Apple has taken a beating from the “in crowd” lately. In the mind of these technophiles, they’ve gone from hip to evil in just a few years. While Apple is lambasted for turning the iPhone “walled garden” into a jail, Google is applauded as the new bastion of openness and geek friendliness. This criticism focuses on the iPhone, especially with regard to the despised American mobile carrier, AT&T. But Apple is a long way from the evil empire it’s accused of being, and is showing signs that it will soon retake its mojo from the carriers.
Everything
Feed Your Drobo: 1 TB WD Green SATA Drive, $55.49
It seems like my Drobo is always hungry. I’ve got all four slots stuffed with 1.5 TB drives right now, and the Western Digital Caviar Green is one of my favorites. It’s quiet and draws just a little power, yet is fairly quick thanks to 64 MB of cache. Now Amazon has it for $55.49, shipped!
How To Force Apache To Redirect To Canonical Hostnames, or ServerAlias Is Not Your Friend
Today I came up against a frustrating realization: Apache doesn’t have a satisfying way to redirect multiple domains to canonical hostnames! In other words, it’s fairly easy to redirect one domain’s content from “www.example.com” to just plain “example.com” or to make both hostnames work, but there’s no one-stop solution to do this with a dozen domains. I’ve hit on a method that correctly redirects alternate hostnames and will save you aggravation in the long run.
A High-Performance, Low-Memory Apache/PHP Virtual Private Server
I’ve previously written about my Multi-Server Web Hosting Environment and the how I Tuned Lighttpd For Linux to run as well as possible. But I’ve been having weird issues with that setup lately and was forced to rebuild the server entirely. While I was at it, I decided to give Apache another try, since the lighttpd hackery I needed to perform to get things like WP-SuperCache running were starting to get me down. The configuration documented here uses Ubuntu Lucid (10.04), Apache 2.2, FCGI, and PHP-CGI tuned for a 512 MB virtual private server (VPS) running on Rackspace Slicehost.
Walled Gardens, Gilded Cages, and Right to Repair
Things are getting awfully complicated, aren’t they? The custom parallel CPUs, proprietary communications networks, and encrypted data ports require extensive training, special tools, and a computerized reference library to comprehend, much less debug. And the manufacturers, who derive much of their money and differentiation from warranties and authorized repair centers, are loathe to see independent shops get a piece of the action.
