This post is about the bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). It’s a bill with a very friendly name, pirates are bad, and we’re going to stop them, politicans can even show it’s a sign that both parties can work together, as it has bi-partisan support. Except, that it was drafted without the input of voters that elected them. It was drafted by the organizations that paid for the political ads.
To help illustrate my point, let’s take this very likely scenario.
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This post should explain how to setup an SSL site that’s load balanced across your web nodes using Cloud Load Balancers, and nginx on your web heads. This assumes you know how to setup the following:
Now, log in to your Rackspace Cloud account, and go to the Load Balancers section.
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Your words are weapons of mass destruction. They can be used to make people pull a trigger, or lay down their arms. Share your words wisely.
The only security checkpoint against this weapon is your own heart. Keep it in check.
This is universal, it applies in business, and in your personal life.
There are many reasons to host with a managed WordPress hosting company like ours, automatic updates, backups, security, WordPress experts.. etc etc.
One of the things we haven’t advertised or done a poor job of advertising, is the inclusion of premium plugins, like Gravity Forms. Since we host a few thousand WordPress websites, we’ve seen all sorts of businesses, and use cases of WordPress. They all have one thing in common:
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In August, WordPress.org released the data of a survey they conducted. You can see Matt’s keynote and some of their findings yourself. We took their challenge to task, and did some analysis of it ourselves.
Being a WordPress hosting provider, my interest was more towards figuring out who our target customer is, and what they’re doing with WordPress. I’ve had a hunch, for a while on the results, and I figured this would be the simplest way to confirm or deny it.
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Last night, two of my 3 dogs got into a fight.. one of them lost her eye. My wife and I have gone through a range of emotions since then.. I haven’t slept since waking up yesterday morning..
I was just getting over the shock of Steve Jobs demise, when I got the call from Erin, asking me to “rush home, because Lady’s eye ball had popped out, and I don’t know what to do, I’m freaking out”. After a few seconds I told her to call the vet, and they’d give the number of the emergency hospital.. in the time it took Ryan and I to drive down from Austin, to San Antonio, my wife had picked up the dog, taken her to the emergency hospital, and had the problem diagnosed as a proptosed eye, that could not be re-attached.
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If you’re like us, and use Rackspace Cloud Servers a lot, you eventually get tired of the web based control panel. It’s slow, it’s a pain to switch to a browser and to login, and search for servers.. it’s a pain to deal with over the web based interface. Luckily, the smart folks at Openstack thought the same thing, and built some awesome command line tools to handle things.. unfortunately, it’s not as simple to install as I’d like.. so.. here’s a tutorial for myself, and others in the future. PS: This also serves as the internal KB for the company 
.
Go to http://github.com/openstack/nova and clone it.
cd nova
sudo python setup.py install
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Steve Jobs is no longer amongst us.
To say “he will be missed”, is to dishonor him, and his legacy. His fingerprints are all over society, he is one man who will not be missed. He will be celebrated, and emulated for years to come. He can not be missed. He made sure of that.
Steve was the ultimate Entrepreneur, he showed us all it could be done, and he showed how it could be done without giving up your core beliefs. He was eccentric, he was wrong, he was right, he was Steve. He was humble, he was arrogant.. he was the best at what he did. There’s not a single entrepreneur today that doesn’t wish he could be 1/10th the visionary Steve was, or 1/10th the salesman, or 1/10th the CEO, or 1/10th the Artist..
Steve is single handedly responsible for my views and vision for ZippyKid. Things I learnt from him.
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Thank you for sharing your vision with us Steve. I hope to be one of millions who continues to carry it forward. Thank you for inspiring me, I will continue to strive to emulate you.
Thank you for your inspiration.
The awesome folks at WooThemes have issued a security update, we’re going through our list of sites and figuring out which ones need upgrading. It turns out we have a couple of hundred customers that use WooThemes, so we’re trying to figure out how to execute these updates en masse. If you got the email and have updated your framework already, great, if not, we’ll have it done by COB today.
To find out if you host WooThemes sites yourself, you can issue the following command, and it’ll give you an idea of whether you need to upgrade or not.
find /-type f -exec grep -i ‘Author: WooThemes’ ‘{}’ \; -print
This will give you a line by list of folders where you need to upgrade. I recommend you replace / with the base path of where most of your sites are, it’ll speed it up considerably.
If you want to get the IP of the visitor in your Nginx logs, and you’re using Rackspace Load Balancers, you need to look at the Nginx Real Ip page.
From there, the basic thing you need to do is in your http block
http {
set_real_ip_from 10.X.X.X;
real_ip_header X-CLUSTER-CLIENT-IP;
......
}
This is similar to the approach in Apache2 with the RPAF module, except that it’s stupidly easier in Nginx.
PS: Make sure this is set, or Akismet and other Anti Spam programs will not be very effective for you.
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