I’m a huge fan of DNS Made Easy and Zerigo, so I wasn’t terribly impressed when Amazon announced Route 53. While it did fill a hole in their cloud infrastructure offerings and DNS is certainly not something to neglect, it’s also one of the most basic elements of networking - one of those elements that isn’t exciting, that just works… or doesn’t.
Back in early December someone in #habari who knows that I’ve got an EC2 server asked me what I thought of them. When I told him I preferred my Rackspace Cloud Servers for a variety of reasons he asked me to enumerate them. The conversation that ensued covered a lot of ground and really made for a great blog post.
The past week (and a half) was a busy time for most people involved with the holidays, but there wasn’t a shortage of activity in the Habari repos.
I’ve had my eye on 23andme for over a year. The idea of having someone look at my genes and predict the future is amazing to me. Unfortunately the price is also prohibitively expensive… Unless you find one of their discounts running, then it’s $991.
I ran into what is apparently a pretty common issue with users running PHP as some sort of CGI with the Nginx webserver. If you’re trying to detect whether a user is using SSL you normally check to see if $_SERVER['HTTPS'] == 'on'. Well apparently this is more of an Apache-only convention than I thought… It won’t work under Nginx, your PHP script will never see an HTTPS server value and will always think the connection is unencrypted (in my case with the SSL Admin plugin for Wordpress, resulting in an infinite loop back to the SSL version of the page).