The following steps are the mostly-complete guide to setting up XAMPP: set alternate folders/domains/subdirectories, enable “missing” extensions, and let it play nicely with VisualStudio’s local IIS.

1. Download zip version
2. run setup_xampp.bat to fix directories
3. to access your local dev like `http://ALIAS.localhost:81/whatever.php`, in \apache\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf add your custom directories like: (note port 81 from step 7)

   
   <VirtualHost *:81>
    ServerAdmin YOUR@EMAIL.COM
    DocumentRoot "/Relative/Path/To/LocalFiles"
    ServerName ALIAS.localhost
    ServerAlias www.ALIAS.localhost
    ErrorLog "logs/ALIAS.localhost-error.log"
    CustomLog "logs/ALIAS.localhost-access.log" combined
   
    <Directory "/Relative/Path/To/LocalFiles">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    </Directory>
   </VirtualHost>
   

    

4. Update your hosts file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts) accordingly: 127.0.0.1 ALIAS.localhost
   (added bonus: wildcards in hosts file (untested))
5. OR, instead of #3 and #4, configure subdirectory aliases in \xampp\apache\conf\extra\httpd-userdir.conf, which will let you access your local dev like `http://localhost/ALIAS/whatever.php`
   

   <IfModule alias_module>
    # ===== Description of the following
    Alias /ALIAS "/Relative/Path/To/LocalFiles"
    # Access control, etc
    <Directory "/Relative/Path/To/LocalFiles">
    AllowOverride All
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    </Directory>
   </IfModule>
   

6. Allow “missing” extensions by uncommenting dll line in \xampp\php\php.ini
7. If also have IIS (VisualStudio) on same computer, you’ll need to change the ports (you can use other numbers)
   1. in \xampp\apache\conf\httpd.conf – change `Listen *:80` to `Listen: *.81`, `ServerName localhost:80` to `ServerName localhost:81`
   2. in \xampp\apache\conf\extra\httpd-ssl.conf – change `Listen 443` to `Listen 442`
   3. ignore the message in xampp-control that says it started on port 80 (that’s hardcoded)

@dgiambruno David Giambruno Senior Vice President & CIO, Revlon

Notes:

Their virtualization strategy allows them to access all of their data and sling it to any device and they did it in two days.  His simple mission is to allow the business to do whatever they want when they want to do it.

It took them 5 years to enable their virtulization strategy.  One(ness) is their mantra, one server image, one desktop image, etc.

They are moving to streaming all their applications.  They are even streaming Adobe…they have one copy that they patch and then all their users get it automatically.

The new active vectors are the SAN and mobile devices especially 4G enabled devices.  This changes the paradigm of Application Delivery and it will change the nature of compliance with government regulations.

Management and Orchestration of Virtualized Infrastructure: The Next Battleground in the Converged Stack Market

@jdooley_clt Jeramiah Dooley vArchitect, VCE

Notes:

Infrastructure is boring, but Virtualization is not boring.  Because there is competition what will come out of there is innovation.  Watching VMWare andMicrosoft go at it is interesting, but the key is that innovation is occurring rapidly.

An Intel Processor is sitting inside every major storage provider.  One answer as to why is cost.  Intel makes them by the billions and can distribute them and performance is usually great.

Microsoft seems to think that there is a phishing attack getting the user credentials or this is the work of a virus/worm. My guess is that it is a full on assault on Hotmail using both methods. Just today I received an email from a known contact with this in the body:

Hello,
So amazing!I ordered one black apple iphone 3gs 32gb from this website [link removed] www.savyou.com one weeks ago,today I’ve got it .Far from my  imagination, it’s genuine and as good as I expected,but much cheaper.I can’t help sharing this good news with you! May all goes well for you.Cheers!
Jay

An interesting part to this email is that this is a standard closing that this person uses, perhaps in a signature file. At the end of the day this becomes a nightmare to email system administrators. This is a significant amount of spam coming from a previously trusted source. I have not tested out the link that I removed above but I am guessing that if I visit that site there will be a drive by download of a virus or trojan.

My preferred free web based email  service is Gmail, it may be time for every loyal Hotmail user to consider switching.

Read the Full Article.

By clicking on the “Reports” button, you can find a lot of useful information about your email account like how many spam messages you received or how many emails you received last week.  Another new exciting feature is the ability for us to skin your domain account to look and feel like your website.

Most of the changes are behind the scenes, but the enhancements to the interface should make for a more user-friendly experience.  The new software allows us better control over spam and enhances security so that we can stop more threats from ever reaching our mail server.  The new software also allows new reporting features that help domain administrators set up notification reports which let users know how much space they are using or how many emails a user is sending out.

If you would like information on how to use any of these new features, please contact our support department at 919-518-0670 option 8 or support@atlanticbt.com.

This update adds to Firefox one of the most dangerous vulnerabilities present in all versions of Internet Explorer: the ability for websites to easily and quietly install software on your PC.

To make matters worse, as you can see in the image, the uninstall option common in Firefox Add-ons is not available in this “add on.”

Tech Republic has an interesting quote from Brad Adams that explains in its first iteration this was installed at the machine level which meant that it would be available to all users on the system, but not available for uninstall at the user level. Microsoft has reportedly released another “update” that makes this “add-on”  a user level component. As you can probably guess this means that you not only have to rip it out for your user account but also all the other user accounts on the system.

So for those of you brave enough to follow the uninstall instructions at Annoyances.org and actually change the registry to remove this uninvited vulnerability from your Firefox install (it’s not that bad as long as you know how to launch regedit); whats to say this is the end of these types of shenanigans, from Microsoft.  The rub here is that if you read what was changed with the service pack there was no mention of this add-on, Firefox or anything called .Net Framework one click assistant.

If you are like me and have been putting off getting this gaping security hole closed up do not wait any longer, it only takes a minute or two.

This is one move that makes one wonder to what end will Microsoft go before they realize they have simply been outclassed and lost the browser war, post questions in the comments if you have some.

While it probably isn’t terribly important to the average web user or business person to be highly knowledgeable about these codes you’ve likely come across them in your travels on the Net so you might still want to know what they are.

Most web servers adhere to a standardized set of result codes that every request/response falls under. Each series has a general meaning and within the series there are very specific result codes.

• 200 – Success
  Everything is working properly. (these are generally silent or not sent to the browser because if everything is working ok you want to look at a web page not a message that says everything is ok)
• 300 – Redirection
  You are being sent from one page or url to another. (these are often silent because you are generally sent to a new location which should respond successfully)
• 400 – Incomplete
  Something happened and the request didn’t complete successfully. (these are generally sent to the browser in some way)
• 500 – Error
  There was an internal server error either related to the server or the software running on it. (these are almost always sent to the browser)

I’ll pick out a few of the more popular response codes you might have seen and provide some info about them, but here is a good list of all the possible response codes if you want the gory detail.

• 301 – The page you were trying to get to has moved to a new location. The server should automatically redirect you to the new page and you shouldn’t have to do anything further. Search engine marketers use 301’s a lot when a page is removed or a new website is created so that visitors and search engines can find the new page easily.
• 403 – You are not authorized to view this page. Either you authenticated incorrectly or your IP address is restricted from viewing the page. In either case its back to the drawing board for you.
• 404 – The page you were trying to get to does not exist. It might have existed in the past and has been removed or the link you followed was just wrong. There is no redirect and you’ll have to find your page another way. Our creative team put together a great 404 page for our site that hopefully not many people get to see. Check out http://www.atlanticbt.com/404
• 500 – Any 500 code probably means that something out of your hands has gone wrong. You might try back in a few minutes in case it’s a server load issue but if the issue doesn’t clear up you might try and let the manager of the website know that you had an issue. Try to remember what you did prior to the error because that can be helpful for troubleshooting.

With hosting prices as low as $5 a month you have to ask yourself what kind of service you can really buy for that amount of money. After all you can’t even buy a good fast-food meal for that price.

The economics for cheap hosts is roughly the same as it is for high quality hosts who might charge as much as $75 a month for what appears is an equivalent account. Cheap hosts still want to make a profit just like the quality hosts. They just have to do more with less so corners need to be cut.

Here are some examples:

Internet Connectivity/Bandwidth – You may not think so, but there are different grades of bandwidth and different ways of delivering it. Technically a website can be hosted off a cable-modem, which isn’t to say this is what cheap hosts do, but they often use the least expensive providers of bandwidth and often there is no redundancy in their networks. It’s up to 50% cheaper than doing it the right way with tier1 bandwidth providers and redundant routing through different providers.

Power – Power can be one of the most expensive parts of delivering hosting or datacenter services. Leading hosting providers use redundant power circuits with battery backup and generator power, cheap hosts normally have a single feed to each server and fortunately often have battery backups and generators. Often the power capacity isn’t sufficient so if there is a power outage some services still get interrupted.

Servers – Leading hosts use high quality server-grade hardware from reliable manufacturers, cheap hosts often use PC-grade hardware. Under continued high load PC-grade hardware doesn’t stand up well to the load and can fail.

Support – Hiring good people with technology experience that know what they are doing isn’t cheap. Often cheap hosts hire entry-level people to follow predefined support scripts to save money. The relative number of hosting accounts per support rep is often higher for cheap hosts, which means each rep spends less time per customer each month.

Performance and Site Density – Each server a hosting company purchases costs them money in a couple different ways. 1) initial hardware cost 2) operating system cost 3) setup cost 4) maintenance cost 5) power and cooling costs 6) rack/space costs  The more sites you can put on a single server the better your economics get from a utilization perspective. The only trouble is that if a server is overloaded it won’t perform well and your site may either load slowly or not at all. As a general rule of thumb you wouldn’t want any individual server to run higher than 50 or 60% utilization during normal usage. This is to allow sufficient headroom so that during peak utilization (such as an unexpected spike in traffic for several sites) the server can easily service the spike and overall performance won’t be affected. The economics of cheap hosting dictate a higher utilization rate and consequently performance is often affected.

Backup – Backup software and storage is expensive. Proper backup routines create several full copies of data and often many partial copies for daily incremental backups. In most cases the costs to do proper backups put them completely out of the realm of something a cheap host can provide. If you are working with a cheap host you better make sure you are performing your own backup routine.

Conclusion:

Our normal hosting plans start at $25/month. The difference between a cheap host and our quality hosting plans is $20 or less, so the question you should ask yourself is “do you feel lucky?”. If you’re lucky your cheap host will perform just fine and your business won’t be affected. If you’re not then the $20 you saved just might cost your business a whole lot more in downtime and aggravation.

Listen to the presentation.

At the beginning of 2005 we were a 6-man shop with less than 100 clients so it was easy for us to keep up with contact information and share client details with our team. However, by the end of 2005 we were eyeing our first acquisition and we new we would need a more efficient way to manage information. Through the recommendation of a trusted consultant we began exploring Goldmine®. Of the features that attracted our attention, the most important were that it was based on SQL Server and attached all inbound and outbound e-mail to a contact record automatically.

We soon installed the software and were off and running. Aside from the very un-2005 interface (more like 1990) and annoying mannerisms (such as random screen refreshes and the exclusion of Windows standards like “undo” and floating windows) I suppose we were somewhat happy. We were after-all still in the throws of an interesting acquisition that brought much more load to our team then we were expecting, so Goldmine® wasn’t at the top of our list.

Maintenance

After the first year we received our first note from FrontRange to renew our product maintenance. Of course having tried using their support a few times in the first year and not seeing a single worthwhile maintenance upgrade I opted not to renew the maintenance.  However, being a growing company we soon needed new licenses and I was informed that we couldn’t purchase new Goldmine® licenses without renewing maintenance. WOW! Now that’s a zinger… overnight the TCO doubles in price (or I suppose becomes infinite if you continue indefinitely), which isn’t cheap to begin with. I believe we had 15k in our initial first year software costs (not including hardware, and labor).  At no time in our purchase process was this made clear. Not wanting to rip everything out, we bit the bullet and we have been buying maintenance ever since.

Data Structure

Goldmine® reuses tables for different purposes so a column called “Email” might actually be a street address in one row and a date stamp in another. These are fictitious examples but I assure you the point is real. Additionally there is no such thing as a one-to-many relationship between company data and contacts. So every contact creates a new company and they have a really hacked together way of joining additional contacts together in an org chart. The data mess associated with the org chart stuff would make your head spin. We needed to integrate Goldmine® with our own software for managing other parts of the business, and this single issue has created a very lousy connection and will probably ultimately precipitate a move to something else.

“New Version”

So after 2 years of the clunky 1990’s style interface and no undo function (this is a really important feature in goldmine after the screen refreshes and you accidentally wipe out the text of the e-mail you were working on) we find out there is a big new release that has a nice looking interface and new features. Of course we are on product maintenance so we expect it to be included. WRONG! We have to pay to upgrade to the new version because they have changed the name to Goldmine® Premium.  They added 1 or 2 new features and called it a new program. For legal reasons I won’t say that’s a rip-off, but you can draw your own conclusions.

Poor Support

We originally installed Goldmine® onto Windows 2000 server with SQL 2000 db. Of course we now want to get it off that old server and onto 05 or 08. We contacted support for the procedure and were informed that there isn’t an official procedure and we need to work with a partner. We are paying $4,000 a year for support and maintenance and we want to do something as simple as rehosting the application to a new server and we need to involve a partner. Perfect.

We have asked for support on a variety of other issues and haven’t faired much better than the example above. In one case one of our techs waited on hold for 30 minutes and then they wanted a credit card before they would help. I suppose that was some glitch where they didn’t understand we were on maintenance but all the same..

We pay maintenance on other products such as BackBone’s Netvault® backup software. I don’t like the fees there either, but their support is prompt and helpful so its worth the money.

Conclusion

Despite the commentary this isn’t designed to be a bash of Goldmine®. We have used it for 3 years and it certainly has its ups and downs. We wouldn’t have been able to keep organized as we have grown from 6 to near 30 people in 3 years without some kind of CRM and Goldmine® does some things well. If some other CRM vendors would provide an integrated e-mail conduit and a good one-to-many relationship between companies and contacts we would be very likely to switch. So far, unless we roll our own software I haven’t seen any viable options so for now we’ll grumble and stick around. Here are some summary strengths and weaknesses for Goldmine® if you are considering a purchase.

Strengths:

• Integrated e-mail client
• Desktop-based system. Power users will find it faster than a web-based sytem
• Full-featured. There are gobs of features built in
• SQL Server based (vs. a proprietary or non TCP/IP accessible RDMS)

Weaknesses:

• Database structure
• FrontRange corporation (a customer-centric management style would take this product far)
• Desktop-based system.
• Deployment to remote locations is going to be a hassle.