Back in 2001 I worked at an interesting company that at the time worked on an e-Business website. They have since reinvented themselves selling excellent tools like Clover. The company was a great place to work as many great developers worked there (sorry BPH, you have no blog:-).

The environment at Cortex was such that there was always time to develop things of interest. At the time I was using Log4J and I wanted a graphical log viewer. Not having done much Swing programming I decided to write one. Thus the first version of the Log4J viewer Chainsaw was born. It was simple, it worked and it was accepted into the Log4J code base.

I remember we came up with the name Chainsaw by kicking around names at a typical Tea-pot party (Cortesians will get the joke). The name was decided on as "Chainsaw cuts your log down to size". I was very proud of the name (and the interactive filtering).

Since Chainsaw served its purpose (for me) and I also had another open source project on the go, I pretty much never worked on it again. I was glad to see that others in the Log4J community picked up the ball and developed Chainsaw v2. The result of that effort is nothing short of staggering. I encourage you to give version 2 a try via the Java Web Start link.

Many thanks to the guys for mentioning me in the contributors section. I think all that is left of my contribution is the name. :-)