Ever set up a server? Ever managed a server? Ever wondered if there’s a tool out there to help you do these things? Well (as far as I know) there isn’t such a tool out there in the open source world yet.

That’s why Paul and myself decided a while ago that it would be a good idea to make one! I am hoping that we’ll actually get round to doing some work on it now that we’re both going to be working in Coventry. That is assuming we actually get some spare time!

So, watch out for it!

So today I’m in Stafford because Helen has an assessment day for the police which is being held at Stafford University. I dropped her off there about 30 minutes ago and then decided to pop into the town centre to see what’s around. It was 8:30 so all the shops were pretty much shut apart from the coffee shops, some discount shops and McDonalds. I was quite hungry and really needed a coffee so I thought I’d grab a McDonalds breakfast!

Anyway, whilst ordering I noticed a sign saying free WiFi, so I got my laptop out and here I am, on free WiFi in McDonalds! It reminds me of Canada where there was free WiFI EVERYWHERE – and I do mean everywhere. It’s a good sign of things to come in the UK.

So this is the first time I’ve ever written a blog post whilst eating a fast-food breakfast! Needless to say, the breakfast certainly hit the spot!

I’ve been doing some work recently on a couple of websites (one being for Riverdale) and in order to test the sites I set up virtual hosting on the copy of Apache which came with Leopard. There’s a few tweaks/issues with Leopard’s Apache which I thought I’d write down incase it helps anyone else, or helps me in the future when I forget what I did!

So to setup the virtual hosting you need to first change some details in /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf. You should make sure that the line for the virtual host module is not commented out:
LoadModule vhost_alias_module libexec/apache2/mod_vhost_alias.so

Then, at the bottom of the file, add in the following:
Include /Users/username/Sites/vhost.d/*.conf
Where username is your own username.

Then you should create the directory /Users/username/Sites/vhost.d and into it, put these two files:
00_default.conf:
NameVirtualHost *:80
<VirtualHost *:80>
   DocumentRoot /Users/username/Sites/
</VirtualHost>

01_virtualsite.conf:
<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName virtualhost1
   DocumentRoot /Users/username/Sites/virtualhost1/
   <Directory "/Users/username/Sites/virtualhost1">
      Options +ExecCGI +Includes +FollowSymLinks
      AllowOverride All
   </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Again, where username is your username.

Then, in /private/etc/hosts you need to add:
127.0.0.1 virtualhost1

Restart apache and check out http://virtualhost1/ – it should work!

The big problem with Leopard is that you can ONLY share websites from your ~/Sites directory. It works though if you put a symlink in there to another directory (such as in ~/Documents), but keeping your vhost pointing to the directory in ~/Sites.

A couple of days ago I took my MacBook in to be fixed as it had a crack on the front case where the lid closes on the case. They took it in and said they’d order the part in and that it would take 24 hours. I picked it up, 24 hours later and it looked like a good fix. But when I got it home I noticed that they’d put on a US keyboard!!!

So I took it back in today and they managed to find a UK keyboard (already assigned to someone else, hehe) and they took just 30 minutes to fit it and now I’m sitting here typing on my brand new UNITED KINGDOM keyboard!

Now that I’ve decided when to start my job with Senokian on the 15th September, I have just under 4 weeks left of “holiday”. So, what shall I do with the time? I’m going to be doing some research into the work I’ll be doing, so that should take up some time. Also, there’s a certain wedding to go to on 30th August and we’re off to Keswick for just over a week, so maybe those will keep me busy enough…

I’ve just managed to deploy Google Apps on the domain for Riverdale (my parents’ house in Keswick – http://www.riverdaleinkeswick.co.uk/) and it went very smoothly again. This time is took me about 15 minutes to set up 5 email accounts and all the back-end framework. It really is groovy.

The great thing with this is that my parents and Dave & Sharon can share all their documents relating to Riverdale, so they’ll mostly be using Google Docs I’d have thought. But I also thought that the calendar feature could be useful because they’ll be able to put information in there about when the house is booked up.

Anyway, another successful Google creation…

Since the release of MobileMe by Apple, I’ve been wondering about what I’m going to do with my galloway.me.uk domain now that there’s options like this out there. I looked into MobileMe but it doesn’t allow you to have email addresses like @galloway.me.uk – only @me.com. This is a bit pointless for a domain hosting service!

So I looked into Google Apps which is essentially a free equivalent of MobileMe. I’ve found that it’s absolutely amazing. Quick & easy to setup and very easy to use. I’ve had a GMail account for a while, but now I have one setup with my matt at galloway dot me dot uk account. This gives me all the benefits of GMail along with IMAP access, Google Docs, Google Calender, etc, etc, etc.

The dashboard for our new family Google Apps is at http://partnerpage.google.com/galloway.me.uk so check that out. I’ve not quite finished porting everything over, but that should happen sometime this week.

Anyway, thanks Google – very pleased!

UPDATE:
I’ve just finished importing all my old emails from the old server into GMail and it’s worked perfectly. I used Thunderbird to drag across my old folders into my new GMail (using IMAP for both servers). It’s worked like a charm and GMail is even clever enough to sort out duplicate emails by only importing one copy (there were a few duplicates left over from a poor IMAP migration of my server host).

So, everything is going great with Google Apps!

Well, I received another job offer today from Tessella, a company in Abingdon which I went to for interview yesterday. I also had the offer from Senokian in Coventry (at which Paul works).

I had to make a tough decision as both companies had their plus points, but I am pleased to say that I made the decision to start work with Senokian. It’s going to be a fun time I think and I’m very pleased to be working with Paul and Jake. I think that there’s lots of potential there and I can hopefully bring something to the company.

So, I’ll be starting sometime in September I should think. Now just have to work out where Helen and I will be living! (Probably at 9 Knoll Croft for a while and then see from there).

I’ve just bought FixTunes, which is a piece of software to automagically fix all artwork, song names, album names, etc in iTunes. It works on a backend database which has been populated with tonnes of data. It really does seem to be amazing!

Anyway I recommend anyone buying it who needs to sort out their iTunes library. Ours has 7110 songs in it and I certainly didn’t want to manually go through and fix all the songs!

It can be tried for free as well – go grab it: http://www.fixtunes.com/

I bought the iLife update yesterday, the family pack so I can install it on up to 5 Macs at home. So far I am finding it really good. The new iPhoto is amazing – I really like the sorting by events and that it just knows what events are. It’s much more intuitive than the old “film roll” way of organising the library. I guess that’s the way it used to be done with film cameras, but “events” is a much better way of thinking about the different files in your library.

Anyway, well worth the money and I look forward to playing with iMovie to create a new movie showing photos and videos of the world tour!