Catchy Logs

Whenever I upload a new version of our blog-like newsletter [1], send an email announcement, or update the RSS feed, I tend to check the web server access log to watch the first information-hungry visitors read the latest news and click on the high-res images.

Of course, deciphering the server log entries scrolling by is fairly tedious. It would be much better to monitor the requests in the background and start working on something else in the meantime. One way to do this would be to transform web hits into sound. Many moons ago, I read in Netscape Time, by Jim Clark, that the early Netscapers used to output incoming hits via PC speaker after creating a new release [2]. A Netscape browser download for Windows croaked like a frog, the sound of breaking glass played for Macs, and Unix downloads were announced with a cannon shot. This meant that the Internet pioneers could share the sound of success in their cubicles after the long coding stretch that preceded the launch.

Implementing something like this in Perl is fairly easy. In my case, however, things are not quite as simple because the web server is somewhere in a hosting provider's server farm. Although the hoster allows ssh-based shell access, it can't transmit sound.

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