December 2004

I have truly enjoyed watching Apple grow over the years. As a matter of fact, my first computer was an Apple LC II (16Mhz 68030 processor with 4Mb of RAM and a 80Mb hard drive) and so I’ve always had a special place in my heart for them. I have watched the iMac, the iPod, iLife and others as Apple has grown from a hardware/software company into a marketing machine. You don’t buy a Mac because of the superior technology; you buy it because of its coolness factor.

Don’t get me wrong, I own a 12″ PowerBook and you’ll hear me more often than not say “use the best tool for the job”. To me, Apple laptops are hands down the best laptops going. I bought my 12″ PowerBook for no more than the equivalent Dell and everybody that sees it oohs and ahhs. You can’t put a price on that. The big thing for me is that it does the job; email, ssh and presentations when I’m on the road. Best-tool-for-the-job.

Next up, check out that bitchin’ iPod. Another investment I have made recently is in the iPod mini … how frickin’ cool is this thing?! My wife even loves it and she hates technology … doesn’t get it. My father could even work this thing and more importantly read the screen. That is huge. The coolness factor and the hipness of the iPod design is something that sets it apart from other “devices” … at the end of the day, the iPod is a way of living, everything else is just a gadget.

To me, Apple is like Nike or Volkswagon … they are boutique marketing companies that farm out their manufacturing (well mostly anyways) to foreign factories, etc and are able to focus on design. Heck, even AMD does it; they rent/lease time at fabs now instead of owning/building their own. Genius IMHO. Take Volkswagon; what is the new Bug anyways? Its a frickin’ VW Gulf for crissakes … now put the two next to each other and tell me what has more of a coolness factor? What do I think they will do next? Look out for the next VW Scirocco … and it will be the frickin’ coolest machine on the block. But I digress.

So where will Apple head next? I see something quite obvious for them to move into and its the perfect blend of their strengths of marketing, product design and integration with all of their computing products; why don’t they go into the DVR/PVR market?

Think about it. Everybody in the world would love to own an Apple DVR/PVR … iTV if you will … it would be a sexy design, would integrate with technologies like Apple’s Airport Express and iPod and it could do pictures (a la the color iPod), play music, record your favorite shows and integrate with your other Apple hardware as seamlessly as saying “rendevous”.

I’ll be the first to step up to the plate and slap down my $699 for the iTV. Bring it on.

Thank goodness for Slashdot for providing me with so much blog fodder over the past few days … what would we do without Cmdrtaco?!

I am a PHP developer and have been for quite some time. I’m no frickin’ brainiac but I do okay. I am also an avid user of Apache and more importantly Apache 2. We have been using Apache 2 here with the worker mpm + nptl threads + 2.6 kernel on ftp.osuosl.org for quite sometime with amazing success. I actually can’t justify more hardware because switching to that from Apache 1.3 + 2.4 kernel made such a huge difference. We can handle 1000 req/s at 250Mbit/s without ever getting the load on the machine above 1.0.

We also use Apache 1.3 here for hosting our PHP applications and like most folks we cannot justify moving to Apache 2 on those machines … it just doesn’t make sense for us.

Now I feel for both the Apache and PHP camps. Its a tough debacle to be in and one that is obviously generating some tension between developers. So how do you get folks to make the switch? My answer: features.

Apache 1.3 is great, but it just doesn’t scale like Apache 2 can. Now, I know with Apache 2 + PHP you still have to use prefork and this essentially makes it like Apache 1.3 in terms of scalability. However, some of the new features and updates to old ones coming out in Apache 2.1 I believe will make users make the switch simply for ease of use and ability to keep your environment sane.

Last week we had the chance to interview Paul Querna for a job here at the OSL. Part of the interview was to do a presentation on developing the next-generation infrastructure for the Mozilla Foundation’s applications (such as update|download|developer.mozilla.org). Paul’s presentation was fantastic and shed light on some of the features that I believe will bring Apache 2 into the lime light: mod_proxy, mod_cache and mod_proxy_balancer.

Now I know what you’re saying: “mod_proxy and mod_cache have been around for years … heck they were in Apache 1.3!” Well, I drilled down a little by grabbing the latest alpha via SVN from svn.apache.org and also talked with some of the developers of those modules. mod_proxy and mod_cache have been updated quite a bit and developers are expecting about a 20% performance improvement over the versions in 1.3 and even 2.0. This is great for long-time users of the best-single-threaded-app-ever: Squid. With mod_proxy and the mod_cache memory and disk modules now, you can essentially replace Squid plus get the added benefits of a fully-threaded application that can scale plus with added support for all of the HTTP 1.1 calls (some of which even Squid still has problems with). Not only that, you can leverage all of the other modules in Apache like mod_rewrite, etc that allow you infinite flexibility in managing your site(s).

mod_proxy_balancer is really interesting. Now, tie in mod_proxy and mod_cache … you have a great caching reverse proxy solution. Now, if you can leverage your static content through this plus tie that back to your Apache 2 + PHP in prefork on the backend you can get a lot more mileage out of your hardware. Your caching servers would essentially do most of the heavy lifting and then would hand back queries to the application servers that would than pass them through the caching servers. Sweet ass sweet ™!!!!

The next question is to see how all of this works in practice … I shall be the guinea pig of course … Big thanks goes out to Paul Querna for his excellent presentation and getting us to think about this stuff.

If my initial tests show anything, I can forsee the combination of the above modules bringing Apache 2 together with PHP once and for all …

I just read an interesting blog post by Peter Torr from Microsoft. The posting brings up some questions about the security of downloading Firefox from Mozilla’s download redirector as well as the need for digitally signing releases of software. I’d like to make a rebuttal to some of Peter’s points below.

I helped author the download redirector that Mozilla uses to distribute its software. We originally had 10 mirrors in the main ftp.mozilla.org rotation. This was all well and good when Firefox and the other Mozilla software products were not as popular. With the 1.0 release of Firefox our mirror network hit a wall and was about to meltdown until we were able to install the download redirector. The redirector works as follows: the user clicks on “Get Firefox” on the Mozilla website which redirects them to a download.mozilla.org URL with information like OS, language and product that they want to download. The redirector then queries its database of valid mirrors (more on that in a second) and then redirects the user via a HTTP 302 response. The entire response is a little over 100 bytes and allows us to now leverage 50+ mirrors now instead of just 10. In addition to that, we can weight the mirrors based on bandwidth available. This allows us to send more traffic to the mirrors that can handle it and less to those that have smaller pipes.

Every 15 minutes the download redirector queries each mirror and makes sure that the latest release of each product is on that mirror. If it is not, then it removes it from the queue and tags it as disabled. Bear in mind, this is a v1.0 application. What is v2.0 going to bring? We will actually download the files from each mirror and check their md5 hash. I’ll be the first to admit that leveraging md5 isn’t ideal but until there is an objective way to sign applications, I don’t see another option.

Now, in a perfect world I would love to be able to have all of this come off of one box but at the time of the Firefox 1.0 release we were pushing close to 4.4GBit/s across all of the mirrors (that requires a little math and extrapolating from the redirector statistics). That said, I believe the Mozilla Foundation is accepting donations.

Finally, Peter makes a note about how we must make it so users only trust software digitally signed by the vendor/developer. He even goes so far as to talk about getting a VeriSign code signing certificate for doing so. Now, I don’t think anybody has a problem with signing software; its a great idea. The big problem today, is having to buy that trust from less than savory vendors. This is a great opportunity for the likes of free, open solution to digital signatures and certificates.

It’s obvious to me that the honeymoon is over for the Mozilla Foundation and I’m excited to see honest dialog from the likes of Peter Torr … what doesn’t kill us can only make us stronger.