Version 3.0 of my favorite cross-platform SFTP/FTP client was released over the weekend. Filezilla now boasts full drag and drop support, which was my most desired feature in the 2.x versions. It also got rid of the purple and orange icon, which was probably my second-most desired change! I do tragic amounts of FTP stuff at work, so I’m pretty happy to have the drag and drop functionality finally implemented.

You can snag up a copy of the free software, now specifically called “Filezilla Client” at the Filezilla project website. (and NOT at filezilla dot com or any of the other sketchy sites using the Filezilla name)

Meanwhile, still no major updates to the server software, which is my favorite “nearly zero config” FTP server software for Windows.

Also I’m not dead. I just forgot about my blog.

As an extension to my earlier tutorial, [How to] create an offline WAMP demo kiosk in Vista, I thought it would be worthwhile to discuss how to host more than one offline demonstration site on the same machine. These instructions will work on a Linux installation of Apache as well as our Windows installation from Apache2Triad.

This is useful if the extra sites you’re hosting have web-root-relative links (with leading slashes like "/files/document.html") that would otherwise point to http://localhost/files/document.html instead of http://localhost/site3/files/document.html, for example.

In this example, We’ll pretend you already have a site set up on localhost in your webroot. The easiest way to add new sites is with virtualhosts. To set up virtual hosts, we just need to add a bit to our httpd.conf file. Locate httpd.conf in your (apache2triad directory)/conf/ directory, and find the section for Virtualhosts. It should have a sample Virtualhost entry commented out for you already, but you need even less than that.

In your httpd.conf, add these lines:

NameVirtualHost *

<VirtualHost *>DocumentRoot C:/apache2triad/htdocsServerName localhost</Virtualhost>

<VirtualHost *>DocumentRoot C:/apache2triad/htdocs/site2/ServerName site2</Virtualhost>

<VirtualHost *>DocumentRoot C:/apache2triad/htdocs/site3/ServerName site3</Virtualhost>

…and add more blocks like this for any additional sites. Windows users, note the direction of the slashes! Don’t forget that you need to restart Apache any time you make a change to one of your conf files.

All you need to do now is add aliases to your hosts file for each virtual host you added.

In Windows, the hosts file is found in C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc
Locate the line for 127.0.0.1 and add your “ServerName” aliases like this:

127.0.0.1    localhost    site2    site3

You can now access your sites by typing their ServerName aliases in your address bar. "site2" would take you to site2, for example, and all your root-relative links would work.

Today I was asked to put together a fully-roamable version of a demo website on a laptop with Vista basic. This way, you can demo your site with a working db to a client while you’re out on a yacht with no wifi, for example. It’s fairly simple, but there are a few stupid things you need to do to get it working in Vista.

Objective: To create an instance of an existing website with Apache and MySQL that runs completely off localhost, so demonstrations can be conducted without a network connection.

For this project, I chose to use the very-awesome Apache2Triad. Apache2Triad takes care of PHP and MySQL with remarkable ease in XP, but we’re not using XP today.

Download and install the “Edge” release, 1.5.4 from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93507 . This will take care of MySQL, but the Apache services won’t start properly in Vista. To fix that, you’ll have to install Apache 2.2.4 over top.
Get the MSI installer of Apache 2.2.4 from http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi , and do a ‘custom’ install into the same path as your Apache2Triad installation. UAC will ask you for allowance, and a blank message box with nothing but an OK button came up (a cmd window came up to tell me that the Apache service was already installed, and that I could press esc to quit, but I just ignored it). Click to allow the UAC, and OK on the mystery window. When prompted, put in localhost for the host and server names. You can leave the email address blank if you want. The latter installation will add a shortcut to the Startup folder in your start menu, you can remove that.
After a reboot, Apache and MySQL should both start automatically.

Try navigating to localhost in your browser. The second time you installed Apache should have a message telling you that “It works!”. Navigate to your site root, (C:\apache2triad\htdocs by default) and paste in a copy of your demo site.

Check out http://localhost/phpmyadmin , and use the Import feature to recreate your database(s) from SQL dump files. (Oh, by the way, go make SQL dump files out of your database with Phpmyadmin’s “Export” if you haven’t already.) Click the Privileges tab in Phpmyadmin and create the accounts you need.

Navigate to http://localhost/ again and try out your site. If all went well, you should now have a working copy of your website that you can take with you and demo for clients anywhere.

Neutrality.ca is “An open letter to the government of Canada” about the issue of net neutrality in Canada. I remember when the neutrality buzz was in full force, but all of the articles I saw were USA-specific, and it never fully occurred to me that this could be- and IS going on here in Canada. According to neutrality.ca, Shaw Cable (my ISP) is guilty of intentionally throttling competitors’ VoIP services unless the customer pays an additional “Quality of Service” fee.

Sorry if I’m really late posting this, I’ve been busy
Canadians: tell your friends about neutrality.ca, and tell them to tell their friends. I think I may actually email my MP, as the Internet is probably one of four things I take seriously.

The official Google Blog posted a bit on the future of Google Video this morning, and it looks like they’re looking at becoming sort of a a video equivalent of the image search (which is what I thought it was when I first heard about it, but that was before places like Youtube and Dailymotion existed).

Starting today, YouTube video results will appear in the Google Video search index: when you click on YouTube thumbnails, you will be taken to YouTube.com to experience the videos. Over time, Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves into a service where you can search for the world’s online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted.

Does this mean goodbye to gVideo’s cool player? You could seek to the last five minutes of a 2 hour video on that bad boy.

PS the google.ca image search seems to have just introduced those mouseover tricks they’ve had for a while at google.com. It took us months to get tabs on our start pages here in Canada, oi.

SA’s Front Page update for today had me laughing very hard. It’s a list of goon-submitted “Youtube Wishlists”, ideas for videos they’d like to see on Youtube. Most of them don’t seem so unlikely, which makes it even funnier. The article also contains a link to the best ghost riding video I’ve ever seen, and probably ever will see.

Ghost Ride SF (download)

Skype 3.0 Final has been released, alongside the announcement of their new Long-distance pricing plans.

I’d tried the Skype 3 beta but it was so unstable that it didn’t last long enough on my system for me to have a look around. You’ll immediately notice the addition of another tab, the “Live” tab. This lets you access ’skypecasts’, group voice chats where you can participate or just listen to them chatting about the given topic. Very awesome.

The plan has always been to begin charging for the currently-free calls anywhere within North America at year’s end. A part of me naively hoped they would have a change of heart and keep it free forever. The good news is it’s still pretty affordable. $15 dollars for a year of unlimited calling within North America if you sign up before January 31, and then $30 when the sale is finished. You can read about the yearly long distance plans at Ars Technica.

PS, I got my copy of Windows Vista Business today!

As of this writing, I’ve already disabled screen font smoothing and the Aero glass effect.

The first alpha release of Firefox 3 “Grand Paradiso” has been released, and it finally passes the Acid2 test. Good news for web developers: with Gecko 1.9 under the hood and a bunch of css improvements, we should be able to point and laugh at IE alongside Opera… or continue to do so, but this time with less guilt.

edit: oh! P.S. I’m just excited about the new features. I don’t recommend downloading it if you’re not an extension developer or something. Alpha 1? No thanks, buddy.

Mozillazine discussion can be found here.

Bram Cohen made an announcement at the utorrent.com forums that the Micro Torrent project had been acquired by Bit Torrent inc.

+++++

This is Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol, and Ludvig (Ludde) Strigeus, the writer of µTorrent.

Together, we are pleased to announce that BitTorrent, Inc. and µTorrent AB have decided to join forces. BitTorrent has acquired µTorrent as it recognized the merits of µTorrent’s exceptionally well-written codebase and robust user community. Bringing together µTorrent’s efficient implementation and compelling UI with BitTorrent’s expertise in networking protocols will significantly benefit the community with what we envision will be the best BitTorrent client.

What does this mean for the µTorrent community? Not much, at least not at first. The intention is to maintain the website as it is, and keep the forums and community active. Moving forward behind the scenes, we will continue to develop µTorrent and will be using the codebase in other applications, especially ones where a fast, lightweight implementation is more suitable, such as embedded systems on TVs, cell phones, and other non-PC platforms.

The existent µTorrent and BitTorrent communities are immensely valuable to us, which is why we are announcing this here first to make sure you’re all the first to know about the news. The plan is to continue to foster the health and growth of the community that has been critical to the success of µTorrent. Thank you in advance for your support.

Bram and Ludde

+++++

both Bram and Ludde are available now on IRC #utorrent and will be answering questions for the next few hours.

A new forum has been created – uTorrent/BitTorrent – please use this new forum for all topics related to the uTorrent acquisition

Fans of the “Very tiny Bit Torrent client” immediately began to worry that this move might make it not-so-tiny in the long run. I had a laugh when the 7th, 8th and 9th posts in the thread all said “back to BitComet for me!”.

I’m hopeful that they won’t lose sight of their vision; tiiiiiiiiight code. It seems the BT community is antsy because of Bram’s dealing with the MPAA. A lot of people are afraid of a repeat of the Napster disaster, I’m hoping everyone learned enough from it not to let the BT project die at the hands of legitimization.

Also, you can see what Wired has to say

Followers of Google may or may not be aware of their famous (at least on the Google campus) whiteboard. It’s been alluded to occasionally in interviews and Google Blog posts. A (non-english) site called UnderGoogle has a cool Zoomify shot of the entire board as of some random period in time. I can’t wait for the goat teleporter.