Hello, Slashdot!

Date: 2002-10-17 17:08:12

I wouldn't say that I've been hit by the brunt of the Slashdot effect, but I can easily say that my box has been getting a whole lot more hits than it's used to getting.

Last night, shortly before going to bed, I spotted the latest Slashdot poll and decided I had to say something or another about Yukon after the unfortunate demise of the Volvo. So I posted a few links, tailed my weblogs, watched a few hits come in, and wandered off to bed.

This morning, after waking up absurdly early to take Willy to school, I returned and saw that I was saturating my measly 20k/s uplink pushing pictures to the rest of the world. I relocated the two rounds of heavily-linked pictures to the Cobalt, which helped me push requests through a whole lot faster. I even got bored and decided to throw in a little shameless advertising for everyone's favorite web hosting company. Because if just one person signs up, it's going to be cool. (Last I checked, nobody had.)

I've been tailing my weblogs in an Eterm all day, but finally just now I decided that I really wanted to syntax highlight them so I didn't have to pick out where exactly the request was and where exactly the referral was. So I threw together a short Perl script that does the magic. It's simple: a regular expression separates the different pieces of the log, a small function encapsulates each piece in the relevant ANSI colors, and they're concatenated back together for display. It looks rather nice.