Nginx - Count of IP addresses in /var/log/nginx/access.log

Inspired by this post which supposedly works for Apache and also works for my Nginx installation. It seems however, some of the comments didn't work quite right on our Debian Lenny equipment.

Did away with grep (instead using cat) and tweaked to fix sorting not working correctly.

cat access.log | cut -d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rg

If your log is big enough to scroll multiple pages when logged in remotely.

cat access.log | cut -d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rg | less

Wordpress on Steriods

We have corporately started moving all of our clients which use a CMS from Drupal to Wordpress. There are a few reasons but we have been pleased with the functionality and performance of Wordpress on our hosted infrastructure. One of the primrary things we've done in our migration to Wordpress in buying some products which expedite our ability to take clients from concept to live site. We've done that using some of the below products. We will provide more in-depth reviews of the products as we have time.

All the best.

Catalyst Website Builder
Catalyst Dynamik Themes and Skins

We will also use this post as a place to keep some other helpful Wordpress links that we have referred back to during the migration process.
Changing Wordpress Site URL

Bulk File Rename

As usual there are command I use just often enough to forget them when the time cose. In our case we had a group of files that has the file extension in caps which was causing a problem with some 3rd party javascript so instead of modifying the .js files we change the extension to lower case (.JPG to .jpg).

for file in *.JPG ; do mv $file `echo $file | sed 's/\(.*\.\)JPG/\1jpg/'` ; done

Drupal 7 Painfully Slow Performance

We recently (yes, finally) started testing Drupal 7 and there is only one word for its performance....SLOW! It seemed to load quickly on the home page after the installation but once we logged back in it was as if we were attempting to run the site on a x86 with 512MB of RAM from a USB RAID array.

This server has a dev version of Drupal 6 that screams along without any issues but the defaul Drupal 7 installation was not performing well. After some research on the web it appears the performance issues are caused by modules that provide functionality to the server and client (a.k.a. browser).

To help with client speed disable the following modules (http://yoursite.com/admin/modules/list).
- Overlay module
- Toolbar module (Disclaimer: Make sure you have installed a module which replaces the admin functionality such as the Administration menu module before disabling this module.)

Server side:
- Update Manager Module

Disabling those three modules caused a significant increase in the response time and performance of our Drupal 7 sites.

All the best.

Compound Interest Calculator

Have you ever wanted to do a compound interest calculation but don't have a calculator in front of you? Here is a nifty way of doing it with Google.

A more detailed description of the below formula is provided in the Wikipedia link above however here is simple example which takes US$10,000 which is compounded at 5% annual interest 2 times per year for 20 years.

10000(1+(.05/2))^(2*20)=

Each number is as follows, the bolded number represented the item being described:
10000(1+(.05/2))^(2*20) = US$10,000.00
10000(1+(.05/2))^(2*20) = Fixed value (do not change)
10000(1+(.05/2))^(2*20) = 5% interest rate converted to decimal
10000(1+(.05/2))^(2*20) = Numbers of times the interest is compounded per year
10000(1+(.05/2))^(2*20) = Number of years the money will have to grow

Find Text Within Files

If you're a Linux Geek who likes to spend time figuring out a problem and writing grep commands this post is not for you. If you're using Linux, specifically a Debian distro such as Ubuntu, and need a quick solution and do not have a mastery of the command line nor time to write scripts for Gnome Nautilus this is your post!

Background:
Started using Ubuntu again due to finally having decent support in Google Talk for Drag/Drop file transfer and Google Voice Chat in Empathy. Since I use this quite a bit in my business it was imperative this work correctly.

Problem:
The ability to search inside of a variety of files (such as: pdfs, office 2K3 and 2K7 files, text files, etc.) for specific text. Tried apps such as sagasu, regexxer and even tried a few Nautilus scripts but they didn't perform what I needed.

Solution:
Google Desktop
If you've used it before you know how it works, if you haven't download it and give it a try. Here is a short post about how to install, setup and use Google Desktop on Ubuntu.

Help - SearchFilterHost.exe is hogging CPU!

Are you having the problem of SearchFilterHost.exe, SearchProtocolHost.exe and/or SearchIndexer.exe performing a HIIT workout on your CPU? We had the same problem with our Vista machines having an usually high CPU utilization and found that the following minor change helped fixed the problem.

Try and disabling the .XML file extension from being indexed in the Indexing Options control panel.
Answer by Eric Wolz - MSFT
via this thread

How do I change Windows indexing options?

Thank you Eric!