I’m a huge fan of the Mac Mini and think it has been one of Apples most under developed and under rated units, in fact I’m on my 3rd one at the moment now the MacBook Air has been eBayed. Needs as must however and although it’s the somewhat older 1.42ghz G4 model it’s no real detriment to me as (compared to the video hungry masses) all my own daily apps are probably as low end as you can get these days (“Terminal” isn’t that resource intensive). Obviously I would relish the prospect of owning an 8 core Mac Pro but I honestly have no need for one.

The new Mac Mini “Server” is a most welcome addition to the range and although not yet in the realms of what would be classed as real server technology it’s certainly heading in the right direction with it’s two hard disks, redundancy is the name of the game when it comes to servers and multiple drive RAID configurations are a must.

With a mere two disk offering your options or still somewhat limited and in this instance you’d be advised to opt for RAID 1 (mirrored disks), yes you lose half of the available storage space by doing so but the other option for a two disk setup, RAID 0, merely stripes data across both drives. Although RAID 0 does provide a performance increase two disk stripe sets offer no inherent redundancy, if one disk fails it’s game over for all your data (unless you’ve backed it up of course).

Ideally I’d have liked Apple to have added an extra ethernet port for network redundancy, adapter teaming options and as provision for limited LTSP, after all if they’re tagging this model as a server then what need is there for a bank of four USB ports? You only need one to rebuild the system (there’s no DVD drive in this model).

Technical shortfalls aside it’s the form factor and power efficiency of the Mini which are the winners here. During 2007 I ran a clients property management website from an OSX 10.4 Server enabled G4 Mini sat in the airing cupboard of my current lodgings at that time in Harrogate, the web link was provided via DynDNS across an 8mb Orange home internet connection and everything ran quite literally problem free for six months until we migrated it to some “real” hosting. Page delivery times were more than acceptable and apart from the notably generic web address provided by the free DynDNS service there was no other indication of it’s rather interesting location.

A few years ago there was talk of the Mini drifting into end of line but with increasingly realised adoption for it’s amazing versatility and new forays into Mini Server world it’s nice to see it now standing even taller in the line up.

Good things come in small packages.

Apple were slated by a few people post the September 9th event for not releasing anything innovative enough. All considered I feel this was a touch harsh but I do realise demand of the gadget hungry innovators from the world of media tech doesn’t get any easier to satisfy so I suppose it was only to be expected.

I personally think Apple have produced quite a pleasing array of products recently. Snow Leopard is a superb remodel of OSX (my MacBook Air loves it), the iPod Nano Video is a great little addition which will most certainly now expand it’s niche and the improvements in iTunes 9 for presenting the way we enjoy digital music are most alluring. The double picture disk LP with gate-fold sleeve will never return but perhaps the digital door has indeed opened for an increasingly improved user experience inviting further enhancement come the release of the mystical Apple Tablet?

Ah yes, the Tablet. Too Much Green have previously blogged about this mythical wonder, highlighting perception and faith for the still unknown element yet to enhance its unrealised dynamic as the next must have device. Steve Jobs won’t disappoint. I recently watched the superb independent film “Welcome to Macintosh” in which various Apple products were mentioned which quite literally changed the world and the way we view computing, we’re talking about the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, iTunes, Quicktime and the OSX operating system. Each would be a major achievement however for them all to eminate from a single source in such a comparatively short time frame? This is no accident. Critics of the Apple tablet are still viewing it as either an overgrown iPhone or a mini touch screen laptop which is obviously somewhat amusing, they aren’t envisioned enough to look past Facebook into other areas of potential and by writing the tablet off before it’s even released are merely highlighting their own boxed in ignorance. Take a lead, “Think Different“.

Myself and Lesley were sat in Cafe Tous les Jours the other day playing with the recipe spinner on my iPod Touch, the food element got me thinking about the tablet and I realised how useful a larger wipe clean device might be in the kitchen. Recipe programs are already available for “regular” computers but let’s be honest, cake mix and keyboards aren’t a good combination, a sealed wipe clean device could be given the once over with a damp cloth, cake mix gone and no harm done. If it was latched onto Wi-fi you could download new recipes on demand (or just view them on websites), you could pass on links, modify ingredients, share and re-distribute, view and follow videos of food prep methods all whilst listening to your iTunes and Tweeting your friends an E.TA for when the meal you’re cooking them will be ready. A software cooking application would have no problems converting weights and measures, it would provide an on screen timer and could even IM your iPhone with a reminder to take the cake out of the oven should you get too engrossed in the afternoon movie.

The header shot on this post shows potential for such an application (click the image for more details). It was pulled from a strain of development which seems didn’t reach completion as I can find no progressed information past 2007, perhaps it was merely two years ahead of it’s time? I would most certainly urge those responsible to get back on the case as the term “Cook Book” could have a whole new meaning by this time next year.

I’m no Steve Jobs (obviously) and the “CookBook” idea isn’t perhaps the most visionary scenario for Apples latest design innovation, however it does highlight a world of computing outside the box of business and media, an area Apple have already seamlessly re-invented. What’s next?

If you don’t have the luxury of a second computer or on-line Virtual Server it’s a good idea to have a local instance of WordPress for mirrored back and related development, under OSX Leopard this is quite easy to configure.

Firstly you need to install the server side of things (Apache, MySQL, php & phpMyAdmin), this is quite straightforward and I’ve a separate quick and easy ‘How To’ for that HERE.

Once you have the back-end sorted go into phpMyAdmin and create a new database called wordpress with global full privilege access for the root user

Next, download the latest version of WordPress from HERE, expand it and copy the contents (not the full folder) to your /sites directory, either into the root or to a created/named sub-folder depending on your preference for access (i.e http://localhost/ or http://localhost/<blogname>).

Look for wp-config.sample.php amongst the wordpress files and open it with a text editor, input the database name, user and password you created earlier (DB_HOST will invariably stay as localhost, I’ve never had to change it even for a server side install), re-save the file as wp-config.php.

To start the actual installation, access the location of the WP install file through your browser at either the root – http://localhost/wp-admin/install.php or at the named sub-folder location you created – i.e http://localhost/<blogname>/wp-admin/install.php), the installation will start and you’ll be presented with a login password for the admin account when it’s done, it literally takes but a few seconds.

To log in use the same URL but omit the install.php tag, once in you can manage and create just as you would for your web based version.

To mirror-import your blog out of it’s web location just use the export/import feature under the tools side menu (export from the web version & import to your local installation), you’ll have to manually set up your matched theme and plugins for a truly visual mirrored copy but the import procedure will offer the option to pull in your images which is quite cool. Bear in mind also that all pre-created hyperlinks are relational to your online instance only so won’t be relative locally, however this is merely a backup we’re working with as oppose to a fully functional live web facing version so it’s no big deal.

Even if you don’t fancy a fully mirrored local instance of your blog site it’s a VERY good idea to keep a periodic copy of just the exported .XML file for peace of mind in case the worst happens, it’s so quick and easy to do and the file takes up no space, I religiously save a fresh copy after every new post.

Obviously I was keen to upgrade to Snow Leopard this week (who wouldn’t be for €28.99) and was there in the queue at Gravis on Saturday morning. After a rather satisfying chocolate croissant in their cafe we went back in the apartment and an hour later it was up and running on the MacBook Air (Rev A 1.6ghz), OK, let’s see what we have…..

The first thing I noticed was instantly snappier performance, yes, MUCH snappier. It was true then, a genuine 64 bit operating system does indeed zip along nicely on matching 64 bit hardware (not that I doubted it wouldn’t, obviously), and what about that extra 6GB of disk space we’ve been promised? 6GB? Never mind that, I seem to have got an extra 9GB….how DOES it do that? Bonus.

OK, what about existing apps (I did an upgrade), is everything working? Seems I’d lost  “Coolbook” functionality, which to be honest is no real biggie now I’ve left the heated tropics of Costa Rica, especially as Snow Leopard apparently facilitates a cooler CPU anyway. Apart from Coolbook everything seemed quite happy and it was only the day after when I discovered MAMP functionality had taken a dive (I had the pukka stack installed) but again this was no real problem, I know I could get it going again but I’ve no real need now I’ve moved all server development onto the superb little Dell Mini 9 (These days I really do wonder how I ever managed without two laptops), the Air has been a real workhorse over the past year what with running VMWare instances and the like so it probably deserves a rest anyway.

Obviously the computing masses are making comparisons to Windows 7 with some giving Snow Leopard a real slagging for “apparently” being no more than a service pack for 10.5. I haven’t seen Windows 7 so can’t comment nor am I interested in doing so, I’m a Mac and Linux guy so why would I want to, however I do think the “service pack” tag is somewhat misguided. Snow Leopard both is and isn’t a new product, 10.5 is a fantastic operating system which delivers superbly across both PPC  & Intel Macs, 10.6 is an improved version designed to fully utilise the Intel 64 bit architecture, calm down people.

Cosmetic tweaks and touches are included here and there of course and although I haven’t discovered them all (the manual was in German) the ones I have noticed have made sense (like visible airport signal strength for available networks), the “big” change though has to be inclusion of O.O.T.B connectivity for MS Exchange, yes indeed, no more Entourage required (*cheer*). As the world runs on MS Exchange this is a most wise inclusion and brings Mac desktop email inline with the now ubiquitous iPhone.

Snow Leopard was never meant to be a huge cosmetic change from 10.5, it was designed to deliver a tailored performance hit  for newer machines and on that score (for me) it’s a total success, so much so I honestly feel like I’ve got a new laptop which isn’t a bad result for a €29 DVD and an hour of my time.

*UPDATE* – My battery life seems to have increased by 30 minutes, impressive.

Email – the enabler of the electronic age? Our very own technological spokesperson, Apple fan-boy extraordinaire, Ubuntu advocate and undisputed King of Twitter, the man Stephen Fry, nailed it with his recent blog-post “Office Slavery” in which he laments the loss of the office secretary and highlights the resultant time sapping vacuum we drop into each day trawling through our digitised messages, as ever he’s right on the button and I’m not going to further drag out the scourge of lost hours spent replying, forwarding and CC-ing, we’re all more than aware how much our lives are ruled by the keyboard and the inbox. No, in this post I just wanted to drop behind the scenes of actual content for a moment to highlight a few of the technical hurdles mainstream users may not be aware of, you may think with email being the prevalent and integrated norm it is there might be some degree of stability around the majority of services offered to us, however you’d be surprised.

Let’s start with the two types of home based email, POP and IMAP, both allow you to read, send and forward etc, but it’s what they do with the actual messages which leads to potential “fun”, basically an email account configured to use POP invariably downloads everything from your ISP’s server onto your computers hard disk, IMAP mail leaves it up there.

Both POP and IMAP have good and bad points. With POP, as the full mail folder is stored on your own computer it’s easier to back everything up to a USB device and equally as easy to replace all folders should you need to restore your account at anytime (for example if you’ve had to rebuild your PC), however POP only facilitates archive mail views from a single machine whereas IMAP, due to all data being held online, offers concurrently synchronised operation and viewing from any number of machines (or handhelds such as iPhones & iPod Touch’s). Although incredibly useful for dynamic users all IMAP data is lost should your hosting company take a dive without adequate backups in place, yes, even if you’ve configured the account for “offline” viewing (IMAP offline viewing only applies to the current “live” connection, re-connection to an empty account will only display what’s online, not what “was” online, contrary to what you may think there’s no local archive once the connection is made back to the server).

Now, I’m sure you have confidence in your hosting company, they wouldn’t lose your email account? No? Believe me it can happen, I previously hosted with http://www.maiahost.com who lost all my data for the whole of May, email, blog posts the lot, and all without so much as an apology, obviously this was somewhat stressful but I suppose it’s a risk you take with cheap hosting and I quickly moved on (luckily I was mid-projects and it wasn’t a major show stopper, others might not have been so fortunate).

Post “maia” I re-located to UK2, one of the largest hosting companies in the the UK. UK2 offered a reasonable package deal with proffered multiple daily backups which after previously jittery hosting unprofessionalism seemed quite alluring, however, after signing up I was rather disturbed to discover that although the web hosting aspect was fine they didn’t offer a secure email option for IMAP. Secure email should (In my earnest opinion) be an absolute given for an IMAP connection, it utilises something called “SSL” (secure socket layer) which unlike POP provides a locked and secure end to end “tunnel” between you and the server, thus preventing your messages and content from being hi-jacked “en-route”, I like that, I like that a lot.

Where am I now then? Well, I had a stable website but un-secure email, still not good enough, so, seeing as Snow Leopard was coming out I decided to blow the dust off my redundant .Mac (dot Mac) account to see what I could do with it.
Apple revamped dot Mac a while back into something new & whizzy called “MobileMe” and I had a hit and miss relationship with it for a few months last year which resulted in me setting it to one side. A year on though with increasingly favourable press I was pushed to think it might be a nice geek-applemac-fanboy touch to start using my legacy “mac.com” email address again (seeing as how you can’t obtain them anymore). Everything was good (of course) and I’d actually forgotten how seamless, quick and easy configuring Mac email from a Mac was, it felt so nice after being away I did actually wonder what the problem had been before (as it goes I actually can’t even remember), as in life this can happen when you re-acquaint yourself with an old friend.

The interim non-Mac accounts had obviously done a bit of work for me over past year and I needed to keep them active. Dot Mac offers a nice way of achieving just this whilst negating any concerns regarding the potential flakiness of dodgy hosting hardware, you simply configure your Mac account to pull down external POP mail into a sub folder, it’s really cool and offers a nice option for duplicating all external messages by leaving them in-situ on the source, the folder replicates down to your Mac mail client, get’s checked accordingly and everything ends up under one roof, safe and sound on the Apple servers.

The advantages of going “back to Mac” have been immediately apparent, aside from silky smooth integration I use the slick webmail interface to get through Comcast’s fussy mail servers and re-contact my mate Andy in Florida (Comcast seem to block most of the mail from Europe – wf?), the iPod Touch loves dot Mac and I’ve even dumped my Google Cal and gone back to iCal & associated sync ups, yes, everything is back in it’s place and happy with SSL connectivity as standard and the statutory 20GB of available iDisk / Webspace sat waiting for me to fill it up, I can even host websites up there using the interim domain names I purchased which seems like something worth looking into.

Back to Mac then, I may even renew my subscription when it comes round

There’s obviously quite a bit of recycled information on the internet and this review is in part just that, as well as also being part speculation and part *sum* of it’s parts, hopefully (or at least partly anyway)….err….yes….

The Apple Tablet then, hopeful geek myth or concept changing portable shortly to emerge from the reality defining vortex of Steve Jobs designer distortion field? Personally I’d like to think the latter and there’s plenty of evidence stacking up around development of such a product to reinforce an imminent release, including a reported suicide due to a lost prototype (or was it indeed industrial espionage gone wrong?), whatever the story things are getting quite serious about what seems to be just an overgrown iPod Touch….or is it?

Mobile I.T (mobility?) is indeed *it* these days, so, let’s step into the rapidly moving world of speculative future tech for a moment to discuss the potential for such a mid-level take anywhere device as depicted in the opening mock up shot.
Mid-level? That would be selling it short for a start, the mighty and forever crisp Apple would never bring out something mediocre just to fill a gap, if they did we’d already be coffee shop surfing on our dinky Mac Netbooks, no, it’ll be something different (*cough*), something incredibly groovy and something we’ll all wet ourselves over and immediately desire to fill the newly created void in our resultantly lacking suite of media I.T and personal gadgetry (well, some of us), but hold on, just what’s the low down on such a unit anyway, what’s it’s attraction and who would use or buy it? (aside from the demented “We’ll buy anything with an Apple logo on it” Mac fanbase).

Well, as it goes me for one (if I could afford it), admittedly I am indeed part fanboy but also a broad and long time user who both enjoys & realises improved technology slots where apparent. From Linux server down (or up?) to my iPod Touch and across most things in between (albeit strictly Unix based I may add) I’m most certain a Mac Tablet would give my (superb) Ubuntu Dell Mini 9 more than a run for it’s money (were the money not a deciding factor of course). I like the look and idea of an optional on-screen keyboard (my touch screen intuition has been steered and honed over the past few years to want and expect more) and from previous posts lamenting the sad loss of 12″ vinyl it’s no surprise I also relish the idea of re-invented album artwork on an expanded and larger scale (apparently codenamed “Cocktail”), 10″ is a good size for portability (a netbook for me isn’t a netbook if it’s over 10″) and solid state storage has come on so much even in just the past year I’m sure it would pack a 128GB drive as standard, Wi-Fi of course would most likely kick out and pull in over 802.11n (which does make a difference).

However, it’s the unknown and unimagined which are Apple’s forte and who knows what re-packaged re-inventions of the wheel they may have in store for us to ice the tablet cake (you’d expect it to be direction aware, but what else?). Whatever cards are presently hidden up the proverbial black sleeve of Mr Jobs you just know you’re going to wonder how life ever existed before he slipped them out to reveal a five Ace hand we instantly accept as the norm, after all, even the staunchest PC user has an iPod these days and if they say they don’t want one they’re either lying, deluded or just arrogantly putting off the inevitable.

Indeed, it’s all very well and good having all this data flying about, data on your USB key, data in the Drop Box cloud, data on your hard disk, data here, data there….but how secure is it? What if you lose your USB key? It wasn’t password protected was it, no, I didn’t think so, don’t berate yourselves though, I’m invariably slack too sometimes (although only ‘sometimes’ I may add).

If you’re a Mac OSX user there’s a super quick, super efficient and super clean way to keep things in check and secure, it just involves dropping a level, let me explain.

OSX uses a format called the Disk Image File (.DMG), you may have seen these when you’ve downloaded software and installed it, clicking the DMG *mounts* the image on the desktop so you can work with it (it’s a legacy UNIX thing), anyway, what you may not be aware of is that you can create your own DMG file of more or less any size which once mounted you can drag files to and from just like you would to any drive. Once closed (un-mounted) all files are contained inside it as a single entity which you can copy to your cloud storage, USB key or anywhere you like, cool huh, however here’s the real killer – you can encrypt and password protect it using 256-bit AES encryption, sounds impressive? It is, it’s the top level encryption standard as used by the US Government (and we all know those guys don’t mess about).

Interested? Fancy a go? Here’s the procedure, it’s very easy, check the image above and reference with the following bullet points (gotta love a few bullets..!) >

• Open Disk Utility (this is in /Applications/Utilities/)
• Click “New Image” in the toolbar
• In the “Save As” field choose a name for your DMG
• The “Volume Name” is what the name of the disk will be when it’s mounted.
• Choosing a size depends on what you want to store, for general document storage 100 MB should be more than adequate.
• Choose “Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)“
• Choose “256-bit AES encryption“
• Choose “No partition map“
• Choose “read/write disk image“
• And finally click “Create“

When asked for a password make sure it’s a secure one (it will tell you) and DON’T check the box to save it in your keychain (obviously, doh…!). Disk Utility will mount the image once it’s finished creating it, just drag your files into it and un-mount when your done (ctrl + click & ‘eject’), to re-mount just click the DMG and enter that secure password.

And that’s it, a secure, portable and secure software container for all your sensitive data, and don’t worry if you need to add more stuff, you can easily re-size it later in Disk Utility (mine grew to 250GB due to some scanned docs, say no more).

It would be reassuring if certain people paid more attention to data security as it’s an obvious area of widespread and shameful neglect. Here of course I’m referring to the spate of ‘Government’ owned laptops abundantly stolen from cars over the past few years and the resulting data leakages, there are no excuses, as I’ve shown here data security is both easy and free, well, if you’re a Mac user anyway.

As both an OSX user and a Linux developer find a localised LAMP installation somewhat useful. There are a couple of methods to achieve this, the quick way, and the *real* way.

The first method is to simply download and install the MAMP bundle. This comes as a self contained single package which runs completely from it’s own folder with *one click* stop and start (see the header image) , it’s free, it uses it’s own version of Apache and removal is as easy as just deleting the folder. MAMP is quick and stable and it couldn’t be simpler to install, it’s ideal as a quick test platform for your dynamic websites and php scripting however if your drop is more toward the actual ‘LAMP-ness’ of LAMP development you may prefer to install the real deal using a more professional approach, if so here’s the How To.

Apache

OSX comes with it Apache2 installed so it just needs enabling. Very simple, in System Preferences look for the ‘sharing‘ tab and just click ‘Web Sharing‘, that’s it, remember this as you’ll need to use it for restarting Apache later.

Php

Leopard comes with php however it’s a basic version and doesn’t have all the goodies needed for full MySQL functionality, as such it’s recommended to use the excellent entropy packaged installation from Marc Liyanage. Download from HERE, click and install.

To test php create a text file containing the following single line..

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

..save it as test.php in your /’username’/sites directory, re-start the webserver (web sharing) through system prefs and go to http://localhost/test.php, you should see an extensive list of resplendent php goodness

MySQL

I presently find version 5.0.82 works best with phpMyAdmin under OSX as oppose to the newer 5.1 release, download it (HERE) and install the main package, the startup item & the preference pane, it’s all quite straightforward. Once done it just needs a touch of fine tuning, open up terminal again and type the following (entering user-name & password when requested)..

cd /usr/local/mysql

sudo chown -R mysql data/

..start the service through the newly installed utility under System Preferences and in Terminal type the following (this is to secure the DB and set a password)..

sudo mysql_secure_installation

..quite self explanatory, and it will prevent a nasty #1045 DB access error when firing up phpMyAdmin for the first time.

PhpMyAdmin

To install firstly download the latest stable release from HERE, click to expand, rename the folder to just ‘phpmyadmin’ and move it to the sites directory alongside the test.php file you created earlier.

Inside the phpmyadmin folder locate the config.sample.inc.php file, open it in a text editor, at the top of the file you’ll see the following line..

$cfg['blowfish_secret'] = ”; /* YOU MUST FILL IN THIS FOR COOKIE AUTH! */

..input a string of letters and numbers (of your own choice) as follows and re-save as config.inc.php

$cfg['blowfish_secret'] = ‘insert1234567′; /* YOU MUST FILL IN THIS FOR COOKIE AUTH! */

Restart Apache again and that should be it, log in at http://localhost/phpmyadmin with ‘root‘ + the password you created earlier.

Monolingual is (I think) one of the most useful OSX utilities about, it simply frees up extra disk space at no cost (who isn’t glad of a bit few extra bytes). Don’t worry, it’s not a data compression program, it merely removes all the extra language files you don’t use/need, and you’d be surprised how they add up. Install it, fire it up and tick the boxes. I usually dump everything but English (obviously) and as I’m an Intel based Mac guy now all the old PPC (G4 & G5) architectures too.

For maximum effect run it AFTER you’ve got your system loaded up as each program contains their own individual multi-language options, I’ll wager you’ll be quite surprised at the results, seriously. My MacBook Air is one of the 1st generation units with an 80GB HD so space management is something I need to keep on top of, anyway, after installing my latest suite of apps I thought it best to have a clean out attaining my best ever results by freeing up over 4GB, quite a saving and most definitely worth doing leaving me with a nice slot of 20GB to play with.

Monolingual is a free download from HERE.