Simple Setup of SSL on Apache with mod_ssl and OpenSSL

This is a very simple way of setting up Apache with SSL from a trusted Certificate Authority(CA), just follow these steps and you will have it running in no time. I am assuming you have all the prerequisites installed, Apache with mod_ssl enabled and OpenSSL. I add the following to the server configuration (either httpd.conf or apache2.conf) so it knows to listen on port 443, you can do this in the virtual host file if you wish:

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
NameVirtualHost *:443
</IfModule>

The next thing you will want to do is create an RSA key for your server. There are 2 ways to do this you can do it so that Apache will require a password at startup/restart, or you can do it without this added encryption. If you choose not to use encryption, you should make sure you protect this key as much as possible! Rename domainname with your actual domain name you want to secure.
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WMV Playback on MAC

There are many options for what to use to play WMV files on OS X. The first of these is Flip4Mac which is a plugin for Quicktime. With Windows Media® Components for QuickTime, by Flip4Mac™, you can play Windows Media files (.wma and .wmv) directly in QuickTime Player and view Windows Media content on the Internet using a Web browser. Here are 2 links
Link #1
Link #2
cellent option is VLC player for MAC (this is my favourite media player):
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Rails Application and SSL Problem in Internet Explorer

Recently we ran across a very annoying problem when deploying a Ruby on Rails application running under SSL when viewed in IE7. When we loaded the page in Internet Explorer 7 there was a content security error. This made no sense at all as everything was secure, and even when we hard coded absolute links the problem still persisted. What could possibly be causing this problem.

Thinking perhaps it was some random HTTP link sitting in the code, the developers went over everything with a fine tooth comb and could not find the problem. Knowing that a secure content error could be the result of a number of things we broke parts out of the page and rebuilt the page one line at a time until we recreated the content error. Low and behold we found a single JS file that was causing this problem!
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New Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

The good folks at Amazon have announced a new pricing scheme called a Reserved Instance to complement the On Demand instance. For a low one time payment, and about 20% of the instance hour cost, you can reserve capacity on 1 or 3 year terms. If you want to tie yourself into a long term contract but have a significantly reduced rate resulting in savings, this is the option for you.

For a standard instance, on a per use basis you will pay approximately $880 for one year. Using the new reserved instance, you will pay about $580 for a savings of around $300. These are just rough estimates, but a reserved instance saves you around 30-50% versus On Demand instances.  The longer the term, the better your savings.  You will save $1300 on a 3 year term deal against an on demand instance running for 3 years straight.
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Mongrel Gem and Paperclip Plugin Problems

This problem occurred when setting up a site using mongrel along with the paperclip rails plugin. After about a week of normal operation we started having lots of problems with the automated image resizing required by the rails application.

It was running along and generating all the images just fine, then all of a sudden it stopped processing the ‘large’ images or made them blurry, and we started seeing the following in the application logs:

Paperclip::NotIdentifiedByImageMagickError: /folder/stream.####.# is not recognized by the 'indentify' command.

This is a very strange problem since the development environments work just fine and the developers were insistent that the server was the problem and not the code, as they usually do.
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