However what I didn't realize was that the pass phrase would be needed every time Apache was started. This means that if the server has to restart for some reason you will have to manually enter the pass phrase every time or Apache will not start.

I learned my lesson when the server I had put the ssl certificate on went down in the night and then automatically restarted. Because Apache didn't come back up automatically; I got a call late in the night wondering why the server was not working. I got connected to the server to quickly find that Apache wasn't running simply because it wanted the pass phrase from the certificate in order to start.

It was at that point that I decided that it would be just better to get rid of the pass phrase; the complications outweighed the benefits. Luckily the pass phase removal is pretty easy and straight forward (however it took a decent amount of digging around the web to find a good answer).

Below is the process for removing a pass phrase from a key file.

First you will have to find where the key file you want to change is located on your server and then change to that directory on the command line. This will depend on the software and configuration but I keep mine in '/etc/httpd/conf/ssl.key'.

After that all you have to do is run the command below and then enter the pass phrase when prompted (replace 'www.domain.com.key' with the name of the key you want to change).

WARNING: I would highly recommend backing up your existing key file before regenerating it.

Now you should be able to restart your server and be all set to go.

This was a good article that I found and used when setting up my secure server.
http://www.samspublishing.com/articles/article.asp?p=30115&rl=1

You need to use the 'a' option to see the processes by all users and the 'x' option to show all of the processes outside of the scope of the shell.

If you just run that command as is, the results will just scroll by. In order see and browse the results at you own pace you can pipe the list into 'less'.

Or if you want to search for a particular application process, instead of piping in 'less' you can pipe the results into grep.

For example I can find the process id of Firefox by doing something like this:

This example output is from my MacBook. Now I can successfully kill the app by calling the kill command. In this example I can do this:

This also works on a Mac, but Mac's Force Quit features are pretty nice and there is really no need to use the command line.

I am very excited to find an organization like this because I have been accumulating old hardware for some time now and I have been looking for a good place to donate it. I always tell my friends and family to not throw out the old computer, because it still has some life in it. Besides after reading some of the facts on their website a computer and/or a CRT monitor can be quite harmful to the environment.

From reading through the information provided on their site I would recommend that everyone look into recycling over trashing. They provide general information about what types of places take old computer materials and where. The information on their site is based mostly in the Columbus area but I image it wouldn’t be too hard to find a local recycling plant no matter where you dwell.

The organization in Columbus is modeled after the original Free Geek out of Portland, OR. Other useful information on donating and recycling is available on their site.
http://www.freegeek.org

The main website of Free Geek Columbus is as follows.
http://www.freegeekcolumbus.org

I didn't really test out the anti-phishing alerts because I am not really sure where to go on the web to get solicited. However I do think the idea is a good one and I hope they pull it off well. Only time will tell here.

As far as enhancing the search bar in the top right corner; the suggest feature appears to be nothing more than a drop down of terms you have previously typed in. It doesn't seem that intuitive. I do however like the idea of offering search extensions from a web page, much in the same way a developer can advertise to a browser an rss feed or a favicon. But, I couldn't really test this out to see how it worked.

Also being able to resume your browser session is a nice feature, but it is one that I really don't much care to use. The only reason I got to experience it with this beta is because it crashed a couple of times. But I am sure they will have that fixed up before they release it though (it is just a beta after all).

The new add-ons manager looks promising but you really can't tell if it is any good because you can't install any extensions. This is because of the compatibility restrictions and the lack of 2.0 extensions (this is just because the browser is not out yet). I have also always thought that it would be nice if you could search and browse the themes and extensions within the context of the options menu; instead of it just launching a new window.

The bottom line is that Firefox 2.0 is going to be a great step of improvement from Firefox 1.5, but this beta is nothing to get excited over.

Here is a review I read that inspired the post.
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS3852026030.html

Here is where to get a copy of the beta to try for yourself. Just be careful, it is not a finished product.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bonecho/all-beta.html

I have been following this project for a while and if you don't know what it is I encourage you to read more about it at their website. Basically they are trying to design and produce a laptop composed of durable yet cheap materials that can be mass produced, so they can give them out (or sell them cheaply to governments) around the world. It looks like they are set to move between five to seven million units in 2007. Their aim is to hit a $100 price tag per laptop.

Each laptop is water resistant and features a 10:1 crank charged battery (one minute of cranking yields ten minutes of power). It will have a basic Linux based operating system with just the basics, to be used for network communication (Web, Email, etc) and document viewing and modification (text, spreadsheet, etc). The laptop will use flash memory instead of hard drives and base network communication on a distributed network, so that if you get a laptop in range of another one they will be able to share data and build larger and further reaching networks based on how many laptops that can be stringed together. This will allow intercommunication at least on some level for even the most remote locations.

I chatted with some of the people involved on IRC for a little while and they seem very technology focused. They are working hard to get the hardware and software working together so they can give these units out for testing. Which makes it a little difficult to find opportunities to help outside of the realm of hard-core programming. I think as they get this project further along they will be able to outreach to more volunteer opportunities; the Getting involved in OLPC gives some ideas but is not complete.

It will be exciting to see this project develop.

Now, whether your numbers are low or high, that is not the subject of this discussion.  But I do want to mention that if you do receive low numbers of hits, don't judge this as success - I often hear people speak of only seeing a couple hundred of visitors a month and believing their site can never be successful.  For any size business, it is possible to exponentially increase your hits; but that is another discussion.

So, what is a hit?  Well, different statistics programs often record hits differently, but for our purposes, we will define a hit as one visit to a site.  Usually, these are not unique visits, so often it could be the same person visiting your site more than once.

Now, we have clients that receive anywhere between a couple hundred to a couple of thousand hits or visits per day.  Well, the point I have been getting to is how do we judge of these hundreds or thousands of hits which are "hot hits".  What's a "hot hit" well its my way of describing a visitor who reaches your site in success - you are selling what they are looking for.  On the other side we have a "cold hit" where a visitor reached your site in error.

In discussing targeted online advertising, I often speak about the factor of correctly targeting keywords.  Does someone who searches the word "bike" look to buy a bike or are they looking for bike trails.  Well, how many visitors who find your ads, get you in search results or discover your link on other sites are qualified visitors that will take action on your site.

How do we judge when a visitor to our site is a qualified visitors?  A lot of the newer statistics programs, including Insivia's ConnectTrack give you a lot of information about the visitors coming to your site.  Information about where they come from, where they browse on your site, the amount of time they spend viewing different sections and so much more.

The real key component is being able to evaluate that information to correctly gauge your success - despite the number of visitors.  Online marketing is often about conversion, if I can get 20 visitors a day and can convert 15 in sales or leads versus a site that gets 200 hundred and only converts 10 - you can see why quality is really better than quantity.

However the one user interface feature they are adding to Firefox 2.0 that I think will keep Firefox's features ahead of Internet Explorer (even IE7) is that addtition of the inline spell checker for form inputs. It will allow you to spell check forms before you submit them; which is a great feature for a blog or other community web system. This feature has been enjoyed by other browsers (i.e. Konqueror) for some time, but I think by Firefox adding the feature it will be a huge visual thing that will help convince the average computer users to leave Internet Explorer behind. And lets face it Firefox is the forerunner in converting average computer users away from Internet Explorer, so it needs all of the niceties it can get (despite where the inspiration may have come from).

They have also done a lot of work to improve the application efficiency. To be honest with you though, I have never found Firefox to be running noticeably slow. However the computers that I use have relatively new processors and a gigabyte or more of RAM.

Security is also tightented down as well; but you really wouldn't expect anything less considering their track record. They have had six releases in less than a year since their last major release. Microsoft definitely can't say the same thing (IE6 released August 2001).

Firefox 1.5 - November 29, 2005
Firefox 1.5.0.6 - August 2, 2006

Unfortunately Firefox 2.0 will not pass the Acid 2 test, but its standards compliance is improved some and still far outshines Internet Explorer 6 (and I imagine IE7 as well). Hopefully by the time Firefox 3.0 rolls around they will have compliance shored up well enough to pass the test. Right now Safari 2, Opera 9 and Konqueror 3.5; as well as a few obscure browsers (iCab, maybe a few others) are the only ones that pass the test.

Here is the link to download the beta. I encourage anyone to give it a test drive.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bonecho/all-beta.html

Here is a link to the Firefox Roadmap. It will give you an idea of when the next release will be.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.html

Here is the code:

The output came back:
false
true
false
true
false
true

There were warnings produced by the above code as well. I left them out for readability.

The the results show that no matter how you call a function; whether it be globally, or through a class by scope resolution or object declaration; if you do not specify a value to an argument that does not have a default value, 'isset' will return false.

Apparently Internet Explorer 7 has corrected this issue so that it ignores the syntactically bad code just like most other browsers. Which I would say is a good thing. However there is a bit of an uproar brewing about it being removed because so many developers have come to rely on it to get their webpages to look right in both IE and Non-IE browsers.

Personally I welcome the fix and think that people who have relied on a hack composed of syntaxtically incorrect code should not be surprised that it has finally caught up with them. Even Microsoft gets around to fixing its bugs from time to time. Personally, I don't understand why anyone writes syntactically bad code to target IE when you can use conditional comments (which have been around since IE 5) to add specialized styles, extra Javascript, ActiveX components, etc.

However in all fairness Internet Explorer 6 was released almost two years ago (August 6, 2004), which is a tremendous amount of time when it comes to the web (which is part of the reason why IE is so insecure and has such standards compliance problems; it is very outdated in comparison to other browsers). So I can understand that many developers have come to rely on certain things to be a constant and may have many pages to fix.

Internet Explorer 7 also boasts what seems to be a decent jump up in standards compliance. It is hard for me to say specifically what has improved; I have just noticed that when I layout pages, IE 7 beta 2 renders them a lot closer to Firefox, Opera and Konqueror without custom styles.

Another thing that I am glad that Microsoft is finally fixing in their browser is the support for PNG (Portable Network Graphic) transparency. However I am by no means applauding them on this effort because many other browser have had full support for quite some time and the format has been standardized since October 1996. I am just glad that once the browser is released and in time I will finally be able to leave behind GIF's (a graphic format from the late 1980's) and stop doing DOM based workarounds.

This is a poll that is going on about the Star-HTML hack. If you understand the concept I encourage you to vote (if you have not already).
http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/poll/star-html.php

Anyway I guess they have depreciated the 'target' attribute (unless you are using frameset) with the idea that the World Wide Web Community has matured to the point that individual users should be able to direct the loading of hyperlinks to the window of their choice (i.e. new tabs, new windows, etc.).

I however, when I realized that the 'target' attribute would not validate, I decided to find a way to pull off opening a link in a new window that would not break pages.

Here is what I came up with:

It requires JavaScript to work but it degrades just fine. If the popup works it will return true and then cause the onclick event to return false and stop the current window from loading the 'href'. If the popup window fails but JavaScript is enabled on the browser (i.e. the window.open gets stopped by a popup blocker) it will return false and the onclick event will come back true and the page will be loaded into the current window as if the popup was never attempted. And finally if JavaScript is disabled the link will just function normally.