Da Vinci Planet » Architechture

Caching Tutorial for Web Authors and Webmasters

Da Vinci — Sun, 06 May 2007 12:59:22 +0000

Here’s a useful guide for everything related to Web caching. Webmasters inevitably have cache related issues at some point in time. The author describes different types of caches and how to control them.

Caching Tutorial for Web Authors and Webmasters

Virtual Appliances update

Da Vinci — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 03:59:10 +0000

In a previous post on VMware virtual appliances I wrote about how easy and convenient they are. So it is good news and for good reason that the VMware directory of free virtual appliances has grown. The directory is up to date with recent versions of most (free) operating systems and many applications. They even have a “Voice Mail RSS Feed Generator” . Personally, I have been mostly using a WinXP virtual appliance – one that I had to create myself using the VMware server (also free, but because of the XP licensing it’s not really “free”).

If you ever want to test an operating system or an application, but you are hesitant to install it on your own computer or server, this is an excellent virtualization option. There are, of course, many torrent downloads available – both good and bad. Other uses of virtual appliances include testing of software, like Windows Vista, IE7 or Microsoft Expression Web – all those beta applications that you really want to try out, but don’t want install on your computer just yet.

Technosocial Architect

Da Vinci — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 01:09:03 +0000

Thomas Vander Wal has a great post in his blog on social interaction with technology, which he refers to as technosocial. His perspective is that there is a gap between what information and when people need information versus what techologists provide. In my full-time job I am responsible for implementing Web metrics and it is always surprising to see how much information people *want*, but then never really look at or understand.

We (as designers and developers) focus on making our technology easy to use and providing a good experience in the domain we control.

People want to use the information when they need it, which is quite often outside the domains we as designers and developers control.

Technosocial Architect – vanderwal.net

Create your personal VPN using Hamachi

Da Vinci — Thu, 18 May 2006 03:47:34 +0000

In our world of working at the office, from other offices, from home, friends’ homes, airports, Starbucks or even from parks and other wi-fi hot spots, security of our Internet connections is a major concern. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) make it possible to connect securely to networks from remote locations. While employers normally provide VPN access to their networks for employees it is often useful for employees to have access to their personal networks at home – especially when they frequently work from home. However, setting up your own VPN can be costly and overwhelming if you do it the enterprise way. There are a few different ways to create your own secure network, but most are surprisingly difficult or at least to non-technical folks. Hamachi is an amazingly simple and free service for creating your own VPN.

I read about Hamachi a few months ago on my favorite site lifehacker.com and have been using it since. It has great appeal to the gaming community because it allows one to create your own LAN over the Internet, but it has a lot of potential for the working professional. I’m not saying working professionals shouldn’t play games . By creating your own Hamachi VPN you can create a secure network, which gives you access to files and services on any of your computers or servers.

Since the source code is not open, some people are concerned about the security around Hamachi. However, they claim “Nobody will be able to see what two Hamachi peers are talking about. Not even us.”

Hamachi is a zero-configuration virtual private networking application with an open security architecture…

A special effort went into designing and polishing Hamachi user interface. The result is sleek, simple and intuitive, while still very much functional. Everything you need, nothing you don’t.

Hamachi software contains no spyware, bannerware or any other -ware unrelated to its purpose. And it never will.

ExtremeTech has a very good article on setting up your own VPN.
ExtremeTech: Secure Surfing to Go: VPN Made Easy

Wikipedia has a fairly academic overview with many resources.
Wikipedia: Hamachi

Lifehacker.com
Profit42.com: Share iTunes music over the internet in 3 easy steps

Printing to your home printer from anywhere is also useful!
Transparent VPN, Printing From Anywhere with Hamachi

I have read a lot of complaints about problems with getting Remote Desktop (RDP) to work on Windows XP with Hamachi. Cyberonica has a very good article with a solution to this problem by explaining how to configure free Hamachi to run as a Windows service. This kind of bridges the gap between the free and the commercial version. Nice!
Cyberonica : Hamachi

Another “running Hamachi as a service” resource:
It’s a Tech World: Hamachi VPN Solution

If you like podcasts, Security Now! has several discussions on personal use of VPN and Hamachi. Look for the episodes titled Virtual Private Networks (VPN): Theory, “Hamachi” Rocks! and VPNs Three: Hamachi, iPig, and OpenVPN.
Security Now!

B.t.w. the Hamachi site is fairly basic, however, you can find more info on these sections of their site:
Comparisan between the Free and Premium versions
Hamachi Discussion Forums where you can also download the lates beta

Hamachi is not perfect. It is not open source and it uses UDP to create a tunnel that many firewalls block. However, chances are that you can easily create a VPN that will allow you to connect to your home network. Apparantly Hamachi is working on a solution that would do tunneling over an open Web port, but not as a free service. I guess that’s where the open source folks would step in .

Hamachi

Run virtual appliances on your desktop PC

Da Vinci — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 01:56:46 +0000

Virtualization is becoming more real and if you ever wanted to try Linux, but have been too afraid to install it or give up your Windows or Mac, the VMware Player will allow you to run most operating systems virtualized. The VMware Player is a free application that allows you to run virtual appliances. It is a perfect sandbox solution: test and install applications without messing up your desktop. VMWare Virtual Server and Microsoft Virtual PC allow you to create and run virtual desktops or servers on your desktop. The VMware Player is a light weight virtualization server without the overhead of a full fledged virtual server that has system management features.

A virtual appliance is a fully pre-installed and pre-configured application and operating system environment that runs on any standard x86 desktop or server in a self-contained, isolated environment known as a virtual machine. Virtual appliances provide an evolutionary step in the software distribution model.

There is a substantial list of free virtual appliances available on the VMware site, including operating systems like:

Debian
Fedora Core (4 & 5)
FreeBSD
Gentoo
Kubuntu
Puppy Linux
RedHat Enterprise
Ubuntu

and applications like:

BEA WebLogic
BugZilla
MySQL Network
Twiki

All you need to do is to download install the VMware Player (it’s a 28MB download). During installation it will ask if you want to disable autorun on your cdrom and also if you want to install the Google Deskbar, which you typically would want to disable by unchecking the checkboxes. To use the player you can either download pre-built virtual appliances or you can create your own. To use a pre-built appliance, simply download the one you want and open it with the VMware Player. You can also create your own virtual appliances, e.g. a virtual Windows XP desktop, by installing the VMware Virtual Server. It is currently in beta, but it is free for home use and it works just fine for creating virtual appliances. Note that you will need OS and application licenses (as usual) for the products that you install on the VM instance (e.g. Win XP).

So for me, as a new-cool-app-I-have-to-try-it type of person, this is awesome. It’s like having unlimited sandboxes at hand

VMware
Microsoft Virtual PC (MS Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition is currently available for free)