Asymptomatic

One of the more common design patterns in installable web applications today is the Front Controller pattern. Unlike other web applications that have separate files to respond to specific requests, the front controller pattern funnels all requests through a single file, and that file processes the requested URL to respond as appropriate.

In typical scenarios, you'll accomplish this with Apache using a set of mod_rewrite directives. These directives first check to see if the requested file or directory exists. If it does not exist, then the request is passed on to the front controller. This allows requests for existing files - like images, stylesheets, and client-side scripts - to be requested directly rather than passing through the URL rewriting mechanism.

If you are familiar with implementing a front controller using Apache, you will recognize these directives, which are commonly found in an .htaccess file within the application directory:...

I was just poking around looking at some domains today, and checked in on the .com version of this site. I know it's been squatted on for some time, and I'm always shocked at how much money they're asking for it. Who else is going to want that domain but me, and who do they really expect is going to pay $7088 for it? That's crazy.

Is there no way we can fairly determine who is squatting on a domain and make them stop? There's this whole (I'll call it) black market of people selling domains that they're not going to use for anything except to extort money from people who could put them to good use. Apart from BuyDomains.com, there's that awful site Sedo.com, that encourages regular people to do the same thing. It's horrible. I have a very low opinion of people that make money this way.

There should be an alternate registrar that disallows this behavior. You should be able to point their DNS servers, and it'll serve you the address that better applies to that domain. For example, if I've registered asymptomatic.net with the regular servers, and my site is deemed to be neither squatter or spammer, then you'd see my site. If I then register asymptomatic.com with this alternate service, they would evaluate the best use of the .com domain - whether it be the existing squatting site or a mirror of my .net content - and then serve the IP address of the server they deem best....

Man, this week has been difficult. We've had a few server issues with work clients, and I've been playing around with my own servers, and it's just been a mess that I'm hoping will be in the past come next week. But I've learned some lessons, and I figure I might as well pass them on because people are apparently still buying hosting from really bad places.

What do I need? This is the most basic question you need to start asking yourself before you even hunt for hosts. Having some idea of your demands, both from a technical perspective and a logistical perspective can save you some pain in the future. Here are some really basic considerations:

Shared/VPS/Dedicated -- What level of hosting you choose will depend on the types of service you intend to run and the affordability of storage space. Shared hosting is for small, single, low-traffic installations, like a single blog or a low-traffic forum. VPS hosting allows you to interact with the server configuration directly, to host more complex applications and more of them. Dedicated hosting gives you full control over what runs on your system, plus often includes dedicated storage that is many times what you'd get from the other options. But there are more things to consider....

We had a discussion at work the other day, and again on IRC recently, about what to name our computers. At first this might sound like a silly thing, especially to people who use a single home computer, but for people with more than one at home or who use computers every day at work, it's something that you probably end up thinking about at some point.

All of my computers at home are named after "characters" in books. This computer is Defiant, named after a spaceship in Bill Baldwin's Galactic Convoy novel. My file server is Naruto after the manga character, and my notebook is named Runcible, after a much higher-tech device that is the center of the Neal Stephenson novel The Diamond Age.

I tend to be pragmatic about my server naming because there are just too darn many of them to remember, but many people and organizations give them more fanciful names. For example, A Small Orange uses characters from the show Lost to name their servers, as I noticed when editing some of my content on Hurley....

I'm taking on some more server-management related responsibilities for work, and I'm trying to be a little proactive with getting things under control so that I still have time to code. One thing that I would like to do is have a server configuration that we can standardize on so that when something goes wrong on a server we have many benefits.

The advantages of having a pre-configured system are that we'll have a way to set up a server again quickly that we know will work with the software we already have on the system. If something goes wrong with one of them that is related to the system settings, we'll know what we need to fix on all of the servers to make them right, not guess at whether the fix needs to be applied to each.

The process of standardizing allows us to pick the tools that we want to be on the system without having to rely on them being provided by a host. This gets particularly hairy when we try to build tools on a hosted environment and we're not sure what other tools might be on the system that could be affected or affect the tool we're trying to build. There are too many questions....