But that 9/10′s of the internet will be able to enjoy the exact same video stream no matter what device they are on, be it laptop or the tiny iPod touch. No need for a desktop optimized version and no need for a mobile optimized version. The same stream will play on any sized device.

Make no mistake, this is a giant stab at anyone who is arguing that flash is needed on Apple’s devices. If you need any further information about the state flash on Android you need only watch the video here and then read the comments. People love to rail on Apple while completely missing the point that having flash at all doesn’t mean flash works and a half-assed flash experience is not what Apple is willing to allow on their devices. Reading through the comments you’ll find a few people who argue that “at least it is there” and that “it doesn’t matter that flash sucks today because there are better phones coming out tomorrow.” That makes no sense.

According to this post on the AppleInsider forums it sounds promising:

From some I’ve the reports I’ve seen, Apple at the urging of Valve and others is really starting to get serious about their OpenGL implementation. With the drivers in development some willing to break the NDA have reported scores up to 3 times higher in OpenGL Viewer and significantly higher game performance on all cards.

First one is that you can manage applications from the application switcher. By pressing command tab you can then tab to different applications. Once an application is highlighted you can issue other command+? commands like command+q to quit or command+h to hide an application.

The second tip involves iCal. iCal in Snow Leopard now officially supports synchronizing with Google Calendar. Adding new accounts is simply done in iCal’s preferences area but adding addition calendars you have access to isn’t as obvious. To add additional calendars simply click on the delegates tab when editing your iCal accounts in preferences.

Mod_rewrite is used to manipulate URLs as they enter and pass through Apache. One way mod_rewrite is useful is that it allows you to rewrite incoming URLs so that what the user sees in their browser’s location bar is translated into what the application expects. You can also use it to manipulate the URL in the event that the location of an object has changed. In my setup I wanted to use mod_rewrite to rewrite certain URLs and then proxy them through the Railo application server.

Lets say my Railo application lives at http://localhost:8080/ and I want any URL that comes into Apache (on port 80) that starts with a keyword like ‘show’ to be rewritten and passed to Railo. Railo could just as easily be hosted on some other machine but for this example lets just say it is located on the same system as Apache.

In my example, I have a new vhost configured in Apache and it looks like this:

  <VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName railo.dustinrue.com
    DocumentRoot "/Users/dustin/Sites/railo.dustinrue.com"
    <Directory "/Users/dustin/Sites/railo.dustinrue.com">
      RewriteEngine On
      RewriteRule ^show/(.+)$ http://localhost:8080/index.cfm?url=/show/$1} [P]
    </Directory>
  </VirtualHost>

Notice that I’ve told mod_rewite that I want to use an external command for rewriting the incoming URL. An external program basically accepts one argument, which is the URL portion that matches the rewrite rule, and then prints out the reformatted URL which Apache then uses from that time on and in this case, passes to Railo.

In this example, mod_rewrite will take a URL that might look like:

http://railo.dustinrue.com/show/article/id/123456/

And turn it into:

http://localhost:8080/index.cfm?url=/show/article/id/123456/

At the end of the mod_rewrite rule you see a flag telling mod_rewrite to proxy the request through the rewritten URL rather than giving than than telling the browser to visit the new URL (the default behavior). In turn, the request comes into Apache which sees the ‘show’ keyword. This keyword causes the request to be passed to the application server which responds with the appropriate output and this output is then sent to the browser.

In my example, the rewrite is very simple. You can do far more advanced stuff than this and it’s even possible to do some rewriting right within Railo and the server it is running under such as Jetty or Tomcat.

Here’s the first one. If you have a folder as a stack item on your dock, command clicking it will immediately open the folder instead of doing the usual stack animations.

The second one is, if you select a file anywhere on the desktop or in a finder window and press command+shift+T you’ll add that item to the dock as a direct link to that file or as a stack if it is a folder. Command+T itself will the selected file as a sidebar item in Finder.

One thing that hung me up though, and seems to hang up some others, is the configuration of virtual hosts when using Jetty. The OS X package is only available with Jetty and the documentation does a fine job of explaining how to setup virtual hosts. The only problem is they fail to mention that you actually need to uncomment some of the included config file to make virtual hosts work properly. Some people might see that right away, I glossed over it.

Documentation for setting up virtual hosts is provided by the Railo team at http://www.getrailo.org/index.cfm/documentation/installation/railo-express/. Note that in the virtual host definition section the documentation shows the option virtual host information already commented out, in the files distributed in Railo Express, they are not uncommented.

You can learn more about doing virtual hosts using Jetty at http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JETTY/Virtual+hosts.

The only “problem” I had was that my Linux system would show up with an icon that looked like an Apple display. I wanted to appear in my Finder window as a little bit closer to reality. By default OS X is aware of all of Apple’s products and can display the appropriate icon for any product it finds. In my setup I’m happy with my Linux system appearing as an older style of PowerMac. With a bit of effort you can cause OS X to show any custom made icon you want.

This blog post explains the process and this comment describes the various device types you can specify.

There are times however that you might not want to use this feature. For example, I was out of town this weekend and my Macbook was spending a lot of time in sleep. Even though sleep uses very little power, it still uses more than it would if the power was completely off. In this situation I prefer that the laptop simply hibernate when I close the lid.

You can tell an Apple portable what kind of sleep mode to use using the command line tool called pmset or, better yet, you can use the very simple preference pane called SmartSleep. SmartSleep is a simple frontend to the pmset command allowing you to choose between a number of different sleep options. Best of all the utility is free and is available at http://www.jinx.de/SmartSleep.html

To do so start System Preferences from the Apple menu in the upper left. Next, click the keyboard option and then click the Keyboard Shortcuts button.

Click the plus to add a new keyboard shortcut. Search for the application, enter in the name of the menu item, the keyboard shortcut you want to assign and click Add.

The shortcut will now have been added. You may need to close and reopen the application before it appears.