend to check it out (and/or Splunk).

Task based language learning is supposed to give one the focus to learn language faster through general familiarity with the task and limited vocabulary. This approach fails spectacularly for one hard core knitter. Fortunately, internet is there to help. (via LanguageHat) And if this situation is common for you, NativeText(WayBackMachine archive) is hoping to make a business (or at least a website) around the distributed human translation.

I remember cutting out snowflakes out of the paper around New Year time. It was fun and strangely addictive. I thought I was over it. Obviously not, as I have found this virtual Make-a-Flake game (if one can call it that) and I am snipping away again.

What is a server access log and how much information can one actually extract from it? If you don’t know, read this good introductory article on the subject. And if you find the article interesting, look for other logs your server/application produces. The easiest way to find out what log files you have is to run ProcessExplorer on Windows or lsof on *nix and see what .log files the program is keeping open and where.