I’m one of the few people who don’t mind buggy software as long as they release often.  Why don’t I mind?  Well, software development is hard, really hard.  Across platforms or cross browsers or even across versions of 1 type of OS.  I’ve felt the pain, and certainly caused it.  But one piece of software that can’t be buggy is the OS itself.  It effects everything.  A buggy OS can make you life miserable, see Windows 98 and apparently OS X 10.5.0.  Vista on the other hand isn’t buggy but slow, I know, I’ve used it for over 1 year now.  Buggy or Slow, not a good choice.

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1) Configure ETags

Add this to your httpd.conf

2) Turn on Expiration Headers

3) Add Gzip compression

Install mod_gzip for Apache, add this to your httpd.conf to configure mod_gzip to handle files/settings

 That’s it, those 3 changes improved my score from F (60) to a respectable B (81).

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First Impression

• When I click on the top bar to expand the window, the dang thing disappears. Wait - Actually if I move it to my dual monitor and click the expand button the dang thing disappears.  Guess the dual monitor code hasn’t been put in.
• It is fast, very fast.  Although reports are FF is faster then IE, I’ve found IE to render quicker (maybe because of the extensions I have going on FF), but this thing is really fast.
• Finally, no more VNC to a MAC to make sure things are working correctly on Safari.  This is great.
• Font rendering is nice - not clear type, but pretty close.
• Hey the backspace keyboard doesn’t move you back in history - not cool.

I’m not switching from FF because of the extensive plugins I use but for some fast web browsing this might make take over my IE.

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Can you image if Windows Update next week included a Zune update for Windows 2003 Server? Kinda of hypocritical of their new Mac commercial with the Windows guys comes out bloated, dontcha think?

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For our staging server, there is no real security concerns running VNC because the box is inside of our network and can not receive outside traffic. However for our production Web Server, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have VNC running even if you change the default port. For one reason OSXVNC only does 1 part authentication, I.E. you are only challenged with a password, not a user name. Instead of running down to the server room everytime I have to use the MAC GUI, I instead have came up with this nice little tip.

I start VNC server from the command line in my shell client specifing an encrypted password file, log on to VNC, do my buisness, and then kill the VNC server thread. In security theory it goes like this: - I create a locked door on the fly, open it up (keeping it locked behind me), then destroy the door when I am done. This is how to do it.


- OSCVnc creates a directory when installed named: /OSXvnc.app/
- Inside /OSXvnc.app/ there is a utility named: storepassword
- Run this command to create your encrypted file with your password in it:

This starts the OSXvnc server with your encrypted password file


Now, start your RealVNC client on your windows machine. You will be asked to autheticate. Once you are done with the MAC GUI, close RealVNC, go back to your command shell and hit: “Ctrl + X” to kill the VNC thread. This is a nice way to not worry about running VNC all the time on your production boxes exposed to the world.

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*NOTE: This assumes you are doing a daily dump of your Apache log files

#! /bin/bash
#####################################################
# http://www.techtoolblog.com
#####################################################

exit 0

I still need to write some type of logging into the script incase there is an error. Also, there is a way to specify a encrypted file name for the password instead of having the password in your script, but I ended up changing the permission on the actual script file so only root could read it, root is the user running the cron job, so that should be enough security.

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