Boxee

There’s a new version, read about it here!

Finally I’ve accomplished to free myself from TV schedules, advertisments and all the other stuff that’s just not right anymore about commercial TV broadcasting. This post will outline which hard- & software is involved in my perfect TV setup, so you can attempt to rebuild it in your home.

Hardware:

Software:

Transmission

So how did I chain it all together?

Firstly there is the iBook with?Catch pulling my subscribed TV shows from?showRSS. Whenever there is a new Release, Catch will download the torrent file and autostart it in Transmission. Then I have the 1TB drive connected via WiFi over Apple’s Timecapsule router and set up different groups in Transmission for each show (so they all have a defined save location). Whenever a file is finished downloading it will be transferred to the external drive in the show’s corresponding folder.

When I get home in the evening I can switch on the projector and the hacked AppleTV running Boxee and since I have “subscribed” all my shows in Boxee, it will tell me right on the start screen which new und unwatched episodes are available. Now I just have to select the show I want to watch. Ad-free, mostly in their english original language (and not the crappy, synced version in Austrian/German TV) and whenever I want.

GoAccess - web log analyzer

GoAccess - web log analyzer

Description

GoAccess is a very handy tool, that runs in the terminal on most *nix Systems (e.g. Linux, Mac OS X, BSD etc.) and displays relatime data gathered from Apache’s access logfile.

It offers a very structured display with different “modules” that break down the parsed access.log data into sections:

  • General Statistics – Information analyzed from log file – Unique totals
  • Unique visitors per day – Including spiders
  • Requested files (Page-URL)
  • Requested static files (images, stylesheets etc.)
  • Referrer URLs
  • HTTP 404 Not Found response code
  • Operating Systems
  • Browsers
  • Hosts
  • HTTP Status Codes
  • Top Referring Sites
  • Top key phrases used on Google

Each module has a detail view that can be opened by pressing “o”. The detail view gives you a scrollable list with more information on the currently selected data.

Installation

Since I couldn’t find a package for GoAccess in Debian lenny’s apt sources, I took the manual compile route. But the installation is still really easy and fast.

  • Make sure you’ve got the GLIB2, ncurses & GeoIP packages installed.
    aptitude install libglib2.0-dev, libncurses5-dev, libgeoip-dev
  • Download the latest GoAccess tarball from http://goaccess.prosoftcorp.com/download and uncompress it on your webserver.
    At the time of writing the current version was GoAccess 0.3.3.
  • Go into the newly created folder where the uncompressed files are and type “./configure
    (include the dot and slash before the command!)
  • If all tests pass, you should see those three lines at the end of the output:
    config.status: creating Makefile
    config.status: creating config.h
    config.status: executing depfiles commands
  • Type “make” to start the compile process.
  • When the program is readily compiled, it is time to install the binaries on your system.
    For that gain root access (or use “sudo”) and type “make install“.

Running GoAccess

Once you are done installing you can start the program by typing in “goaccess” on the command prompt and pressing enter. If you don’t add any command line options, GoAccess will print a few lines of help text.

GoAccess - 0.3.3

Usage: goaccess [ -b ][ -s ][ -e IP_ADDRESS][ -f log_file ]

The following options can also be supplied to the command:

  -f  - Path to input log
  -b  - Enable total bandwidth consumption. To achieve
        faster parsing, do not enable this flag.
  -s  - Enable/report HTTP status codes. To avoid overhead
        while parsing, this has been disabled by default.
  -e  - Exclude an IP from being counted under the HOST
        module. This has been disabled by default. 

For more details visit: http://goaccess.prosoftcorp.com

If you want all the features you can start it with:

goaccess -b -s -f /var/log/apache/access.log

Give it some time to parse the logfile (could take a very long time, depending on your logfile size), then you should see the mainscreen with live updating data and can start to use GoAccess.

GoAccess - Operating Systems module report

GoAccess - Operating Systems module report