Brent Kearney

For the past week or so, temperatures have been climbing and snow has been turning to slush in the Banff/Lake Louise area. This weekend, it was 8 degrees Celsius at Lake Louise. The snow conditions are very good, for spring, with about 1.5m of snow base left. Early Saturday morning it was super crusty, but by 10:00am it had softened up to provide great ski conditions at Lake Louise. The resort is mostly empty, too, so there are no line-ups anywhere. Its warm enough that the resort is hosting live music on the patio at Kokanee Cabin, making an excellent apres-ski atmosphere on sunny afternoons.

From what I’ve heard, Norquay is pretty much finished for the season, with only a couple of runs remaining open. Sunshine and Lake Louise have only closed a couple of runs each, with both resorts offering over 100 runs to its sparse population of spring skiers. I’ve heard that the snow in the backcountry is excellent, but avalanche dangers are fairly high, depending on the microclimate and underlying terrain.

For nearly a year, I leased a server for hosting websites, mail and DNS for web projects and consulting clients. It was expensive, but I thought it was necessary because I needed maximum control over the environment in order to run whatever web apps I needed and to create custom configurations to meet the needs of my clients. Then I discovered DreamHost.

DreamHost is a web hosting company that leverages open source software and mad geek skillz to bring you almost all of the benefits of having your own leased server environment, but for shared hosting prices. This is a company that really gets it when it comes to web technologies. They understand that their users know that vhosts, DNS entries and open source software does not incur the costs that most hosting companies charge for, so they include these things for free, even in their cheapest package. It’s over the top.

While you can’t directly control Apache directives, the sysadmins have created a full featured setup that lets you achieve pretty much anything that you would want to do anyways. For example, you can use their custom-made and very functional control panel (included free with all plans) to setup a vhost with your choice of these server-side environments and/or services:

• Full Shell and/or FTP access
• Ruby on Rails
• Perl/CGI via mod_perl
• PHP4, running as CGI or not
• PHP5, running as CGI or not
• A MySQL host with unlimited databases
• Frontpage extensions
• .htaccess password-protected directories
• Quicktime and/or RealAudio/Video streaming servers
• Jabber instant messaging
• IMAP and/or POP3 services, with virtually unlimited user accounts
• Automatic “one-click” installation of numerous popular open source programs, like Wordpress, phpBB, Joomla! CMS, Gallery, MediaWiki, Webcalendar and more…

Their cheapest plan ($7.95 USD/mo) includes 1TB of bandwidth, 20GB of disk space, unlimited MySQL databases, 75 shell/ftp users, 3000 email accounts and unlimited extra domain and sub-domain hosting. As if thats not enough, as an incentive for sticking with them, they increase your bandwidth quota by 8GB per week and your disk quota by 160MB per week.

The icing on the cake is their referral program: they give you $97USD for everyone that you refer to their service (if they sign up), or 10% of what your referred customers pay plus 5% of what their referred customers pay.

My only concern with this company is whether they can afford to stay in business at these prices, and whether they can keep upgrading their infrastructure at a rate that matches the customer growth that they are surely experiencing. Having said that, I encourage anyone who is either looking for new hosting or wants a better deal on their current hosting to check out DreamHost.

Apple successfully pulled of its switch from the PowerPC architecture to Intel’s latest and greatest, the “Core Duo” 2-in-one x86 processors. The new machines have been selling like crazy, and for good reason: they’re blazing fast and have a feature set that, for the price point, is unmatched in the personal computer industry.

Part of that feature set is their amazing new UNIX-based operating system, OS X. It’s stable, fast, secure, easy to use and it looks so good that it makes you want to lick it. For the first time, there is now a viable alternative to Microsoft Windows on the Intel platform. With rising security concerns about Windows, people are actually looking for alternatives.

Some pundits are saying that the availability of this alternative, together with the news that Microsoft’s next release of Windows will be delayed until 2007, will result in a significant blow to the Redmond giant’s market domination.

There is a catch, of course. OS X runs on Apple’s own hardware, only. At least, officially it runs only on Apple hardware. Unofficially, hackers have managed to circumvent the software protections that are supposed to prevent OS X from running on non-Apple hardware, and booted up OS X on their Dell, HP and generic PC systems. However, using hacked versions of OS X is probably illegal, its difficult to install, and users who do it will miss out on the frequent updates that Apple sends out.

Another catch for people considering a switch, even if they’re willing to buy new Apple hardware, is that they may have some applications that only run in Windows, and they’re not sure that they’ll be able to live without. For these people, Apple has just released a new product that allows users to boot up Windows on their Intel Mac. Its ingeniously named “Boot Camp“.

Boot Camp is free to download, and will be included as a standard feature with the next release of Mac OS X, due out this year.

Rumour has it that Windows runs faster on the new Macs than it does on currently available PCs. Long-time Windows users will now be able to upgrade to slick new Apple hardware, and dabble in OS X at their leisure, without the risk of not liking it and being stuck without crack, I mean, Windows.

John C. Dvorak today offered an insightful prediction on how this situation might develop in 2006:

So, is this how it will go in businesses across the country? I bet Apple does.

February – “We don’t do Macs. Windows only.”
March – “Windows runs faster on those new Intel Macs than on my pc?”
April – “Since we can run Windows on a Mac, let’s buy one and check it out.”
May – “It is faster! And this OS X stuff is interesting.”
June – “I just created some widgets that will really be useful for everyone. Since we have to replace all our pc’s anyway, let’s only get Macs.”
2007 – “Vista’s released? So? We don’t do Windows. Mac only.

The trail crews at Sunshine have been busy every night, pouring cement on the runs around the resort. For the past couple of weeks, spring has been creeping up on the local resorts, and the rocks are starting to sprout up through the crusty snow. As usual however, there are still some sweet spots to be found. Today I found some decent soft snow underneath the Teepee-Town chair, including The Shoulder. Riding that chair is like aging at 5-times the regular rate, but its still better than chattering around on the crust. Watch out for the rocks though, they are popping up here and there. If you go to the shoulder, take the lowest route in that you can find — up top are roots and rocks with little room to maneuver.