My Blog (old posts, page 3)

AWStats and CloudFront Logs

How does one use AWStats to analyze AWS CloudFront logs?

AWStats is a widely used tool to analyze website logs, but unfortunately there is not much information available on how to use it with AWS's (Standard) CloudFront logs. The AWStats documentation seems to assume that you are using AWStats on the actual web server generating the logs, or at least that you have access to normal web server logs. That isn't the case when using CloudFront. I was able to find a single blog post from 2011 documenting how to process CloudFront logs with AWStats, and although that post was helpful, I believe more needs to be said about how to shoehorn CloudFront logs into something AWStats can use. This blog post will document what I learned while getting this to work for me.

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Removing Google Analytics

I finally did it: I have removed Google Analytics from this website and all subdomain websites.

This task has been festering on my todo list for at least a year or two. I am so happy to have this done.

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New py5 Release: 0.4a0

What's new:

  • PDE Mode has been renamed to Imported Mode

  • A new Jupyter Notebook Kernel devoted to py5

Also:

  • Better support for OSX Users. Specifically, there are no more issues closing Sketch windows.

  • Repairs to all of the existing Reference Documentation. All of the example code now works correctly and all of the descriptions are now factually accurate.

  • Code improvements in the service of producing better documentation

  • Lots of little bug fixes

  • Lots of big bug fixes

What's Ahead:

  • Continue to address platform specific issues

  • Continue to fill in gaps in Reference Documentation

py5 Reference Documentation Progress

Over the past month I've been pretty focused on improving the py5 Reference Documentation. Here's a quick update on what I've accomplished over the past month.

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New py5 Release: 0.3a5

What's new:

  • Upgrade to the Processing 4.0 alpha 3 release

  • A new way of using py5: The render-helper-tools. This was a great idea suggested by Allison Parrish.

  • Major cleanup of the IPython Magics to make the magic names and their parameters more consistent. Notably, the units for all time related parameters is now in seconds. Any code that used the magics will need to be updated. Refer to the jupyter-notebooks documentation or the magic docstrings for more information.

  • An exciting new feature to simplify the creation of adhoc Java extensions to boost Sketch performance. I haven't had a chance to document it yet, but trust me, it is pretty neat.

Also:

  • Lots of little bug fixes

  • Code improvements in the service of producing better documentation

  • Changes to the setup.py package requirements

What's Ahead:

  • Fixing OSX-specific issues

  • Documentation, documentation, and documentation

Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays!

This is the 3D animation I made for my holiday cards, using the open source library I've been building, py5. You'll need ChromaDepth glasses to see the 3D effect properly.

Music: This is Christmas by Scott Holmes Music.

The snowflakes are from the old and widely used WWFlakes font by WindWalker64.

The actual source code for this animation is available on github as a gist. This is a good example of how one can easily augment py5 with a Java Processing library.

This animation took some time to create because I first had to figure out how to implement ChromaDepth in Java. It's also the first time I did something notable in Processing using shaders, and that took some effort to learn. Shaders are a topic I've been wanting to explore for a long time and am happy I got the opportunity to do so while creating this. I'm also happy that py5 performed well during the development process. I didn't have to fix any bugs. Hooray!

Also have a look at the animations for 2015, 2016, and 2018. Those animations all require red-cyan anaglyph 3D Glasses.

py5 Subdomain

I have added yet another website subdomain: py5.ixora.io. This will be the home py5, a new version of Processing I've been building since the beginning of the pandemic. It will host reference documentation and tutorials.

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py5 blog

This is my first py5 related post. The purpose of this series of posts is to document my progress developing the library. This includes the technical aspects of the library, such as the release schedule, and non-technical aspects such as documentation and community growth.

In addition, as the py5 community grows, I will post links to notable py5 projects. I'd like to highlight everything from student work to the work of professional artists to commercial applications. I do believe in the usefulness of py5 and I'm so excited for the creative community to start using it.