The artful logger

I confess to a deep fascination with the seemingly mundane topic of logging. Software crashes, shopping cart abandonment, and security breaches are among the many situations in which you'll find yourself poring over logs trying to figure out what went wrong.


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Logs can flood us with information, or they can tell us compelling stories. We can influence the outcome by artful and iterative refinement of the data we collect. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

Years ago -- it must have been more than a decade, because Win95 was then a beta product code-named Chicago -- I made a trip to Microsoft to be briefed on OS strategy. Win32 was young then, and its transplantation from NT onto the Win9x codebase was a big deal. Most of Win32 was slated to make the trip, but a few things got left behind, and the omission that most disturbed me was event logging.
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