Not meaning to sound like I am trivialising the studies that I am doing (too much), but
I’ve just had a look ahead into this unit, and there’s a section on web traffic analysis.
Interesting, I thought, perhaps I can learn something…

I was wrong.

I had a better look, and downloaded their sample web log file, installed the application
they give us, then ran it through and had a quick look at the output. Considering we are
supposed to be learning useful things, why are we analysing an IIS log file? Apache controls
a larger proportion of the web server market, and it would be a better example in my
opinion. Add to that the fact that we are analysing a log file which appears to be for a
site bringing in all of 2 hits per day! This is ridiculous, talk about activity for
activity’s sake! At work we are figuring out problems like how to get 16 webservers to
write to the same log file without corrupting it because they are all hitting it so fast,
and at Uni, I’m learning all these ‘important’ things like how to analyse a technically
inferior web server’s mocked up log file!

And people wonder why I don’t have the highest regard for most University study…