After months of speculation, Google have finally launched Google Checkout, their eagerly anticipated rival to the ubiquitous PayPal. As the feature tour demonstrates, the objective is to make online shopping as simple and user-friendly as possible: you search, click to buy, and the data stored in your Google account is used for payment and shipping etc. You can then track all your orders and shipping in one place (Google, obviously!).

I’m very wary of Google’s strategy to dominate the web. Granted, most of their services are free, but they can now know what you search for, control your email, know the contents of your calendar, and where and how you spend your money online. This data has great value to their advertisers, and consequently great monetary value to Google, but there are many ways in which they could potentially sell or misuse this data for the forces of evil (and no, I don’t care about their “informal” corporate motto).

PayPal is far from perfect, but they can keep my business for the time being.

Macromedia (Adobe, whatever)… can you please release a universal binary of the Flash Debug Player? It’s an integral part of my Flash, Eclipse, FDT setup, and it’s a real pain not having it available!

A preview release of Flash Player 8 for Intel-based Macs is available, so surely it can’t be too much effort to release a debug version?

I’ve invested in a black MacBook with 2GB of RAM (purchased separately of course, as Apple charge far too much for RAM upgrades). It’s an exceptional machine; the specification is great for the price, it’s aesthetically pleasing, and the ability to run Windows (preferably using Parallels Desktop rather than Apple’s Bootcamp) makes for a perfect development environment. My only concern is the occasional, quiet mooing I hear in the background
If your designing and/or developing for both Mac and PC (and if you’re not, you really should be), the Apple’s Intel-based Macs are far and away the best solution.

Opera Software have released Opera 9. The update includes a number of new features including:

• Integrated BitTorrent downloader.
• Preview the contents of a tab by hovering the mouse pointer over its title. (I often have a dozen or more tabs open so this feature really appeals to me).
• Apple-inspired downloadable widgets.
• New content blocker — “Block content” option is available from the page context menu.

Opera is quite some way behind Firefox and Internet Explorer in the popularity stakes, but it’s good to see another software developer offering an alternative browser.

The Apache module mod_rewrite is very much en vogue in this web2.0-obsessed world we live in. It’s a powerful tool for URL manipulation, and has many applications that are of interest to the LAMP developer.

I’m currently building a web app that requires wildcard subdomains. So, if the domain name is test.com, the following would all point to the homepage:

http://www.test.com
http://this.is.a.test.com
http://this.is.even.more.testing.at.test.com

The following mod_rewrite recipe achieves this:

ServerAlias *.yourdomain.com
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .*.yourdomain.com [NC]

Substitute yourdomain.com with the domain you’re using.

You can also redirect request to folders:

http://blog.test.com - points to http://test.com/blog

To do this, add the following line to the above example:

RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /var/www/html/%{HHTP_HOST}/$1 [L]

Change the /var/www/html path to match your system configuration.

For this to work, you’ll need a wildcard DNS record for the domain (easy to setup if you control your own DNS).

If you’d like to find out more about mod_rewrite, check out:

The mod_rewrite forum

mod_rewrite: A Beginner’s Guide to URL Rewriting

URL rewriting tutorial at HTMLSource

mod_rewrite cheat sheet

I’ve been doing lots of mod_rewrite stuff lately which has necessitated restarting Apache over and over again. Before doing so, I always run the command “apachectl configtest” to ensure the configuration is correct. Passing the configtest option parses the configuration files and either reports “Syntax OK” or outputs detailed information about the particular syntax error. Most people will recklessly stop and start Apache without doing this, but if you have an error in your config the Apache startup process will fail. If Apache does not start, you web server is down, and if your web server is down….

Google have released a new beta of Google Earth, featuring a host of great new features including:

• Improved, user-friendly UI.
• 3D buildings can now feature textures.
• Linux support (nice one Google!).
• French, Italian, German, and Spanish versions now available for download.
• Better GPS support (Google Earth Plus only).
• More realistic peaks and valleys.

The addition of textures to 3D buildings adds a great deal of realism to Google Earth:

A Google Earth Scene with no textures

A Google Earth scene with textured buildings

Google are encouraging users to create and submit textured buildings created in Google Sketchup, which is a clever way of promoting another application from their stable of downloadable applications.

The author of the CSS3 preview page, Joost de Valk, has launched CSS3.info, a site dedicated to information about CSS3.

For more information on CSS3, check out:

http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/current-work 

The BBC’s eagerly anticipated live video streaming of the 2006 World Cup appears to have failed before a single ball has been kicked:

(Screenshot taken approximately 15 minutes before kick-off of the opening match, Germany vs Costa Rica).

It seems some people we’re expecting problems, but this soon? Here’s hoping they can get things working ASAP.