Have you previously realised that www is redundant? If so, I’m preaching to the converted and you can run along back to whatever you were busy with. 😉 Otherwise, stand to attention, soldier!

begin rantish text:

When I’m browsing the web, I’d much less prefer to type “www.xkcd.com” than “xkcd.com”. Reason being that if *every* site has to have w’s, what’s the point of the w’s? Not to mention that they’re a bitch to pronounce. There’s 9 syllables in there! You could almost halve that by saying “triple-w”. I’ve heard people say “dub dub dub”. Bleh. Even the World Wide Web Consortium prefers to call themselves “W3C”.

So what exactly is (was?) the point of the www? There might be more to it, however the gist of it appears to be that when Tim Berners-Lee first created the hypertext document retrieval system, he called it “World Wide Web”. I believe that www became a standard not because it made sense or because it was a good idea, but because it was hyped far beyond the healthy respect it deserved.

Your web browser *knows* you’re dealing with web content solely by the fact that there’s an http:// in front of the url. Therefore I submit, the www is redundant.

Need more convincing?

Search engines see www.dogma.swiftspirit.co.za and dogma.swiftspirit.co.za as 2 separate web sites. Because both sites have identical content, search engines might lower your Search Rankings. Hell, you’d be competing against yourself for rankings. Silly example: instead of 3rd, you might be 5th और 7th. For this reason, it is better to either force www or to force no www. I’m in favour of the latter.

If you browse to http://www.dogma.swiftspirit.co.za/ you will be redirected to http://dogma.swiftspirit.co.za/. Even if you go to the downloads directory of my main domain with a www, you’ll be redirected appropriately. Importantly, search engines will only find one copy of my web site, नहीं 2. And in the long run, I’ll be wearing out my w key a li’l less. 🙂

With the possible exception of a few quick deaths, no w’s were hurt during the production of this post.

[edit] So much for that. It turns out that openssl is able to determine that the key and certificate are already in a single file. Therefore, no csplitting required (अच्छी तरह से, I hope somebody reading this at least learned about how nice csplit is). In fact, the whole script might as well be obsolete… blaargh. Well, at least it gives a nice warning about not giving a blank passphrase. 😀

Here’s the new version:

pem2pfx – converts a .pem-formatted file containing a private key and signed certificate into a Windows-compatible .pfx certificate file.

#!/bin/bash
#pem2pfx
#v0.2
#Tricky - brendan@swiftspirit.co.za
# Converts a .pem certificate file to .pfx format
# $1 is the source file
set -e
 
अगर [ $# = 1 ]; then
  outputfile=`echo $1 | sed 's/.pem$/.pfx/'`
 
  echo "Please specify a password below. Windows refuses to import a .pfx certificate with a blank password."
  openssl pkcs12 -export -out $outputfile -in $1
 
 else
  echo "pem2pfx - converts a .pem formatted private-key and certificate file to an IIS-compatible .pfx file."
  echo "Usage: pem2pfx inputfile.pem"
fi

अधिक…

The relatively new document types Office 2007 has given some web hosts problems when their clients want to offer documents for download. Most often, the documents are being offered by the web server as “text/html” which is then rendered as a ton of garbage on the web user’s screen.

The best way to resolve this is to add all the MIME types to the server’s main configuration. IIS7 for Windows already has these MIME types set up correctly by default. IIS6 and IIS5 require the MIME types to be added, as might Apache on older installations. For Apache, there is also a workaround for the individual domain owner to add the mime types via Apache’s .इनको फ़ाइल.

IIS 6 MIME type addition (for the Server Administrator)

Before this can be done, ensure that your server is also set to allow direct metabase editing:

1. Load IIS Manager: Start -> Rसंयुक्त राष्ट्र, “inetmgr” -> [OK]
2. Right click the “server” and click “Properties”
3. Within the “Internet Information Services” tab (usually the only tab), ensure that the “Enable Direct Metabase Edit” checkbox is checked.
4. Click [OK]

Be sure to back up IIS’s configuration (यहां for IIS5) beforehand. I won’t take any responsibility for an admin breaking his server. I have reason to believe this may also work on IIS5 however I have just as much reason to believe that it might just give lots of errors. If an IIS5 / Windows 2000 admin is willing to test this for me after backing up your configuration please let me know of the results.

Copy the following text into a file named msoff07-addmime.vbs and execute it once from the commandline by typing cscript msoff07-addmime.vbs and pressing Enter. If you run it more than once, the MIME types will be added each time and you will have multiple identical entries:

' This script adds the necessary Office 2007 MIME types to an IIS 6 सेवक.
' To use this script, just double-click or execute it from a command line.
' Running this script multiple times results in multiple entries in the
' IIS MimeMap so you should not run it more than once.
' Modified from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms752346.aspx
 
Dim MimeMapObj, MimeMapArray, MimeTypesToAddArray, WshShell, oExec
Const ADS_PROPERTY_UPDATE = 2 
 
' Set the MIME types to be added
MimeTypesToAddArray = Array(".docm", "application/vnd.ms-word.document.macroEnabled.12", _
".docx", "application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document", _
".dotm", "application/vnd.ms-word.template.macroEnabled.12", _
".dotx", "application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.template", _
".potm", "application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.template.macroEnabled.12", _
".potx", "application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.template", _
".ppam", "application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.addin.macroEnabled.12", _
".ppsm", "application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.slideshow.macroEnabled.12", _
".ppsx", "application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slideshow", _
".pptm", "application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.presentation.macroEnabled.12", _
".pptx", "application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation", _
".sldm", "application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.slide.macroEnabled.12", _
".sldx", "application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slide", _
".xlam", "application/vnd.ms-excel.addin.macroEnabled.12", _
".xlsb", "application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.binary.macroEnabled.12", _
".xlsm", "application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.macroEnabled.12", _
".xlsx", "application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet", _
".xltm", "application/vnd.ms-excel.template.macroEnabled.12", _
".xltx", "application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.template") 
 
' Get the mimemap object
Set MimeMapObj = GetObject("IIS://LocalHost/MimeMap")
 
' Call AddMimeType for every pair of extension/MIME type
For counter = 0 को UBound(MimeTypesToAddArray) कदम 2
    AddMimeType MimeTypesToAddArray(counter), MimeTypesToAddArray(counter+1)
Next
 
' Create a Shell object
Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
 
' Stop and Start the IIS Service
Set oExec = WshShell.Exec("net stop w3svc")
Do While oExec.Status = 0
    WScript.Sleep 100
Loop
 
Set oExec = WshShell.Exec("net start w3svc")
Do While oExec.Status = 0
    WScript.Sleep 100
Loop
 
Set oExec = Nothing
 
' Report status to user
WScript.Echo "Microsoft Office 2007 Document MIME types have been registered."
 
' AddMimeType Sub
Sub AddMimeType (Ext, MType)
 
    ' Get the mappings from the MimeMap property.
    MimeMapArray = MimeMapObj.GetEx("MimeMap") 
 
    ' Add a new mapping.
    i = UBound(MimeMapArray) + 1
    Redim Preserve MimeMapArray(i)
    Set MimeMapArray(i) = CreateObject("MimeMap")
    MimeMapArray(i).Extension = Ext
    MimeMapArray(i).MimeType = MType
    MimeMapObj.PutEx ADS_PROPERTY_UPDATE, "MimeMap", MimeMapArray
    MimeMapObj.SetInfo
 
End Sub

Apache MIME type addition (for the Server Administrator)

Apache stores its MIME types in a file normally located at $installpath/conf/mime.types. See the mod_mime documentation for more on how it works. आर्क लिनक्स installs its MIME types at /etc/httpd/conf/mime.types और Parallels Plesk installs it in /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/mime.types. Your distribution might have it in another place, so find your mime.types file by running locate mime.types.

Add the following lines to your mime.types file:

application/vnd.ms-word.document.macroEnabled.12                          docm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document   docx
application/vnd.ms-word.template.macroEnabled.12                          dotm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.template   dotx
application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.template.macroEnabled.12                    potm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.template     potx
application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.addin.macroEnabled.12                       ppam
application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.slideshow.macroEnabled.12                   ppsm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slideshow    ppsx
application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.presentation.macroEnabled.12                pptm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation pptx
application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.slide.macroEnabled.12                       sldm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slide        sldx
application/vnd.ms-excel.addin.macroEnabled.12                            xlam
application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.binary.macroEnabled.12                     xlsb
application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.macroEnabled.12                            xlsm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet         xlsx
application/vnd.ms-excel.template.macroEnabled.12                         xltm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.template      xltx

Apache MIME type addition (For the domain owner with at least FTP access – using .htaccess file)

Add the following text to your domain’s .इनको फ़ाइल, most commonly in an httpdocs/ directory

AddType application/vnd.ms-word.document.macroEnabled.12 docm
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document docx
AddType application/vnd.ms-word.template.macroEnabled.12 dotm
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.template dotx
AddType application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.template.macroEnabled.12 potm
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.template potx
AddType application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.addin.macroEnabled.12 ppam
AddType application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.slideshow.macroEnabled.12 ppsm
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slideshow ppsx
AddType application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.presentation.macroEnabled.12 pptm
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation pptx
AddType application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.slide.macroEnabled.12 sldm
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slide sldx
AddType application/vnd.ms-excel.addin.macroEnabled.12 xlam
AddType application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.binary.macroEnabled.12 xlsb
AddType application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.macroEnabled.12 xlsm
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet xlsx
AddType application/vnd.ms-excel.template.macroEnabled.12 xltm
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.template xltx

… and my Personal Rating (PR) out of 10 😉

I use फ़ायरफ़ॉक्स so most of these won’t apply to non-FF users. तथापि, I’d be very very interested to hear what other addons my friends, subscribers, and random websurfers find interesting or useful to them. Have your say and let us know why you love the addons you love. 🙂

Personally, I prefer addons that aren’t intrusive. Ideally, an addon must have a minimal interface and give me a measurable benefit for me to keep it installed.

Cacheviewer – 7

This is a GUI front-end for the Cache Firefox keeps of the last few pages and media. मैं इस ऐड-ऑन उपयोगी से अधिक दिलचस्प तो मैं शायद जल्द ही इसे हटाने के लिए जा रहा हूँ मिल गया है अभी.

ColorfulTabs – 9

मैं रंग प्यार. टैब रंग-समूहीकरण बहुत अच्छी तरह से काम नहीं करता है जब आप के बारे में तक पहुँचने 30 टैब हालांकि… :-/

डाउनलोड Statusbar – 10

मैं टैब में एक एकल खिड़की में फ़ायरफ़ॉक्स में सब कुछ होने पसंद करते हैं. एक अलग विंडो में एक डाउनलोड बॉक्स के बाद मेरे लिए एक बड़ा कोई नहीं है. यह भी स्क्रीन अचल संपत्ति की बचत होती है, क्योंकि यह बहुत कम है. 🙂

वीडियो DownloadHelper – 10

वीडियो DownloadHelper मीडिया स्ट्रीमिंग के लिए लग रहा है – विशेष रूप से किसी भी बड़ी सामग्री है कि डाउनलोड किया जा रहा. आप आइकन पर क्लिक करते हैं, यह आप वर्तमान में डाउनलोड करने की धाराओं से पता चलता है और आप एक के रूप में यह क़तार में विकल्प देता है “साधारण” डाउनलोड.

जब से तुम कभी पता नहीं है, तो एफएफ दुर्घटना करने के लिए जा रहा है या बिजली की कटौती करने जा रहा है, मैं अपने डेस्कटॉप के लिए एक प्रतिलिपि को बचाने के लिए पसंद करते हैं और मैं तो फिर से वीडियो डाउनलोड करने के लिए और अधिक बैंडविड्थ का उपयोग कर के बिना वीडियो देख सकते हैं. भी, काम पर, जब लोग मुझे भेज यूट्यूब या अन्य मीडिया के लिए लिंक, मैं आमतौर पर के बाद ज्यादा तक देख परेशान नहीं करते – मेरे अपने अवकाश पर या एक ब्रेक के दौरान.

समाप्ति की कैनरी – 9

यह साफ और कम से कम addon आपको बताता है कि यदि साइट आप वर्तमान में देख रहे हैं के लिए एसएसएल प्रमाणपत्र जल्द ही समाप्त होने जा रहा है. अपनी खुद की साइट एक एसएसएल प्रमाणपत्र है तो, मैं सुझाव है कि आप अधिसूचना या miscommunication के एक साधारण कमी के कारण मदद करने के लिए आपकी साइट के एसएसएल प्रमाणपत्र अवसान हो रहा से बचने के इस addon का उपयोग.

Fasterfox – 8

Fasterfox कुछ नेटवर्क optmisation विकल्प जोड़ता है. विकल्पों में से कुछ अपने कॉर्पोरेट नेटवर्क ही आप के साथ एक छोटे से पागल व्यवस्थापक बना सकता है. 😉

Firebug – 9

वेब विकास और पृष्ठों के साथ प्रयोग के लिए. कोड के छोटे टुकड़े परीक्षण के साथ ही पृष्ठों डीबगिंग के लिए बहुत बढ़िया.

FoxClocks – 6

ग़लती होना – आप अन्य समय क्षेत्र में समय बताता है. o.o थोड़े समय के लिए उपयोगी था – अब मेरे सिर के बाद से अनावश्यक इसे बाहर तेजी से मैं नज़र कर सकते हैं काम कर रहा है. rm -f

FoxyProxy – 9

विशिष्ट प्रॉक्सी सर्वर के माध्यम से विशिष्ट पृष्ठों ब्राउज़िंग के लिए बहुत बढ़िया. यह जब कुछ साइटों ब्लॉक किए गए हैं या के लिए उपयोगी है साइक्स पारदर्शी प्रॉक्सी सर्वर ठीक से काम नहीं कर रहे हैं. 🙂

मैं प्रॉक्सी सर्वर है कि मैं नहीं बल्कि डिफ़ॉल्ट मार्गों के माध्यम से जाना नहीं चाहते हैं पर कुछ यातायात मार्ग के लिए इस का उपयोग. इसकी भी बहुत लचीला. आप एक से अधिक प्रॉक्सी सर्वर उपलब्ध है और एक तुम आमतौर पर अचानक झपकी का उपयोग पर चला जाता है, बस अगले एक पर स्विच. 🙂

तेल बंदर – 10

अभी, मैं केवल के लिए इसका उपयोग GooglemonkeyR लिपि. यह स्क्रिप्ट reformats गूगल'आपके विनिर्देशों के खोज परिणामों और भी पन्ने गूगल लिंक करने के छोटे झलक दिखाने के लिए एक विकल्प होता है. Greasemonkey एक कर सकते हैं बहुत अधिक और लिपियों के बहुत आसानी से देखते हैं उपलब्ध कई कई साइटों के लिए.

लाइव HTTP हेडर – 8

मैं इस कई बार उपयोग किया है IIS वेब सर्वर के साथ gzip संपीड़न मुद्दों का निदान करने के. किसी और ज्यादा नहीं है, हालांकि कहने के लिए: यह काम करता हैं.

लाइव पेज वरीयता – 10 (अब तक – केवल कल इसे स्थापित)

इस ऐड-ऑन काफी सरल लगता है. यह गूगल से PageRank हो जाता है और ट्रे में यह पता चलता है.

NoScript – 10

NoScript अवरुद्ध विज्ञापनों में भयानक है. पहली बार में इसका थोड़ा परेशान बाद से आप की तरह सभी साइटों श्वेतसूची में है – लेकिन लंबे समय में यह soooo इसके लायक है. 🙂

जीवित पेज – 10

यदि आप एक साइट के लिए ब्राउज़ के लिए बहुत उपयोगी है और इसे नीचे होना होता है. साइट है, तो स्थिर सामग्री उन्मुख तो यह है कि यह आसान जल्दी सामग्री लगाने के लिए अगर अपने ऑनलाइन कैश्ड बनाता है.

टैब मिक्स प्लस – 8

Awesome for if you have more than 7-or-so tabs.

ShowIP (using a version modified for work purposes – displays company server’s canonical name when browsing) – 10

I cannot imagine the hell I’d have to go through to identify a server without this plugin. Okay, I can. Used to have to do this all the time. I eventually scripted it but I can’t find the original script. Here’s my 60-second attempt at recreating what was in that script:

$ cat /etc/hosts | grep `dig A $hostname @mycachingnameserver | grep . | grep -v "^;"`

$ dig -x `dig A $hostname @mycachingnameserver | grep ^$hostname | grep A | \
  awk '/[.]/{print $5}'` @mycachingnameserver | grep . | grep -v "^;"

Web Developer – 9

I used this once to diagnose some issues with a page. I don’t do much web development so I’m going to remove this one. अपनी क्षमताओं पर इसका कोई टिप्पणी नहीं के बाद से मैं इस पर विश्वास एक शीर्ष स्तर का ऐड-ऑन है अगर आप वेब विकास बहुत काम कर रहे हैं.

Some of you may already know that I built a home server not too long ago. I documented some of the very important parts of how it was built though I was planning on releasing all the documentation all at once. I was using Arch Linux and I hadn’t nearly finished everything, especially the documentation. उदाहरण के लिये, it was supposed to be a media server. After some disk shuffling, it was supposed to end up having a इस RAID1 for the boot and RAID 10 for the rest (the media part).

This didn’t work out at all.

I got as far as having an efficient (और अच्छी तरह से–firewalled) routing gateway server. I was finally satisfied that the customised local routing* was working correctly and I was confident that my tests with DHCP meant I could disable the DHCP service on the flimsy ADSL router and have all my flatmates start using the server as the Internet द्वार. Instead: I was logged in to the server from the office, I’d just installed Apache2**, and I was about to consult with a colleague regarding getting nice graphs put together so the flatmates could all see who was using up the bandwidth*** — when I noticed a little message indicating that the root filesystem had been remounted read-only due to some or other disk failure.

And then I lost my connection to the server.

And then I gained a foul mood.

🙁

When I arrived home, I found that, as I had guessed from the descriptive message given at the office, the (बहुत) old 80GB IDE disk that I was using for the root filesystem had failed. Unfortunately, the server would never boot again and there was little chance of prying everything off onto another disk to continue where I’d left off.

I’m buying a replacement (S पर) HDD this next weekend just after pay day – and I’ve changed my mind about documenting my progress… and backing up my configurations:

Release Early. Release Often.

* ISPs in South Africa charge less (easy price comparison) for “local-only” (within South Africa) traffic on ADSL but only if you use an ADSL account that CANNOT access web services outside of South Africa. This means that if you want to take advantage of the reduced costs but still be able to access the Internet at large, you need to set up some sneaky routing.

** one-command-install: ~$ yaourt -S apache

*** Internet Access in SA is expensive – you get charged about R70 ($7 / £4.9 / €5.46) per GB when using ADSL, or about R2 per MB if using GPRS / 3G.