Kev's Development Toolbox

November 17, 2004

Intel release last in current line of Pentium 4 processors

This week Intel quietly released the last in the current line of Pentium IV processors, a 3.8GHz model.

Intel has previously stated that this will be the last Pentium IV of the current line. Instead they intend to start developing other speed enhancing architecture changes, rather than raw CPU cycle speed. The new CPUs will also follow a new naming standard which will de-emphasise the actual CPU speed, following AMD’s current marketing strategy.

November 16, 2004

Can Microsoft’s Media Player dethrone Apple’s iPod?

Microsoft are making a late entry into the market of handheld media players, and are hoping to take some market share from Apple’s iPod.

Microsoft are pushing a version of their Windows Media Player software to be used on mobile MP3 players, and are appealing to manufacturers like Dell, Samsung and Rio to start making devies running the software. Microsoft has also started it’s own online music store similar to iTunes, which is also competing directly with Apple.

Has Microsoft entered this market too late, or can the marketing machine of Microsoft drum upenough business to steal customers from the already well established market leader in this area, Apple?

November 10, 2004

Mozilla Firefox 1.0 ships

Mozilla shipped 1.0 of their Firefox version yesterday.

Since downloading one of the preview versions I haven’t missed or wanted to go back to IE at all… Firefox is a leap ahead of IE, and the tabbed browsing is awesome.

I wonder how Microsoft is going to respond to this new challenger in the browser space, since MS has already announced that it will not be continuing development of IE as a standalone downloadable software component, but will instead be an integrated feature into new Windows versions (ie Longhorn)

November 8, 2004

Configuring Apache2.0 to use SSL

I followed this site to get the basics up and running, in particular how to generate self-signed certificates: Raible’s Wiki: ApacheSSL

The actual configuration of my Virtual Hosts in the httpd.conf file was more trial and error. There is plenty of info about not mixing name and ip based Vitual Hosts, but I couldn’t find a good working example. It turns out that this configuration works fine:

<code>
NameVirtualHost x.x.x.x:80

#Use SSL for this Virtual Host
&lt;VirtualHost x.x.x.x:443&gt;
   SSLEngine On
   SSLCertificateFile /path_to/server.crt
    SSLCertificateKeyFile /path_to/server.key
    DocumentRoot /doc_root_for_ssl_protected_files
    ServerName server.name.com
&lt;/VirtualHost&gt;

&lt;VirtualHost x.x.x.x:80&gt;
    DocumentRoot /doc_root_for_files_on_port_80/
    ServerName otherserver.server.com
    DirectoryIndex index.jsp index.html
&lt;/VirtualHost&gt;


&lt;VirtualHost x.x.x.x:80&gt;
    DocumentRoot /doc_root_for_other_files_on_port_80/
    ServerName otherserver2.server.com
    DirectoryIndex index.jsp index.html
&lt;/VirtualHost&gt;

#ssl config
SSLMutex sem
SSLRandomSeed startup builtin
SSLSessionCache none

ErrorLog logs/ssl.log

</code>