Hi there! Here’s another quick suggestion for all of you out there who have to deal with a lot of web server environments and need to make sure that they’re all alive and responsive. Sure there are all sorts of tools for server monitoring and performance tracking, but I found that most of the time you just need to know if the server is up & running. And of course you should be notified if it’s not.

I’ll keep this one short. Don’t know about you, but I’ve always been frustrated about how most FTP clients won’t let you search for files on a remote FTP server. I remember I used some client that had this functionality, but this was quite a while ago so I can’t even remember the name of it. If someone else knows any lightweight tools that let you do that, please leave a comment.

This time around I want to share with you a little Python library I found called PIL. If you’re a Python developer chances are you already know of it, but I use Python only from time to time, usually to automate some tasks so I was very excited to come across such a library. First thing’s first, download PIL and install it. I’m using it on a Windows platform so I used the packaged binary version, but you can get the source code and use it on any platform that supports Python.

Here’s a simple implementation of “tail -f” UNIX command equivalent in python. I used it a lot on windows servers to monitor log files. The good thing is that it works over SMB (windows shares). #!/usr/bin/env python import sys, os, time def main(argv): if len(argv) < 2: print "Usage: tail filename.log" exit(1) try: fp = open(argv[1], "r") st_results = os.stat(argv[1]) st_size = st_results[6] fp.seek(st_size) while 1: where = fp.tell() line = fp.

A few days ago I needed to extract all strings from .java files and also thought that it would be a good idea to keep count how many times a string is used. So I came up with this simple python script. It’s kind of a quick and dirty solution, but it met my needs for the particular task. import sys, os, re from operator import itemgetter files = [] strings = {} exp = re.