Not really sure, but, following on from the many posts floating about after Tim’s original entry including Ray’s, Andy’s and Mark’s I thought I’d join in. Amongst other things I claim to be, I’m usually aliased as flatpackedworld.

• * 25 years old
• * Bought a 3 bed house just under 3 years ago
• * Going out with my Canadian lady, Jenn, for about 4 months now
• * Drives a 06 plate VW Golf GTI in black
• * Looks at the Apple store every couple of days thinking I’ll buy a macbook then thinking of reasons not to
• * Likes pretty much any food except sprouts and cauliflower which are evil devil veggies of doom
• * Loves music, has way too many mp3′s.. really like last.fm
• * TV wise likes Scrubs, Fraiser, 24 & CSI
• * Films would be Lord Of The Rings, Star Wars, Bad Boys, Indian Jones (can you spot a theme?)
• * Been working with CF since around 2000 starting on version 4.5.2
• * Director of own company Caffeine Press (yes, I know, the site’s a bit poo… new web2.0 stylie design on route!)
• * Co-Founder of office-humour.co.uk – the soon to be social humour site, hopefully!

It looks like Apple could be considering putting the optical drive on the bottom of the Macbook to make it even smaller.

Seems like a crazy idea, but, I suppose makes some sense in space saving and you don’t use the drive that much… still not sure though!

Via unwiredview.com

About 2 years ago, maybe more, I remember finding a new, free statistics service called Reinvigorate/. It seems that after disappearing and doing nothing since it’s popped back up with a beta program.

I got an invite this morning and flatpackedworld is now running the tracking code so we’ll see how it holds up. Had a quick look around and it seems nice, good UI and seems pretty quick.

If you want an invite go to the site and hit the link. It currently says:

We periodically invite new groups of people into the beta, about every week(ish) or so. This helps us mitigate any unexpected server load while we fine tune and tweak our systems.

The new Apple UK adverts. Fronted my Mitchell and Webb, from the Peep show.

To save bandwidth on one off the servers I look after I decided to implement mod_gzip.

The server in questions is running RedHat ES3, apache 1.3.37, Coldfusion 7.0.2 and has the cPanel/WHM control panel.

First off was to get mod_gzip compiled, now this can be done manually, download a pre compiled one or in my case just go into WHM and rebuild apache with the mod_gzip box checked. The version it puts in is 1.3.26.1a.

As I’d already got Coldfusion running on this webserver the resulting httpd.conf file it creates became invalid so I had to move a few things about. To cut to the chase the order in which modules load is crucial with Coldfusion due to the was the mod_gzip and mod_jrun modules work intercepting requests. The following is my httpd.conf (abbriviated) with the relevant sections.

LoadModule ...
--snip--
LoadModule jrun_module /usr/local/coldfusionmx7/runtime/lib/wsconfig/1/mod_jrun.so
<IfModule mod_jrun.c>
JRunConfig Verbose false
JRunConfig Apialloc false
JRunConfig Ssl false
JRunConfig Ignoresuffixmap false
JRunConfig Serverstore /usr/local/coldfusionmx7/runtime/lib/wsconfig/1/jrunserver.store
JRunConfig Bootstrap 127.0.0.1:51011
#JRunConfig Errorurl <optionally redirect to this URL on errors>
#JRunConfig ProxyRetryInterval 600
#JRunConfig ConnectTimeout 15
#JRunConfig RecvTimeout 300
#JRunConfig SendTimeout 15
AddHandler jrun-handler .jsp .jws .cfm .cfml .cfc .cfr .cfswf
</IfModule>
LoadModule gzip_module libexec/mod_gzip.so
<IfModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_can_negotiate Yes
mod_gzip_static_suffix .gz
AddEncoding gzip .gz
mod_gzip_update_static No
mod_gzip_command_version '/mod_gzip_status'
mod_gzip_temp_dir /tmp
mod_gzip_keep_workfiles No
mod_gzip_minimum_file_size 500
mod_gzip_maximum_file_size 500000
mod_gzip_maximum_inmem_size 60000
mod_gzip_min_http 1000
mod_gzip_handle_methods GET POST
mod_gzip_item_exclude file .js$
mod_gzip_item_exclude file .css$
mod_gzip_item_exclude file .swf$
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/
mod_gzip_item_include file .php$
mod_gzip_item_include file .cfm$
mod_gzip_item_include file .jsp$
mod_gzip_item_exclude file .pdf$
mod_gzip_item_include file .fic$
mod_gzip_item_include file .html$
mod_gzip_item_include file .htm$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/html
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/plain
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/xml
#mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/force_download$
#mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/pdf$
mod_gzip_item_include handler type-coldfusion
mod_gzip_item_include handler jrun-handler
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
#then the logging directives
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t "%V %r" %<s %b mod_gzip: %{mod_gzip_result}n In:%{mo
d_gzip_input_size}n -< Out:%{mod_gzip_output_size}n = %{mod_gzip_compression_rat
io}n pct." common_with_mod_gzip_info2
CustomLog "logs/mod_gzip.log" common_with_mod_gzip_info2
mod_gzip_add_header_count Yes
mod_gzip_send_vary On
</IfModule>
AddType type-coldfusion .fic
--snip--
ClearModuleList
AddModule ...
--snip--
AddModule mod_jrun.c
AddModule mod_gzip.c

In my test case I had a page show as 18224 bytes originally which compressed down to 3956 bytes a saving of 14268 bytes or 79%! To test the compression I was using the port80software.com compression check. You can also see this site’s report.

More Information (stuff I read):

• owensperformance.com – cheers Irvin!
• mod_gzip on sourceforge
• How to install mod_gzip

If you heard over to menti.net you can see information about how he’s setup some code to push the popular BBC News feeds out to accounts on twitter. Nice!

I was feeling left out.

A new version of script.aculo.us has now been released. It includes the final version of prototype (1.5.0) and a new Morph effect amongst other bits and bobs.

It’s all over the blogsphere, but, I’ll join in anway. If you get yourself over to the Adobe Prerelease site you can apply for the Coldfusion 8 Beta.

• Gran Paradiso
  Or Mozilla Firefox 3.0 alpha 1.
• CrashPlan
  A offsite automatic backup server. Pay $5/month for 50GB then $0.10/month for each 1GB over. Not good for large scale backups but could be ideal for home usage.

• packetgarden
  “Packet Garden captures information about how you use the internet and uses this stored information to grow a private world you can later explore.” Could be cool when it’s done!