More shots of the Parker Clone

General, Guitars

This gallery contains a few more shots of my CH Guitars Parker clone.

As you may have read before, I replaced the microphonic bridge pickup with a very reasonably priiced Kent Armstrong “Rocker” humbucker. Initial impressions of the pickup are very favourable indeed. I’ll try to post some audio of it in action. Some time.

A Surprising New Guitar *updated*

Guitars

As those that know me will testify, I have stunningly poor taste in guitars. It’s not that I buy rubbish, it’s just that the aesthetics that people seem to have an issue with.

In keeping with this tradition, I made a new purchase last weekend at the Newcastle Guitar Show. I had set off for the show with a vague idea of picking up a cheap Floyd Rose equipped guitar for use on an upcoming project. Most of the guitars fell into one of the two categories – cheap or Floyd-equipped. Just as I was beginning to resign myself to the fact that I was going to be out of luck, I came across the C H Guitars stand. That’s when my luck changed.

The first guitar my eyes fell upon was a Parker Fly-like, chinese made guitar with a quilt blue burst finish. And it had a Floyd clone. And it was £139. Something had to be very wrong, or so I thought.

From it’s stand it played remarkably well for such a low-cost instrument. Great action, lovely amounts of sustain, near-perfect intonation. The only low point was a couple of dead spots on the upper reaches of the fretboard, but these were removed easily by tuning the instrument up to correct pitch (it was about 3/4 of a tone flat on the stand). What could I do but hand over the cash there and then?

The day after buying, I took the guitar to a rehearsal to put it through its paces properly. Unfortunatley, I discovered that the bridge pickup was very microphonic, so using overdrive at decent volume was not an option. The neck pickup was beautiful, though, with a lovely warm tone. A quick call to my luthier and we’d arranged a very good price for swapping out the bridge pickup for a Kent Armstring “Rocker”, and the addition of a coil tap. With any luck, I’ll get the guitear back tonight and be giving it a good workout ovber the weekend. I’ll keep you posted, and also add some better pictures.

*UPDATE* It turns out that this was a pre-production prototype. I’m still impressed, even given that my luthier scratched the top while working on it. These things happen, and he’s repaired the damage done and thrown in a setup for my trouble. That saves me a job, at least! With a little luck, it should be ready for the next rehearsal on Monday. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Parse your Apache logs to Mysql using PHP

General

There are many web analysis tools available, for example, the excellent Webalizer. However, there are times when you just want to be able to search through your logs for specific conditions. At times like these, the power of a database comes in handy, but how do you get your log data in there in the first place?

You *could* use mod_log_mysql or one of it’s variants, but they involve recompiling apache from source. Having been through all that once, and got your site up and running it is probably not something you want to go through again in a hurry. This solution will take your historical data, already written to the filesystem in apache’s “combined” log format, and insert it into a mysql table for you.

Ths table should be in the following format*.

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `tat`;
CREATE TABLE `tat` (
  `client` varchar(15) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL default '',
  `logname` varchar(255) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL default '',
  `user` varchar(255) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL default '',
  `date` varchar(35) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL default '',
  `method` varchar(10) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL default '',
  `uri` varchar(255) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL default '',
  `protocol` varchar(20) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL default '',
  `r_status` varchar(5) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL default '',
  `r_bytes` varchar(10) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL default '',
  `referrer` varchar(255) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL default '',
  `agent` varchar(255) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL default ''
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 COLLATE=latin1_general_ci;

And now, the script…

#!/usr/bin/php -q

After configuring the first 6 lines, you can run this script. I’d probably recomend doing it daily, immediately after a logrotate, although this will not give you 100% up-to-the-minute stats. In most cases, though, this is good enough.

*NB. The table layout in this example needs tweaking. It is the first run of the draft, and I was not too choosy about column specifications. I’d recommend you take a look at the data and determine your own layout.

30 Boxes

General

I have just found out about the very cool 30 Boxes calendar app. Apparently, they aim to do for the calendar what Gmail has done for email, and I have to say that my limited look at it so far has impressed me. I recommend you at least have a look.