It used to be really simple to get a VPN for Mac. You'd just go and sign up at Witopia.net and you'd get an inexpensive and reliable VPN with nodes all over the world. Witopia would work with the built-in networking inside your Mac, specifically PPTP protocol.
The problem was Bill Bullock was obsessive about our security/anonymity. So the customer portal didn't really work or hardly existed. Support was over email and a bit hope for the best. Your email address had a single subscription.
Worse yet, when you would go to renew your subscription, you had to create a new account and login.
From the beginning there were two services: Personal, which always included PPTP and now includes ipsec and L2TP and Pro which was twice the price and included OpenVPN. Both are secure but Personal is more easily blocked by governments or corporations as they can usually detect the protocol.
Witopia SSL Service: Tunnelblick then Viscosity
Witopia's upgraded SSL service was always a bit of a crapshoot. For years you had to fight Tunnelblick (one of the nastiest pieces of open source software out there, which requires advanced networking knowledge modifying a text file to get anything done: it defaults to not working and makes you move text files all over your computer, authorizing them each time you do). Then came Viscosity which worked a whole lot better. With your Witopia VPN you got a free preconfigured Viscosity client.
Then something went wrong with Viscosity. When you update Viscosity to keep up with Mac OS X, it's another crapshoot if your settings will carry over to the next version.
So as someone who tried to buy three licenses last year (Personal x 2, Pro x 1) for my company and ran in circles for weeks with absolutely silly suggestions from Witopia on how to fix my configuration, I can tell you the dream was over, the shine off of the hood. With the obliging help of Witopia's owner Bill Bullock finally we managed to get a single one of the personal accounts up and limping. Our ideas of using VPN regularly in the various departments at Foliovision went down the tubes.
We cancelled the other two and got on with our lives. OpenVPN on a small VPS turned out to be an even bigger catastrophe. After a whole day of programmer time settting it up, we were able to eke out 2 KB/sec performance. When Witopia is working, you are looking at anything between 1 MB/sec and 8 MB/sec bandwidth up and down. It's not the 100 MB/sec down and the 10 MB/sec up we have on our connection but it's not 2 KB/sec.
So with clients to serve and lives to live, we more or less didn't use VPN except in emergency.
For reasons of my own, I was using VPN via Witopia a fair amount in the last week. All was well until my VPN account wouldn't connect today.
Witopia happily enough has live chat support now. I lost hours with them today so you don't have to.
Why did my Witopia VPN die?
Witopia created a customer portal and consolidated everyone's account history and orders.
When they consolidated the orders some accounts clearly died. Including one of mine as it was a courtesy account offered for last year's nightmare. Tip: don't kill your courtesy accounts early.
Witopia's ability to consolidate our orders years later begs the question how private were our accounts in the first place if Witopia could consolidate them after the fact.
Locked out of the Witopia customer portal
The new portal sounded great. One problem: it was impossible for me to log in with my old username and password. No problem.
I'll reset my password. No luck: No such username.
Joe suggested I reregister. No problem. Wait yes there is, Username already exists.
Joe suggested I create another account using another email and then consolidate them. That sounds like a lot of work and lots of chances for misunderstandings and broken accounts. No, I want access to my existing account.
Joe needs his supervisor.
Tara comes online (last year Tara was the queen of alternative protocols who led me around an enormous emerald coloured garden of irregularly working VPN). Tara remembers me. A bit awkward. Like an affair gone wrong. Happily she doesn't hold a grudge and we get to work.
Fortunately, Tara is able to get a link which allows you to login to your account and reset your password. Remember Witopia is not access to your data. Witopia is only access to your VPN accounts, so security is important but not paramount. If someone sneaks into your Witopia account, the most they can do is cancel your VPN without asking or change your passwords on you or use your VPN surreptitiously for their own purposes (actually that could get you in trouble if they did illegal things while using your account: but the same applies to your home broadband connection).
Inside the new Witopia Customer Portal
So now I'm in the portal. There are all of my orders for the last three years. Hurray.
On the two active orders, there's 412 days left on one and 46 days on the other. The other is also listed as cancelled, with no options for checking data usage, resetting password or assigning the VPN to someone else.
Looks like portal consolidation this week killed off the courtesy account. Sloppy programming. Thanks sloppy Witopia programmers, you've just stolen two hours plus of my life getting all this working again.
Tara asks me to install Witopia software and use that to access my VPN. No dice. With this track record on working software, there's no way I'm letting Witopia's direct installer get at my network settings. I have work to do this week.
Remember Tara loves the alternative protocols. So I set up all of the different OS X VPN protocols following her instructions.
Alas no protocol, PPTP, ipSEC, l2tp will work.
Testing the main Witopia account
I give Tara the password for my main account (not the courtesy one) to test herself. Tara disappears for about seven minutes. When she comes back she announces that the account works just fine and it surely must be a local problem on my end.
I try to reconnect with a couple of the protocols I'd previously set up and tested unsuccessfully. Bingo, I'm on.
"See," admonishes Tara, "it was a local problem after all."
Yes, Tara, but I haven't changed anything in my settings. All that happened was you went and worked on my account with a tech.
Whatever Tara and the tech did while she was away did manage to reset my Witopia account and get it working.
Witopia Speeds
The second test was on an account with send all connections over VPN so I lost my connection to Tara.
Taking the occasion to test while logging on an on, I ran a battery of tests using SpeedTest.net which is nice enough to give both ping and transfer speeds.
Here's what I found:
ipsec New York
ping 111 ms
download 1.2 Mbps
upload 1.1 Mbps
l2tp New York with built-in Mac client
ping 109 ms
download 2.66 Mbps
upload 7.23 Mbps
PPTP New York
ping 110ms
download 9.7 Mbps
upload 7.36 Mbps
Witopia VPN Software
I was feeling optimistic after seeing all of these protocols work so I decided to give Witopia's custom built software a chance. The download is quick and the installer opens up automatically.
Witopia's software gives a nice blue icon like airport in the menu bar. It takes up less space than Apple's built-in VPN. I tried the built-in L2TP and got some surprising results.
L2TP New York with Witopia client
ping 114 ms
download 8.43 Mbps
upload 6.86 Mbps
I'm still using this connection.
Here's what the interface of the Witopia VPN client looks like:
WiTopia application interface extras
Witopia application interface
Using either built-in or Witopia client software is fine. If I had to do it again, I'd probably just stick with OS X's built in protocols. I'd use PPTP as it tests out very fast. If you want to use a lot of locations, then Witopia's VPN software might be for you as you won't have to build all the locations by hand.
Round two: trying to get OpenVPN up and running with alternative Witopia account
When I got back to my chat, Tara had gone home. A gentleman named Shirin had taken her place. We spent a lot of time trying to resurrect the dead account.
More or less hopeless.
The main OpenVPN connection is very fussy. It wouldn't work with either the Witopia VPN client nor with Viscosity.
Once installed, to reinstall it you need to remove several .kext via terminal. Viscosity which did work at one point, won't anymore. The updater won't update Viscosity and you have to manually find and reinstall all the certificates.
What finally worked was uninstalling launch2netpremium and then doing a hand search for all of its files (a nasty respawn filled networking logs to the point that it was impossible to tell what was happening with Witopia). Next step was to install and reinstall the Witopia client with reboots.
The whole affair required three reboots to work and deleting kexts. You don't want to do this. Viscosity still won't work but for now with the Witopia client I can get on OpenVPN SSL internet.
I spent over three work hours painfully troubleshooting this by hand. Effectively Witopia stole $500 from my company while I did this unpaid work. All I got out of it was this article. Don't you be so foolish.
To be honest, I would not recommend a Witopia Pro account. The amount of time you will spend fighting with software and with cryptic errors just will not justify the small increase in speed and security which OpenVPN brings.
Not only that but a WiTopia Personal VPN account is just $40 (renewal) or $50 new account, while a Pro VPN account is $70/year and will cause you to lose hours with unnecessary tech support.
If you are in China or Iran or some place where you really need OpenVPN, go ahead and spring for it. But be prepared to spend a lot of time troubleshooting.
Resources
Here's a nice historic comparison of Witopia and HotSpotVPN with interviews with both company owners, Bill Bullock and Glynn Taylor.
Answer number one: you are travelling and need to be sure your web access is not being logged (at least only by your VPN provider).
Answer number two: you need access to another server from a fixed and known IP. It's possible with a VPN.
Answer number three: you want to watch Hulu or listen to Mog or Spotify while outside the United States. If you don't use Facebook, your one choice is Mog.
Answer number four: you need to sign up for some papers or service from outside your home country. I wasn't able to complete a birth certificate request from Europe until I came in via VPN and made the order via VPN.
A friend and colleague is about to implement a laptop program for 1700 students over in the amazing technology section in ISB (International School of Bangkok). We are talking about true one to one where each student gets a laptop to take home.
ISB haven't decided whether to put Microsoft or Apple onto their new laptops (actually with Apple you have to buy Apple laptops).
For a smaller program without dedicated IT help, I'd say Apple would be the better choice. But at 1700 students you have the scale to make other choices.
In terms of OS, I wouldn’t choose either Apple or Microsoft. I’d look to the future and give the children Linux laptops. Linux Mint Debian Edition is a very nice distribution which can be based on the very reliable and spritely Debian core (rather than the top heavy and sometimes slow to update Ubuntu).
Of course there are driver issues in Linux, but as you have control of the hardware, you can choose recommended hardware with 100% compatibility and effectively achieve the OS/hardware integration which Apple does at a tiny fraction of the price.
I’m a 15 year Apple user with four Apple computers now (have to get rid of a couple actually). We use all three OS at work but will be moving to Linux over the next years.
Why drop Apple?
Apple is going back to walled garden:
software: only apps from their store
data: iCloud for all your data
hardware: all your devices and all your peripherals have to come from Apple (new proprietary data transfer and monitor connections)
This is an Orwellian world which I wouldn’t want to push children into.
The arguments against Microsoft (backdoors, security issues, shovelware on delivery, performance deterioration over time) have been covered many times.
Let the kids learn how to use real computers where there is a chance to look under the hoods and tinker. It will help them to develop clearer and deeper thinking about IT and technology.
And it will save a boat load of money over 1700 laptops. I'd also try to pick laptops for which I could replacement parts at reasonable prices. I'm not sure what vendor offers that. I know Apple parts are very expensive.
One could still make an argument for hardware quality in favor of Apple in buying the least expensive Apple laptops (say MacBook Air 11" with max memory) and putting Linux on them. Where that gets difficult is you do need a distribution which handles power management on those specific laptops well.
Those MacBook Airs are very light (I have one) and easy to carry around. The maximum memory at 4GB is a limitation but one that young students could probably live with, just as students are forced to live in shared dormitories and only get apartments later in life.
The equivalent of a MacBook Air 11" was only made by Sony a few years ago and cost upwards of $2300. Current US educational pricing on a Macbook Air 11.6" with 1.6 GHz processor, 4 GB memory and a 128 GB flash drive with Apple care is $1332 (bare bones 2 GB/64 GB is at $949 but it's seriously underpowered and nothing is replaceable). Not sure about Thai pricing on Apple computers. The advantage here is that the maintenance for three years would be all Apple's problem.
No, but even the Air doesn't scale out for educational use. The cost for 1700 machines would be $2,260,000.
Steve Jobs holding a MacBook Air: Laptops for Students should be small and light
durable and attractive. They also should not cost $1300+ with reasonable
memory and a multiyear warranty. Photo by MacMessiah.
Does anyone have any suggestions for similarly durable and attractive and lightweight mid-range hardware which would suit Debian Linux (with 1700 laptops, you could even afford to commission some power management rewrites from core Debian team)?
Gruber was complaining about the brilliant Samsung Galaxy S II ad making the rounds. Here is the long version (1m25s) which you might otherwise miss. There's lots of additional clever repartee not in the airplay version: "I guess this is what adultery feels like," says one of the Apple fans in the queue with the Samsung Galaxy in his hands.
long form version of the brilliant Samsung ad
I'm one of the people who moved from iPhone to Android and is really happy about it. Here's why. I owned an iPhone 3GS. After the initial thrill of ownership wore off, I became very tired of:
being forced to update to the latest version of iTunes every week
having my mobile phone tied to my credit card and personal account at Apple, sending all the info in my mobile phone to Apple anytime Apple chooses
fighting with a virtual keyboard which fills most of the screen when you are using it
really slow network switching (I live on the border between Slovakia and Austria and need to switch networks often), usually requiring turning the iPhone on and off
having to hack the iPhone to be able to share the internet connection from the iPhone even to a Mac: and then to be worried that any given update could kill my tethering set up
looking at really lousy photographs, worse than my two year old Nokias
What is Textile? In the beginning there was Textpattern, Dean Allen's lightweight CMS primarily for weblogs. Textpattern was a direct competitor to Moveable Type, B2 (later WordPress) and Joomla! Textpattern lost the CMS wars for two reasons: SEO unfriendly URLs (required numbered ID's) and Dean Allen's collapse from overwork in 2006 (the story is gone from textism.com and Textpattern is back but still with numbers in the URLs). The WordPress story you all know.
Where is Textile now? Most importantly Textile is the markup language for 37 Signals Basecamp messages and Writeboards and Backpackit.
There's nothing nicer than Textile for making a quick list with asterisks:
* item one
* item two
* item three
becomes
item one
item two
item three
in no time.
Blockquotes are easy to do too: bq. gets you there.
h1. h2. h3. h4. will get you headers of various sizes.
# will get you numbered lists instead of bulleted lists.
I often have to introduce our team to Textile formatting and our clients. That's the essential above. Rather than create too much documentation when there's lots of other great Textile documentation out there. I'll link to the rest.
Having trouble creating new Deals quickly and easily in Highrise. I'd like to be able to create new Deals directly from the dashboard the same way you can with Cases.
missing create new deal highrise
37 Signals minimalist philosophy in terms of software is something I really get and really appreciate.
37signals got it so right with allowing us to create a new case from the Highrise dashboard when filing an item.
On the other hand, I don't understand how 37signals can cripple the dashboard File option for Deals by not allowing us to create a new Deal and file the item directly.
Such an easy fix and we've been waiting years.
Unfortunately, this fix will be more difficult to add to our GTD product for Basecamp AscentList than search ordered by date and some of the other nice tweaks coming. AscentList will be free until at least May for those who sign up now, so if you are missing some advanced task and project management capabilities in Basecamp, give AscentList a try. Early adopters will get a permanent discount.
As regular readers know we are heavy users of Basecamp. This month is the first time in a while I'm not happy about our subscription as we've had to move up to the Elite Suite at $249 month as we've run out of Basecamp projects at 100 (we've been rotating them for awhile but five more projects came in and there just isn't space). For those who are counting, that's $3000/year for a software subscription.
Basecamp uses Textile as the main editor (well 37signals have added some kind of WYSIWYG editor lately but for those of us writing messages, comments and writeboards for the last seven years, Textile is in our blood).
So what I want to be able to do is write all my posts and drafts in Textile and then convert them to html for publication (saving the original in Textile for further editing).
For a while I used iTextile a wrapper around a Python script. It worked pretty well but was kind of ugly and not customizable. I gave up on iTextile due to ergonomics. When I went to fire it up again yesterday, it turns out iTextile is PPC only and requires Rosetta. On my most recent machines, I've managed to get rid of Rosetta completely so I was warned about installing Rosetta. I'd prefer not to have the emulator overhead hanging around waiting to steal memory and cycles, so I said no.
There is an interesting application called MarkMyWords from xelaton.com in Germany. MarkMyWords allows you to write in the mark up language of your choice (important ones include Markdown, Textile, BBcode and Wiki syntax) and get html out on the other end.
Preview is live which is very cool.
MarkMyWords does what it promises very well and even includes full screen and distraction free modes. If you are looking for a new text editor, MarkMyWords has a lot to recommend it.
MarkMyWords edit window
MarkMyWords Downsides:
MarkMyWords is another application to install and maintain and learn across all your computers
MarkMyWords requires a change in workflow (I write mainly in BBEdit and other people have their own text editor prefernces)
The icon is fussy and ugly.
MarkMyWords icon
Textile Editing on BBEdit
At this point, I was thinking what I really need is to get Textile into BBEdit. I don't know why the BareBones guys have been so lazy about adding a Textile module themselves. Apparently there's been Markdown syntax for a long time.
I found a reasonably good article about how to add Textile to BBEdit but the explanations aren't very clear and one of the download links is broken and the other doesn't give the right filename when unpacked. [Update: dpkendal's original version was broken - our own Martin Vicenik has fixed it for you and uploaded it.]
So for non-programmers, here's how to get Textile editing working on BBEdit:
unpack the very long file gist1348479-0d1929ba5ff2b3e2b4293dd63254604b72d62b58.tar
you will get a folder with a file with this name in it: "Textile.sh"
Note:If the github ever disappears, here's a local copy. We found that this script has some bugs in it's current version (the constants are not properly added). Before this gets submited to Github.com download the fixed version here: Textile.sh.zip
Our version also won't convert single and double quotes to HTML entities. This should be an option in the original version, hopefully our changes get into Github.com soon.
move this file to /Users/~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Unix Support/Unix Filters/
go ahead and write some Textile
open up the Unix Filters palette: Windows -> Palettes -> Unix Filters
you should see Textile.sh at the bottom
when you are ready to convert your Textile to html, just doubleclick the Textile.sh item. You can create a hot key as well (very useful)
as it's BBEdit you can see your html and get a preview of it and then just use undo (command-Z) to get back to the Textile version for further editing
when you save your file, make sure you save the textile version
for bonus points before posting into WordPress or even Basecamp run the html optimize filter on the result to get rid of all line breaks: Markup -> Utilities -> Optimize
BBEdit unix filters palette
Bingo, you now have full Textile writing inside of BBEdit at zero cost. Apparently this filter will work for other text editors which accept php filters (TextMate among others) but I can't provide step by step instructions as BBEdit 8.7.2 is my weapon of choice.
I may still buy MarkMyWords as I have something of a fetish for text and html editors (own at least ten of them) and earn my living writing and coding. $25 for another work tool is no big deal. But I wouldn't encourage it's adoption across our company as that would be $200 for what most people wouldn't use nearly enough. Our programmers will be much happier with a working php script. On the other hand, Textile.sh doesn't require me to change my workflow at all.
This article full of ordered and unordered lists was written in BBEdit and Textile.sh with no issues.
Marked does not get a review here as Marked is AppStore only. I will not sign into or buy anything from the AppStore or even let it run on my computers (the AppStore is effectively a back door).
MySQL uses Latin1 character set as default. This is something many web developers are concerned about and for good reason. Using latin1 excludes 98% of the world's languages (even a single word) from appearing correctly inside your website.
I agree that for certain unilingual North American sites special cases latin1 is good enough. Otherwise in our ever more international world with visitors from dozens of countries, you really should make all your sites utf8. Latin1 just can not support new websites.
On top of that you can avoid a lot of PHP errors by using correct utf-8 encoding. We've found that even WordPress sites which are principally already UTF-8 have the odd Latin1 table sneaking into them.
So how can you find all latin1 database tables without combing through dozens of sites one by one? Thankfully MySQL keeps this data in one place and you can find them with one database query: SELECT `TABLE_SCHEMA`, `TABLE_NAME` FROM `information_schema`.`TABLES` WHERE `TABLE_COLLATION` LIKE '%latin1%';
WARNING: Be extremely careful on what you convert. As I said, in special cases latin1 is enough and some tables may be designed for that. For instance, don't change anything in `information_schema` database. This is a main MySQL database with important data. So think before you make any changes.
Moving a site can certainly be a hassle. With tools like cPanel's built in migration tools, this process gets more faster, as it will pack and unpack the files, create all the databases for you and even move the mailboxes, preserving their passwords and content.
However - don't not forget to check the site and email functionality afterwards. We will take about the emails and IMAP in here. Specially about IMAP not storing Sent Messages in Apple Mail after the site has been moved.
Testing IMAP Sent Messages Folder in Apple Mail
Make sure you are sending the mail through the right SMTP server (the same one as IMAP)
Send a some email.
It should appear in Sent folder.
Apple Mail sent Messages
It should appear in the "Sent Messages" or "Sent" folder on webmail.
Webmail Horde Sent Messages
Fixing issues with IMAP Sent folder
First thing to check is the mailbox preference this enabled storing of sent messages (Store sent messages on the server). This is on by default.
Apple Mail Account Mailbox Behaviors
So you probably already have this checked. But what happens when you
close the settings window
open up Apple Mail's Activity Window
send a test mail?
You probably won't notice any errors in the Activity Window, but when you open the settings window again, it might have "Store sent messages on the server" unchecked.
When troubleshooting these issues we found that it's caused by the ~/Library/Mail/IMAP-user@example.com@mail.example.comdirectory.
If you moved from one server to another and mail.example.com has changed to mail.your-server.com, that's just another place where the things could go wrong, as it's clearly still showing the old mail server name in the directory name.
Since you are using email, we recommend that you:
Login to webmail and check if all the received and sent messages are there
Backup your ~/Library/Mail/IMAP-user@example.com@mail.example.com directory
Basecamp's mobile platform subscribes everyone to messages, making it nearly useless. With up to 20 people on a single project, spanning design, programming, SEO and content, notifying everyone is a nightmare. That's an average of 2 minutes per person digesting notifications which are not relevant to him or her across 18 people who don't need the information.
Basecamp mobile message notifications:
there is no way to specify recipients
I.e. every time a client posts a message from a smart phone Foliovision loses over half an hour of work time. Way to pick our pockets and/or steal our day, 37 Signals.
As a one time owner of both an OCZ Vertex 2 (34mm NAND) and OWC Mercury Exreme SSD (Other World Computing ripped us off on the return btw, I'd avoid OWC as vigorously as OCZ, it's the same crappy Sandforce 2 technology on the inside and poor excuses on the outside) and a current owner of a Kingston V+ SSD and the buyer of tens of gigabytes of memory every year, I am really interested in real failure rates of this equipment.
Equipment failure rate is a real problem in a company dependent on computers/IT. Not only do you lose money, you lose a lot of time returning/replacing parts and rebuilding systems. A company who makes it hard to return faulty equipment gets banned right away.
SMC will never see another purchase from Foliovision.
Useless obfuscating Indian tech support who seek only to disqualify returns of networking products which were sold known as broken.
OWC will never see another purchase from Foliovision.
Poor products, false marketing claims, nearly impossible return conditions, wasting hours of customer time by forcing repeat calls to eventually get even partial refund. Thanks Dan for being a particularly time-waster along with your supervisor Janice.
Seagate will never see another purchase from Foliovision.
How many drive failures can one stand?
OCZ will never see another purchase from Foliovision.
Vertex 2 and Agility 2 failure rates. Hours and hours wasted trying to recover from serial failure before giving up and returning. Thank you to our dealer for swapping for Kingston V+.
Icy Dock will never see another purchase from Foliovision.
Thanks for destroying all my backup drives, guys.
Fortran will likely never see another purchase from Foliovision (we bought a bunch of their Blue Zen silent power supplies: three have burn out in the last year).
Our IT blacklist is not longer than that. If you value your money and/or peace of mind, I advise avoiding any of the brands above.
Here are some companies whom we have found reliable:
HP monitors. Especially the IPS series like the HP LP3065 and LP2465.
Dell monitors.
IBM Thinkpads.
Kingston memory and almost anything Kingston.
Asus motherboards and graphic cards.
Nvidia graphics technology.
Zalman quiet fan technology.
Apple Macbooks and MBP and MacMinis.
Western Digital hard drives, internal and external.
Kensington high end pointing devices (Expert Mouse) with bad experiences on low end.
These items aren't directly IT but are usually around the office so they make the list.
NAD Amplifiers: great sound and functional design.
Black Diamond backpacks (less satisfied with LowePro which tend to fall apart quickly under wear).
Manfrotto tripods.
Pentax SMC lenses (the old metal ones).
Crumpler computer bags.
What's very funny is when you find out your hunches and personal experiences are borne out by the statistics.
There's a great website in France called Hardware.fr which does a yearly round up of what is working and what is failing. They cover motherboards, power supplies, RAM memory, graphic cards, hard drives and SSD.
Surprise, surprise.
Avoid both OCZ memory and SSD's. I'd avoid OCZ anything after seeing the failure rates for 2010. Here's memory for 2010 (followed by 2010):
Kingston 0,4% (contre 0,3%)
Crucial 0,7% (contre 0,9%)
Corsair 1,6% (contre 1,4%)
G.Skill 2,0% (contre 2,7%)
OCZ 7,1% (contre 6,8%)
Here's SSD failure rates for 2010:
Intel 0,3% (contre 0,6%)
Kingston 1,2% (contre 2,4%)
Crucial 1,9% (contre 2,2%)
Corsair 2,7% (contre 2,2%)
OCZ 3,5% (contre 2,9%)
Notice that a good company like Kingston tries to recover quickly from a bad year (and picks better OEM suppliers going forward). Here's the early returns on SSD for 2011. OCZ is bad and getting worse with the Sandforce 2 controller:
6,7% : OCZ Agility 2 120 GB
3,7% : OCZ Agility 2 60 GB
3,6% : OCZ Agility 2 40 GB
3,5% : OCZ Agility 2 90 GB
3,5% : OCZ Vertex 2 240 GB
I think those numbers are still undercounted by those who are actually using the drives (i.e. multiple returns are counted just as a single warranty incident). Asus also rates well at Hardware.fr in the motherboard and graphic card categories.
Read those numbers carefully before going out to make a purchase. You can bring your downtime down to a quarter or less than what it would be if you bought the cheapest/whatever happened to be convenient items. In IT brand is important.
If you don't like downtime and hassle, avoid OWC and OCZ and Seagate at all costs. Storage is an area where failure is particularly taxing of time and energy.
We don't allow Google Chrome to be used at Foliovision.
There's a couple of reason.
Chrome as a browser sends a lot of information back to Google.
Even worse you need to install and leave installed the Google Pack Updater, which is constantly monitoring your computer and sending encrypted date back to Google.
As spyware, Google Pack Application updates is almost unprecedented.
On the other hand, we do allow the use of Chromium and quite like it as an alternative to Safari or Firefox.
The problem is home page of Chromium only offers links to the instructions for building Chromium from scratch. Not fun. Very time consuming, restricted mainly to programmers.
chromium source code link on home page no binaries
There is a nightly build, though, Dorothy. Google keeps moving it around. It used to be here:
We've been running into reliability issues on our main web hosting provider lately. They seem to have square thumbs and have had major data centre power issues over the last couple of months. Last time they touched our server it was to put in an extra backup drive. Managed to knock us offline for hours, despite our paying an extra $100/month for off site storage. The offsite storage totally inexplicably has the same limit for upload speed as we do from our own offices. I would have thought that our dedicated server host would have the foresight to have a fat pipe open to their offsite backup in order to be able to put clients back online faster.
I was happy that we'd already put in an automated backup routine to our own office. We have the bandwidth available for dailies and use it.
coding horror backup horror
Unlike our hosting provider, who is attempting to squirrel out of their SLA agreements, we gave 100% refunds for hosting in January as when Foliovision promises reliable service, we provide it.
Imagine my shock when exploring further backup options for servers, I learned that Jeff Atwood, author of Coding Horror and founder of Stackoverflow lost his entire Coding Horror archivesone year ago:
SendLoop is an email marketing software and this article shows you how to setup your domain properly to be able to send email from it.
First login into SendLoop and open up Settings -> Email Authentication. After you add a domain, it will be verified for the correct SPF and DKIM entries. Unless you already entered these information into your DNS zone file, this test will fail. Click the domain name to see Authentication Instructions:
SendLoop Email Authentication Settings
Now we need to add that into our DNS zone file. Login into your site's Cpanel like this:
example.com/example
Go into Mail -> Email Authentication
Cpanel Email Authentication
You should be seeing this in the DomainKeys section if you how no DKIM set up:
Cpanel DomainKeys Disabled
Enabling this option will generate the default DKIM for your domain. When you do that, you can continue with the next step.
If you, however, see this message:
"WARNING: DomainKeys cannot be used because this server is not a DNS server for example.com [?]"
"WARNING: domainkeys cannot be used because this server is not a dns server" message
Then you already have some DKIM assigned, but the default key is missing and Cpanel is not liking that. This is what you need to do:
Store and remove your DKIM keys in WHM -> Edit DNS Zone (read bellow for guide!)
Revisit Settings -> Email Authentication - you should see the same message as on "Cpanel DomainKeys Disabled" screenshot.
Activate DKIM
Put back your custom DKIM keys
Go to Edit DNS Zone and pick the one which needs to be updated and click Edit:
WHM Edit DNS Zone
Scroll down to see the whole DNS zone, we are interested mainly in the TXT records. There might be already some entries:
WHM Edit DNS Zone TXT entries
The first record we are seeing it the default DKIM for this domain. It has a selector "default - notice that the selector (key) is in the first column field. Each domain can have multiple DKIM records, each bound to some selector.
The second record is SPF. It already contains some information which basically says that email sent from example.com might originate from the A record IP address (example.com itself) and also from other domain with name example-smtp-server.com. These mail servers will pass the SPF check. ?all means that the anything else will be treated as "Neutral". Once your records are setup properly, you might want to change it to ~all which is "SoftFail". More information in SPF Record Syntax article on openspf.org.
Now to do the changes, we will have to edit the SPF record and add another DKIM record, which will use the selector provided by SendLoop. We add the include statement from SendLoop settings into the SPF and create a new TXT entry for DKIM.
Notice that we use only ml._domainkey for the first field - .example.com will be appended automatically.
WHM Edit DNS Zone TXT entries
We keep the TTLs at 1800 (second column, these values are in seconds - 30 minutes) while we are tweaking these values. Once the values are verified in SendLoop, we can edit the DNS zone again and rise the TTLs up to 14400 (4 hours).
Do you really have to pay for a basic functionality like keeping backups of your WordPress site? Here's our recommended solution for all of you who are concerned about not loosing your WordPress blog.
Database contains all the WordPress posts, pages, comments and settings. So having a safe copy of it on your computer in case your host crashes and your whole site is destroyed is the first and most important step to a fully backed up site.
Depending on how big your blog is, it might actually be all what you need in terms of automated backups, as you might be comfortable doing the files backup manually via FTP.
You can just download your whole public_html directory, but grabbing just images directory (/images or /wp-content/uploads) and your template from /wp-content/themes/ will be enough for the regular backups (make sure you backup your whole site when you do important upgrades).
WP-DB-Backup is a simple and effective plugin which takes care of the database backups only, so you have to backup the files manually as described in the above box.
After you install and activate this plugin, go to Tools -> Backup to see the settings. You can either download the backup right away or schedule automated backups which will be sent to your email address.
WP DB Backup
Just make sure you include all the extra nonstandard database tables you need to keep in the backup. If you see wp_redirection_logs (but make sure you include all the other wp_redirection tables!) or kfm_new_ tables, you can exclude them.
WP DB Backup Schedule
The plugin works well even with bigger databases, but if the backup if too big it might not be sent by email, in that case it remains in wp-content/backup-... directory. I suggest that you install the plugin, do a test backup and you will see if your database will fit into the email, otherwise it will be stored in that directory. Then you can configure some automated FTP client to grab the backup from the wp-content/backup-... directory every week.
20MB database containing over 10,000 comments and over 1,000 posts should get compressed to around 4MB and be emailed correctly.
If your database is 300MB, it can't be typically sent to your email, as it packs to 60MB. You have to download it via FTP.
The advantage of BackupBuddy is, that it allows you to automatically upload these backups to your backup FTP, so the problem with emails is solved. However, that works only if you have some additional hosting account - so first you have to pay for BackupBuddy and then pay monthly for the hosting account you will use for backups. And you backup host should be different from the one which runs your site - so it will survive if your whole host crashes.
BackupBuddy also handles file backups, but it can't backup directories outside of the WordPress folder. But it has certain limitations. We like to keep our images outside of it, so the plugin just doesn't work for us. BackupBuddy authors want to add this feature, but they are not sure when at this point.
BackupBuddy might be a good investment in case your site is bigger.
On the other hand - we believe that if your site is big, then you are probably able to run you own Cpanel backups or your high quality host performs backups for you and you don't have to rely on any of the WordPress plugins (all PHP scripts have certain limitations on how much data they can handle, so they are not reliable as much as host backups - see php memory limit, php execution time).
If you don't know about this, here's a great Google tip. Change your search settings to allow 100 search results. It's much easier to go through a lot of search results when they are on a single page than to go through ten at a time. Google has some very good compression so loading 100 results doesn't take much more time than loading 10.
One of our principal areas of business at Foliovision is SEO. So when I upgraded to Apple's Snow Leopard on my main work computer (I only upgraded since Leopard 10.5 won't run on a Macbook Air 11": still prefer Leopard and its quiet reliability), I was horrified to see that I could only get 10 search results from Google in both Safari and Omniweb.
So I thought the problem was with Safari 5 or webkit as Snow Leopard forces an upgrade to Safari 5. I tried the latest version of OmniWeb. Same issue. Impossible to get 100 results. Now I was really unhappy. My work life was about to become miserable rooting through Google search results ten at a time.
I had just installed Chromium* to see how it compares in memory usage with a lot of tabs open as I have just dropped from 8 GB of RAM to 4 GB of RAM and was feeling the pinch. Safari 5 uses a lot of memory with 40 tabs open - what is disappointing is that when you close all the tabs, Safari hangs onto a lot of the memory. Chrome creates a separate mini-application for each tab using even more memory than Safari but when you close a tab it gives back all of its meemory.
So I decided to run the Google results test on Chromium. No problem to get 100 results with Google Chromium.
Google Instant 100 search results in Chromium
Considerably more research alerted me to a solution: turn off Google instant in Google's settings and Safari would yield 100 results again.
Strangely I could get 100 results with Google instant on Google's Chromium, the open source version of Google Chrome. So the issue is not with compatibility between 100 results and instant (I thought perhaps it was a bandwidth issue).
It looks more like a deliberate crippling of Safari and Omniweb to give Chrome a leg up in the Apple browser wars. Even more diabolical, you have to save your settings twice in Safari after turning off Google Instant to get your 100 setting back.
Google wins our Microsoft Embrace-Extend-Extinguish award of the month for their attack on Safari and other webkit browsers.
"Don't be evil." Maybe. Apparently, a little bit wicked is completely fine. See footnote for evidence of outright evil.
* Note: Don't ever use Google Chrome, it's spyware which will not even run without an admin level updater application on your computer! Get the latest build for Chromium for OS X here: cherish that direct link, Google hides it.
