I’m having a bit of a dilemma.

I’m a web developer, and as a web developer, I’m part of an industry that is forever evolving. New tools and techniques are being created all the time, and if you don’t keep up with the latest industry developments, you face being left behind.

In addition to this: I’m a PC – and very proud of that fact. Microsoft’s Windows platform might not have been at the top of its game at all times (I’m looking at you Windows Vista and Windows 8), but I think Windows 7 is a fantastic operating system – I’ll be the first to admit that Windows 7 isn’t perfect, but I like it.

It’s a lot like your favourite hoodie: the design might be faded, the stitching around the hem might be starting to come loose, and there might be other hoodies with cool, slick and stylish designs on them, but your like your favorite one because it has molded to your body shape and fits you perfectly – which is exactly the case with me and Windows 7.

So?

My dilemma is that, in my effort to try and keep up to date with the latest tools and techniques being developed for the web industry, I’m going to have to jump ship and start using a Mac.

I’m no fan of the Mac.

Unlike my favourite Windows-7-hoodie, a Mac-hoodie would be too short on the waist, too long in the sleeves, and things would keep falling out of the pockets.

Anything I’m able to do on a PC I’m equally able to do on a Mac (and vice versa – but more on this in a moment), but I prefer doing it on the PC as it fits my way of working better. More and more, however, I’m seeing people within the web industry ignore the PC and focus on the Mac. Tools such as CodeKit and Hammer are Mac exclusives, and even tools which support both platforms such as GitHub, tend to focus on the Mac features first.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m able to achieve the same goals as all of these Mac-only tools via the combination of my PC and Debian development server – but it never just works - there is always something that I need to configure or fix. One could make the argument that I’m better off doing things the hard way, and that I’m learning more by manually configuring everything, but I’m not a software engineer - I’m a web developer, and as such, so I don’t care how the tools I use work, I just care that they do work.

This isn’t to say that Macs are fundamentally better than PCs (they’re not) or that PCs are better than Macs (equally not). It also doesn’t mean that the tools in question can’t exist on the PC (they can, if only someone would build them). It simply means that the developers of said tools, for whatever reason, are choosing to build them exclusively for the Mac, and as such, if I want to take advantage of them, I also have to use a Mac.

Once bitten, twice shy

Anyone that knows me knows that I embraced Apple once before when purchasing an iPad, which I later regretted. I still have the iPad in question, but it currently exists as nothing more than a music player, pumping funky tunes out of its speaker dock, as all its other functionality has been superseded by my Android phones and tablet.

I also have access to a Mac at work, but don’t use it for anything more than checking email or reading documentation, as everything else I need to do is completed using an old Windows 7 laptop which I brought into work on my second day of employment. I keep giving Apple the opportunity to impress me, but keep coming away disappointed.

So the point (and dilemma I’m facing) is that, if I should somehow find the £1,500 needed for a semi-decent Macbook, and decide to embrace the Apple once again, am I just going to end up regretting it?

As always, I welcome your comments below.

Tablets and touch-screens

Metro is obviously very much designed for tablet and touch-screen devices. If I had such a device to test it on, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that I would probably like it as a touch-screen GUI. But I’m a desktop user that uses a keyboard and mouse, and Metro just doesn’t lend itself to my workflow.

The Metro interface, potentially good for touch-screen devices, but not for desktops.

The last time I looked at Windows 8 was during the Developer Preview in September last year. At the time I remember having much the same opinion on it as I do now – the only difference was that back then I was filled with some hope that Microsoft might fix the things I didn’t like.

This is based on the fact that I didn’t like the preview releases of Windows 7, but Microsoft must have listened to consumer feedback, as pretty much everything I didn’t like had been fixed by the time it saw a full release – and as a result, I’m now quite happy to say Windows 7 is the best operating system I’ve ever used.

Going backwards

I highly doubt the same thing will happen on Windows 8, however, as it seems that Microsoft are going backwards. Case in point, the removal of the start button. I think the start button is one of Microsoft’s best innovations, and its removal, in favour of a Mac-like active corner that leads to Metro, just feels wrong.

At least the Developer Preview last year let you disable Metro, which gave you the familiar Windows 7 start menu. I would have been happier if this was still the case, as I’d be able to reap the benefits of using Microsoft’s latest operating system, but it seems that this feature has also been removed.

The long and the short of it

As it stands at the moment, I don’t like Windows 8 as a desktop OS any more than I like Android or iOS as a desktop OS. Desktop and touch-screen users have different work-flows, and while it is noble to try and offer a unified solution (a notion which I fully support), Microsoft have a way to go before they get it right.

It would appear, however, that whoever it was that hacked into my server and turned it into a spam-sending machine, had other ideas.

(This post is a bit long and rambling, so feel free to skip to the end if I start to bore you.)

A bit of background

This time last year, if you had asked me about running my own Web server, I would have told you that I had no interest in it. I was perfectly happy with the cPanel based shared hosting that I was been using, and didn’t see the need for anything else.

This all changed during my time at Propeller Communications, where I was introduced to version control. My first taste of a version control system was Mercurial, and while my own experience of it was rarely bad, and the bundled TortoiseHG was a joy to use, it didn’t take long for me to realise that the de-facto industry standard was Git (thanks, mainly to GitHub), so upon leaving Propeller, I made the switch.

The list of benefits afforded to users of version control is long, but the one benefit that really caught my attention was the ability to push changes I had made on my local machine directly to the server. No longer did I have to use FTP to upload the correct files to the correct place, while remembering to removing files that weren’t needed any more. I simply had to run one command, and everything was taken care of for me.

But, in order to reap the benefits of Git, I needed my sites to be hosted somewhere that supported Git – and to date I’ve yet to find a shared host that does. So it was time to say goodbye to cPanel, and say hello to SSH.

First tentative steps

Prior to setting up my live server, the one the hackers took a fancy to, I had built two local development servers.

The first, which was as much an experiment as anything else, was in built out of an old PC in the office at Ghost Design. The process involved booting off the Ubuntu Server (10.11) CD, selecting all the options I wanted (LAMP, DNS, SSH, etc..), then, after watching the progress bar complete, I installed Webmin to help manage it. This, I felt, went quite well, and allowed me to gain more confidence using the Linux command line.

The second, which I use as a development server in my flat, was built out of a PC that I had been using as a Windows-based media server. The install of Debian 6 was a much more involved process because I had decided to install all the software I wanted manually. I also avoided installing Webmin, as I wanted to learn how do things properly.

The success of these two servers had filled me with confidence, and so on the 8th December 2011, with a small loan from my mum, I ordered a dedicated server from Hetzner. Because a development server should be as close to that of the production server as possible, I went for Debian 6 again, and for the most part, followed the same instructions as I had for my home server.

Skip to the end

On the 30th January I received an email from Hetzner stating that an ISP had reported my server for sending spam. I forwarded this email to Phil, who suggested that an incorrectly configured mail server might be at fault. After removing EXIM, I thought that would be the end of it, but three days later I received another abuse report.

A full week later I was still receiving abuse reports, and crying out to Phil for help. I have no idea how he managed it (via the use of the occult no doubt), but he tracked down the culprit: a whole bunch of unexpected files located in three of the sites/vhosts I was hosting.

Two of the sites were based on WordPress. I vaguely understand how the open source nature of WordPress, combined with an out of date install and some lax permissions, could allow someone to search the source code for exploits, then search the Web for an exploitable server. But the third was a static HTML site, meaning whoever had done this had been able to get access to it from one of the other two sites, meaning, potentially, the entire server was compromised.

To stop the immediate issue of spam being sent, I had to turn the server off, and following Sheepy‘s advice, I’m going to “Nuke it from a great distance and start again”.

Prevention is better than cure

So what can I do differently to prevent this from happening again? I think my main issue was that of permissions. You can afford a level of flexibility, and a more relaxed attitude to permissions on a development server, because, for the most part, it isn’t accessible to the outside world. For obvious reasons, the same isn’t true of a production server.

I’m also going to make sure that any software I use on the server is kept up to date, thereby increasing the chance of exploits being fixed.

Anyway, I’m going to reinstall the server soon, and I’m still hoping to write the server newbie post, so watch this space.

I’m about as PC as PC can get (and I’m not talking about being Politically Correct). In my opinion, the only thing Apple is good at is producing shiny tat that costs twice as much, and yet has half as many functions, as their competitors.

Sure, everything that Apple does looks very nice (if you like that style, if not, you’re totally out of luck), and their products’ interfaces are always very easy to use for beginners, but anyone with half a ounce of intelligence will soon outgrow what Apple has to offer, and start to feel frustrated at their lack of control. This is pretty much what has happened with my iPad.

Out with the old…

When the iPad was first announced, I remember feeling very angry at its lack of multitasking, and had this whole rant to myself about how Apple were failing to treat their customers like adults.

A few months later, after some of the things I objected against were fixed, I decided that I wanted a tablet computer, and, at the time, the iPad was the only real option. I should have heard the alarm bells as soon as I discovered that you need to use iTunes to activate your iPad, as I had thought the iPad was a stand-alone device, but it turns out it is just an extension of iTunes.

To be honest with you, this wouldn’t even bother me if it wasn’t for the fact that, on the whole, iTunes is some of the worse software I’ve ever encountered. iTunes is guilty of everything from performance issues, to deleting your entire media library. Even if iTunes was good, I would rather it be a choice, than something which is forced on me… why lock the file-system off?

The other thing about Apple is that they’re not set-up as an innovative company – they’re set-up as a company that lets new features trickle out, just in time for people to spend money on the latest piece of hardware. Siri, the new personal assistant application is an iPhone 4s exclusive. It has been proven that Siri runs just fine on the iPhone 4, so why not let iPhone 4 customers use it? I’m not saying that Apple should give it away for free, I would be more than happy for them to charge for the application, but Apple would rather they spend between £500 and £700 for the new hardware.

All of this leads me up to the last couple of months, during which time I’ve been getting increasingly upset with with my iPad. Some apps were refusing to start, others were constantly crashing (without giving an error message), and it was crawling along at a snails pace. It seems to me that the developers of iOS5 didn’t give enough consideration to the first generation iPads, but probably don’t care, because they would rather you just by an iPad 2.

…in with the new

All of this has resulted in my jumping from the sinking HMS Apple, and the purchasing a new tablet – the Asus Transformer Prime – an Android 4.0 powered workhorse of a tablet PC.

The thing that attracted me to the Transformer Prime is the detachable keyboard. For a while I’ve been thinking about getting a new netbook, specifically something with a keyboard, for the purposes of content creation. At one point I was interested in the Dell Inspiron Duo, but, as much as I love Microsoft, I don’t yet trust their abilities when it comes to touch screen interfaces (I’m interested in seeing how well the Windows 8 interface works). And I’m glad I waited, because the Transformer Prime truly does offer the best of both worlds.

I’ve had the device for less than 24 hours so far, so while I’m not able to give a full and complete thumbs up, from what little I have played with it so far, I’m very happy with it, and it already blows my iPad out of the water.

And now for something completely different

Anyway, maybe an Apple bashing post wasn’t the best way to start my new blog, but it was on my mind, so I figured I would let it out. Welcome to my new site