Nine months ago the official launch of Chrome Extensions marked a significant milestone in its competition with Firefox. Now Lifehacker is reporting a significant shift in it’s readership from Firefox to Chrome. What struck me, however, are the areas where Firefox still wins, including extensions like Firebug, NoScript and Adblock Plus. I now use Chrome for UIs like GMail, Yahoo Mail and Outlook Web Access, but improved speed is not enough incentive to wean myself onto a new set of browser features and extensions for general use.
Month: September 2010
Google Apps Sync
Used to be I always worked in a corporate environment where someone else was responsible for providing email with Microsoft Exchange and everyone used Microsoft Outlook. Email was not my problem, life was good.
Now I have my own business and I manage email for clients with limited resources. Life, or at least email, is a lot messier.
Common options these days are
- Run your own Microsoft Exchange on Windows Server.
- Use a hosted Exchange solution, eg. from Rackspace.
- Use Google Apps.
My experience with Google Apps Sync has not been as seamless as I had hoped for: calendars didn’t seem to sync quite right, and including iPhones with ActiveSync just made it worse. Then there was all the confusion around Apps Sync wanting to remove emails from in-boxes over 2-4 GB – maybe justifiable but it just didn’t work in the same way as Exchange, and sometimes trying to introduce change in an organization is simply not worth it. My client is now happy with hosted exchange from Rackspace: not as cheap as Google Apps, but cheaper for a mid-sized organization than administering email in-house.
Installing Phusion Passenger on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
Before installing Phusion Passenger you will need a working installation of Rails:
apt-get install ruby rubygems # distro packages rubygems 1.3.7 gem install rubygems-update PATH=$PATH:/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin update_rubygems gem install rails -v=2.3.4 # or whatever
The Phusion installation script builds an Apache loadable module by linking various libraries. Make sure these libraries are installed before running the script.
apt-get install build-essential ruby1.8-dev libopenssl-ruby apt-get install apache2 apache2-prefork-dev libapr1-dev libaprutil1-dev apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev gem install passenger passenger-install-apache2-module # compilation dependencies satisfied above
The Passenger installation script displays a message to add some lines to your Apache configuration script. One way to do this with Apache2 on Ubuntu is:
cat > /etc/apache2/mods-available/passenger.load < LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.15/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.15 PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8 EOF a2enmod passenger /etc/init.d/apache2 restart