photo credit: Mike Babcock

Lately I’m fascinated by the Dell Streak and am thinking it would be fun to get one. But really, what is the use case? Do tablets have a place in everyday life?

The tablet computer is an interesting device because it fills that no-man’s land between the phone and the computer, and has so much potential as a conveyor of meta experience to users of the other platforms.

The problem so far is no manufacturer has provided compelling reasons why we should be buying tablets and adding them into our routines. It’s almost as if everyone is blindly following Apple’s lead regardless of whether doing so makes sense. Now we have a flood of iPad-like devices, where the original iPad is, let’s be honest, interesting but not really useful.

My prediction: There is going to be a killer app for tablets and it is going to be immediately obvious to everyone why we need to use this medium. In the meantime, developers with mobile programming skill are going to be writing their own ticket – so learn how to build apps for Windows Phone, Android, iOS, or (to a lesser extent) WebOS.

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Even password-less RSA keys provide better protection than a password because they are long encrypted strings that cannot be guessed from a dictionary. Although a brute force attack against an RSA key is still possible, it requires a much more sophisticated attacker and takes many more attempts. As encryption technologies improve, the length of keys need to increase; but even a key with no password attached is way more secure than a human-typed password.

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If you haven’t had a chance to check out Apple’s Time Machine, you need to do yourself a favour and look it up right now. Time Machine is an incredibly well-put together backup package that automatically saves snapshots of your entire hard drive. Because of the HFS filesystem’s ability to link directories as well as files, Time Machine is able to track incremental changes against your file tree so you can move forward and backwards through time in the history of your computer. A single saved file that you might have lost is now accessible to you regardless of your regular backup regime.

I run my Time Machine from a USB hard drive. A solid state drive would probably be a better choice because if it were to fail the data would still be readable, but my USB drives gives me a conveniently small backup media and extremely fast access speeds – I’m happy with this setup and haven’t lost any data yet. Because time machine copies my entire system and keeps a version of my computer through time, I feel confident that if either my computer’s hard drive or my USB drive were to fail, I would not suffer any long term data loss.

What are your backup rituals?

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So what do I have against cloud computing? Would I rather build servers, deal with co-location, and suffer massive downtimes in order to change hardware specs? Of course not.

Let’s not lose sight of the big picture: virtualized servers are still servers. From a remote perspective the management is all the same and from a hardware perspective you still need to be responsible for your data in the event of a catastrophic failure.

While I am a huge proponent of “cloud” providers like Rackspace (heck I host all of my web sites on Cloud Server instances), let’s call a spade a spade: there is nothing magical about servers in the cloud, they are just virtualized instances running on a massively powerful hardware architecture.

Why go with virtualization over a dedicated box? Virtual servers are cheap – I don’t need to incur the startup costs that I would from a dedicated server. For a small business this is a huge deal; for larger business with intense data needs the dedicated solution will always provide the most security but for anything from tiny, small to very large applications the virtualized way is the ticket. Add more servers, remove them, reconfigure: you don’t get that kind of flexibility from traditional server hosting.

Long live cloud computing; but the name has to go. Did the term come from network diagrams where the Internet was represented as a cloud? I don’t think it’s a particularly clever analogy to consider your business assets living as disembodied entities “somewhere” in the networking cloud.

We’re fighting a losing battle if we believe we’re going to get the marketers to back off the internet now. But on the tech side let’s keep calling it what it is and try not to let the marketing buzz cloud our opinion of the technologies we use.

Related posts:

1. Surviving Cloud Failures
2. Drizzle – MySQL for the Cloud
3. Small Site, Big Footprint

One very simple and effective method for improving Apache’s performance involves off-loading static content to another server. Since Apache spawns a new process (and the memory allocation that goes with that) for every request, it is pretty wasteful to serve your images, css, javascript and similar files this way.

For larger applications, we could run a second web server that makes use of a single-threaded polling process like lighttpd, or use a content delivery network to move our content physically closer to our users for even more speed.

For smaller applications and organizations, we can use nginx as a proxy to serve static content to our visitors. This can be a separate physical web server, or it can be a service running on the same server as Apache. I use the same-server proxy approach at alwaysgetbetter.com, and it has made a significant difference in my server load and memory usage.

To start, change Apache’s settings so it listens on a separate port (rather than the default port 80).

Next, set up nginx to listen on the default http port 80. We will let Nginx decide whether each request should be served directly from the hard drive, or whether it should pass through to Apache.

The config file for nginx looks like this:

server {
listen 80;
server_name mysite.com www.mysite.com;
access_log /var/log/nginx/website-access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/website-error.log;
# serve static files
location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|wav|bmp|rtf|js|mp3|avi|mov)$ {
root /var/www/html;
expires 30d;
}

# pass requests for dynamic content to site
location / {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
proxy_redirect off;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
client_max_body_size 128m;
client_body_buffer_size 256k;
proxy_connect_timeout 60;
proxy_send_timeout 60;
proxy_read_timeout 60;
proxy_buffer_size 4k;
proxy_buffers 32 256k;
proxy_busy_buffers_size 512k;
proxy_temp_file_write_size 512k;
}
}


It is also possible to serve PHP and other dynamic content using nginx, but for our purposes it makes a lot more sense to use Apache for scripting and nginx as the web-facing proxy.

Related posts:

1. Performance Tuning Apache
2. Using FastCGI with Nginx for Performance on a VM

photo credit: abulhussain

My phone has turned out to be a decent alternative; using instructions I found online I was able to re-purpose my Palm Pre as a WiFi router. It’s still not broadband but it gives me a way to check my email when my Xplornet fixed wireless (often) fails.

Although Bell Canada supports tethering with their smartphone plans, they don’t go out of their way to make it obvious how to do it. My Tether turned out to be worth the cost; even though there is a free version you can use if you want to play with the settings.

Related posts:

1. Backup Through Time

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photo credit: michelb

You have to shake your head every time someone goes off about “netbooks”, those wonderful, tiny, cute computers that don’t cost very much. When you look at them, what do you really see? How about a crappy laptop that can barely run Windows. The thing is cheap in more ways than one – but somehow marketers have been able to spin that as a good thing and make big profits off useless hardware without needing to develop anything new.

This Brave New World Seems Just Like the Old

Anything sounds better with a little bit of spin – Web 1.0 is clunky, slow, ugly. Web 2.0 is a designer’s dream, sexy, with new technology. Well, no. The technology isn’t new at all – the web is the same. The only difference is enough marketers held onto the “Web 2.0″ buzz phrase and shouted it repeatedly long enough that it became accepted as fact.

What’s So Social About Media?

There was never anything truly “new” about New Media. There’s nothing earth shattering about Social Media either. Call it a new paradigm all you want, there is nothing different between it and “old” media: the goal is to communicate our message to as many people as possible. How others perceive your brand and how you react to that feedback is not something new and alien – it’s just a lot faster now than it used to be. Your audience is your focus group. Traditional roles haven’t changed one bit – their owners have.

Related posts:

1. Cloud Computing Is Not Magical
2. Command and Control Social Media

It is said that switching tasks takes time – some users report productivity reductions of up to 15 minutes each time they have to change their focus of attention. If a programmer has to look at the documentation only once per day, their employer is looking at 1.25 hours of lost productivity every week, which may not seem like much but when extrapolated to that person’s yearly wage (averaging at $78k) the cost of the lost productivity is worth approximately $2400; much cheaper to buy that $500 monitor. For the general programmer, you can get by with less – a 17-inch LCD retails for less than $200. Sounds like a no-brainer, right?

The same logic can be applied to the purchase of an entire system. What is the productivity cost of having to wait for downloads and load times over the cost of a new system? Even if no new revenue is generated by the company directly as a result of the software or hardware purchase it can be worthwhile to invest in new equipment. Why hire someone and not provide them with the best tools possible to do their job? It’s kind of like putting a Mazda engine inside a Ford (wait a minute…)

• improved satisifaction
• reduced ‘switching’ time
• employees more knowledgable with ‘current/cutting edge’ software

There was a time in the early industrial revolution when buying equipment and machinery was prohibitively expensive, and people could be trained to keep old hardware running for many years in order to maximize that equipment’s value to the company.

Today the reverse is true – computer hardware can be acquired at a fraction of a cost of the person needed to run it – and the training involved in having someone fill the shoes of a departed worker can be crippling to the bottom line of a business. Instead of trying to make machines last as long as possible it should be the priority of any manager to make the people last as long as possible. In a world where individual jobs are replaceable and just a stepping stone to “something better”, volumes are said by the simple act of someone staying in their role for a prolonged amount of time – both about the worker and about the quality of the employer they give their time for.

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For my needs, the Lenovo W700ds Thinkpad sounds like the ideal solution. I practically drool at the thought of haivng almost 1TB storage space, 8GB ram and a Quad core processor. The really interesting feature of this laptop is the 10″ second screen that pulls out of the side. That’s right – a dual screen laptop.

There is a price to pay for all that goodness: the thing is a brick, weighing in at 11lbs. Compare that to a much larger item like a guitar, which typically weighs 8-12lbs. The design is ugly – the second screen slides out from the side of the machine and could seriously use some Apple-esque style sensibilities.

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