Had to do some work with ProFTPD logs today.  This script was created to get the date of last login of a user, or a list of multiple users, and return that data as a .csv file.  If you have customized the log formats, you may need to tweek the regex that breaks apart the line. 

get_last_login.pl

Several bits are incomplete, including the proper handling of timezone offsets and usage text in the help routine, but it works if you pass it a logfile and either a name or a namefile

$ get_last_login.pl --log=auth.log --namefile=username_list.txt > last_login.csv

or

$ get_last_login.pl --log=auth.log --name=am_user > last_login.csv

In doing this work, I noticed something fun, people are now trying SQL injection through FTP:

ProFTPD Default Installation [32717] ###.###.###.### [24/Feb/2013:00:16:23 -0500] "USER %') 
  UNION SELECT 1,concat(0x7b,0x6d,0x64,0x35,0x7d,0x78,0x4d,0x70,0x43,0x4f,0x4b,0x43,0x35,0x49,0x34,0x49,0x4e,
  0x7a,0x46,0x43,0x61,0x62,0x33,0x57,0x45,0x6d,0x77,0x3d,0x3d),NULL,NULL,concat(0x2f),concat(0x2f,0x62,0x69,
  0x6e,0x2f,0x73,0x68) #" 331

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Follow-up to a pair of posts on the manuscripts of Montecassino (here and there), some photos of the monastery proper.

Outside Spaces

Entrance cloister of Montecassino with the statue of the death of St. Benedict	So-called Bramante Courtyard, the statue on the left is St. Benedict and on the right is his sister St. Scholastica, with her birds
Donors Courtyard outside the main Basilica

Inside the Monastary

The shrine of St. Benedict, located on the site of his own cell inside the oldest buildings on the monastery grounds. The current decorations are from the early part of the 20th Century.
Long corridor inside the monks quarters with the cells off to both sides. This is part of the operating monastery and so is off-limits to all women.	Refectory of the monks

Inside the Monastery Basilica
Much of this was destroyed in the 1943 bombings, and has since been rebuilt to the original plans. The frescos are new, and show the styles of the 1960s more then the 1660s

Main nave	Organ and console in the choir
Carved-wood choir-stalls	Main crypt under the altar with mosaics representing the tree of the Order of St. Benedict branching out from the tomb of Benedict behind the wall.

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Some more Montecassino manuscripts, from the same morning as MC318.  These are a somewhat random smattering of texts, though mostly musical, written in Beneventan script. 

Music and related manuscripts

Flyleaf removed from the binding of a different manuscript, cataloged as Compactiones XXII

Flyleaf removed from the binding of a different manuscript, cataloged as Compactiones XXII. This one includes at the bottom, following the rubric "ali communion Ambrosiano" the communion for St. Benedict, most probably composed at Montecassino

A page of Glorias from a sacramentary, MC339

Page of text and music from a notated Missel, MC540

Non-Musical Manuscripts

Some late, Bari-type Benventan script, note the increased width of the letters and greater leading, from the Sacramentary MC339.  The purple is from a bit of corruption in the image file, not original to the manuscript.

A page of text with a large illuminated letter "O" from the same Bari sacramentary, MC339

The opening of the Gospel of John ("In principio erat verbum et verbum erat...") from the same notated Missel, MC540

This is the first of a series of posts from my recent trip to London and Italy.  Starting somewhat backwards, this is a series of pages from a manuscript at the monestary of Montecassino, the birthplace of the Benedictine Order.  This particular manuscript, catalogued as Montecassino 318 (MC318 from now on), is a compendium of musical knowledge thought to have been written by a single scribe in the second-half of the 11th Century.  It includes it in the earliest illustration of the Guidonian Hand, multiple systems of musical notation, each weirder then the last, a list of named musical neumes and many other oddities.  I have only a few pictures from the manuscript, which do not do it justice, but there's so little out there some people might have never seen anything, which would be a shame.  A nice thing about the manuscript is how clear and distinct the handwriting is and how few weird abbreviations there are, assuming, of course, you know Beneventan script.

NB: If you click any of these images, you'll get a somewhat larger one.  If you need a higher-res version for any reason, please contact me

An illustration for some sort of musical theory and a short piece in Beneventan notation, with F-lines in red.

An early form of staffless notation where the the pitch is indicated by the common alphabetical form (A-G).  The lengths of the notes are not indicated except by duplication of the note-letter.

Guidonian hand and early form of staffed notation

A selection of Beneventan (Campo Aperto) neumes and short musical phrases with names.  The names, as far as we can tell, are completely made up and sound vaguely Greek, e.g. "Crodula" and "Ampiriph"

Some sort of musical notational scheme

A bunch of snippets of music in Beneventan neumes

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VC&A (you know them well) have another in their line of jeweled, lightly complicated, ladies watches, the Poetic Complications; from the Fairy in 1997 to the Lovers' Bridge in 2010. Starting with the Retrograde mechanism from their Fairy watch, the Enchanted Ballerina adds to it a mechanism classically known as "le Bras en l'Air"(see previous) and was just announced this January. In the Fairy, the two hands rose, hours on one side, minutes on the other, and then dropped back after each "revolution", always indicating the time. In the Enchanted Ballerina, the two hands, the sides of her tutu, stay down until the button on the left is pressed, whereupon they jump up to indicate the time and transform her into a "butterfly". Or at least that's the theory, so they can use a quote from Anna Pavlova, pre-dessert, in the PR materials "J'ai rêvé que j'étais une ballerine, et que je passais toute ma vie à danser avec la légèreté d'un papillon..." (I've been dreaming that I was a ballerina, and that I was spending my whole life dancing as lightly as a butterfly...)

As usual, the movement is a Agenhor module on a JLC base, with some fantascially shaped bridges and wheels, the Agenhor signature. The case is 40.5mm in white gold the hands are champleve enamel and the dial is transluscent enamel over guilloche.

Movement
Hands at Rest	Hands Telling Time (11:05)

(source)

With Chinese New Years at hand, all of the jewelry houses are tripping over themselves to release Snake-themed pieces.  First off is Damiani (be careful, their website is a nightmare of auto-playing movies and weird custom scroll-bars), who released their "Eden" collection on February 1st, checking the boxes for both East and West.  These are not aiming for naturalism, but the distilled idea of a snake.  The bracelet below is over 2 meters long, stretched out, and set with over 900 diamonds with a total weight of 94.45 ct.

(source)

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