the ryan king

A mashup of windows songs. (from Adam Curry)

I’ve joined dodgeball.com, seems very interesting. If you’d like to add me to your friends list, here’s my profile.

Though my birthday is still several weeks away, I recieved some birthday presents in the mail the other day. I was quite surprised to see an Amazon package on my porch the other day and spent most of the day trying to figure out what I had ordered (I saw the box on my way out in the morning and couldn’t open it until I got back in).

It turns out that grandma ordered some stuff of my Amazon Wishlist early.

I really like having a wishlist, for several reasons:

1. Grandma can buy me stuff she might find offensive. :-)
2. Grandma can buy me stuff she doesn’t understand.
3. I get what I want.

To illustrate #1: I got two CDs by Mitch Hedberg. Ordinarily Grandma wouldn’t buy me a CD by a stoner-comic, but with the wishlist, she doesn’t have to know.

For #2, I got 2 books on Applescript- I’m not sure she even knows what ‘scripting’ is, though she does use a computer (for email and card games, just like the rest of us)

For #3, here’s what I got:

• Ideas and Opinions, by Albert Einstein – a collection of many of his non-scientific writings
• AppleScript, The Definitve Guide, by Matt Neuburg, from O’Reilly
• AppleScript, the Missing Manual, by Adam Goldstein – you might be asking why I got two AppleScript books- well, I intended on deleting one of them before my birthday got close, but I guess they’ll both be useful.
• Strategic Grill Locations, by Mitch Hedberg
• Mitch All Together, by Mitch Hedberg

p>I’ve recently become quite annoyed by the current offerings I’ve found available in web sever log analysis:

• Urchin, which [my webhost] uses, generally sucks- mostly because it does a really poor job of interpreting user agent strings.
• AwStats is really difficult to install, at least if you don’t have root on a machine (as is my situation using a shared host).
• Analog seems to suck, too- there’s a Mac port, but its quite ugly and not particularly easy to use.
• I’m unaware of any other good options.

For what its worth, I actually kinda like AWStats, meaning that it pretty much worked, unlike my experience with Urchin. So, after playing around with all of these, here’s what I’ve decided I want in a web server logfile analysis package:

• The ability to categorize requests based on specific criteria. I’m thinking about the user agent string, but I’m sure I’ll think of other things later that I want to be able to classify.
• The ability to run ad-hoc queries against the data.
• The ability to create graphs of ad-hoc queries.

Are there any open-source projects out there that qualify?

As it is, I’m working on my own implementation, which takes logfiles, parses them out and sticks them in a mysql db. In the process, the user agent string is analyzed to classify the agent into different categories. What do I mean by ‘categories’? Well what I really want is the ability to create a hierarcy like this:

• Browser
  • MSIE
    • 5.5
    • 6.0
  • Webkit
    • Safari
  • Gecko
    • Firebird
      • 1.0
    • Camino
• Aggregators
  • NetNewsWire
  • Shrook
• Robots
  • Search Engines
    • Googlebot
  • Blog bots
    • Technibot

I offer these just to give you an idea of what kind of data I want to have. My first thought was to create a taxonomy like this. However, after thinking about this more, it may be more flexible to have a flat taxonomy (like tags), which can then be bundled into groups (del.icio.us bundles are definitely my inspiration on this one). For example, I could mark something with these tags

MSIE60, WinXP

or these

MSIE55, Win2k

Then I could create bundles like this:

IE->{MSIE60, MSIE55}
Windows->{Win2k, WinXP}

Ideally this system would have a rule-based system for classifying user agents, which would mean that adding a new agent would be as simple as adding a new rule for it (rather than writing or re-writing code for it). The goal of all of this is to have an extensible system for converting useragent strings into a format which is more easily processable with SQL statements.

I’m putting this out there, because I want some feedback on this. Any thoughts?