George Edwards

A few months ago I remember speaking on the phone to Microsoft’s support team because I couldn’t activate a copy of Office 2007. Because I was using it on a Boot Camp partition and sometimes booting it from within OS X with VMware Fusion, naturally the whole Microsoft activation system got a bit confused with the constant hardware changes. So they thought I was a software pirate…which I’m not, despite being completely aware of the whole activation process after years of experience working with the stupid system.

But anyway, on the phone to their team, predictably somewhere in India, I got absolutely nowhere after speaking to a bod, a supervisor and a manager. The result: a downgrade to a dodgy copy Office 2003 and a complete waste of money with regards to Office 2007. So if you read this, Microsoft, why not get in touch and help me activate my software? Don’t complain about the copy of software I’m using when I can prove my purchase of Office 2007 and it’s down to your incompetence that I’m doing it. It’s just pathetic.

With Apple, things are massively different. Recently my MacBook developed a crack in the plastic, resulting from wear and tear near where the clamshell magnets meet the main casing. It’s still well within warranty, so after discovering it seemed like a common problem, I took it into my local Apple store in Kingston.

For those who don’t know, Apple support works in a unique way. Here’s the difference. With Microsoft, you ring a number that costs a body part per minute and speak to an Indian lady who doesn’t even know the difference between a washing machine and Windows XP. With Apple, you go onto their fantastically designed website and use a system called Concierge to book an appointment with a “genius” at your local Apple store. Granted, there aren’t many stores nationwide. But I’m lucky in that respect.

Genius - that’s a good word. Things are slightly different when you do it the Apple way, because every store has at least a genius (I’m guessing) and every single one is sent to the HQ in Cupertino, California to be intensively trained. Wow.

So I go and speak to the genius, who has a unique passion for the product and the brand which just radiates from the communication. Straight away he admitted that the crack was a design fault and even if the MacBook was out of warranty, they’d replace it for free because it was their problem. With Microsoft, you just get told you’re a software pirate by someone with an IQ of 7.

“Our current lead time is seven to ten working days, unfortunately. But we will replace the entire case, keyboard, and so on” he told me. That’s a long time, but I explained that I’ve got a new MacBook Pro on the way so I’ll wait for that to turn up and then bring in the old one for repair. The conversation was far from over. “Will you be looking to migrate your documents over to the new notebook?” he asked. The conversation continued with him explaining the best way of moving over my accumulated digital junk to my new purchase. Wow.

Making the most of his expertise, I decided to ask him about my Leopard upgrade woes. “Yeah, sometimes stability can be an issue when doing an upgrade from Tiger, but if you choose ‘Archive and Install’ as an option from the lower right of the installation screen, I’ve found that can make the difference from a sound install to a bad one.” he happily told me.

Well there we have it. That’s Apple, going the extra mile. If you came to this page looking for reasons to go Mac over Windows, here’s your answer.

I use a nifty piece of software on my Mac called XAMPP, which flawlessly installs an entire PHP and MySQL (along with other features) development environment.

Of course, Mac OS comes bundled with Apache and there’s a lot of info on the Internet to help you configure the factory installed Apache with PHP and MySQL. That said, it’s much easier just to get a whole package that does it for you.

Not convinced? Take a look. You can even get it for Windows, although from experience I find WAMP does the job perfectly.

The most alluring feature of Apache is the ability to configure multiple hosts on one single machine. Professional web hosting companies use the same technique I will demonstrate here in order to host several websites on one physical node, whilst maintaining individuality for the hosted sites. It’s a little thing called “virtual hosts” and it’s something I couldn’t live without.

Let me give you a small example. I currently have four virtual hosts configured on my MacBook. This means that when I open my browser and navigate to “http://ge”, I’m forwarded to a local copy of this site for development purposes. I also have another - “http://xampp” which is a site for accessing the XAMPP administration page and a further two. You see the point. Whilst all DNS names point back to localhost, Apache sends each one to a seperate virtual directory containing a different site.

Configuring hosts
Before doing anything, you need to set up your hosts file. On a Mac, it’s easy to find, in /etc/hosts. I won’t cover doing that here, there are plenty of sites around the Internet to help you. If you’re a grizzled networking veteran you’ll know that hosts is a local file used for DNS resolution.

Specifying the virtual hosts
The thing I noticed with XAMPP is that the build of Apache it installs doesn’t like the standard virtual hosts configuration you specify with WAMP and other builds. In fact, it took me a good few days to find the technique in order to actually get it up and running properly. You should know where your virtual hosts are specified. In the standard httpd.conf file, Apache includes a file seperately for easy management of virtual hosts. You’ll need to un-comment this line:

# Virtual hosts
Include /Applications/xampp/etc/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

On boot-up, XAMPP now knows to look in the extra directory for a file called httpd-vhosts.conf. Sure enough, with the original name of “vhosts”, this is where you specify your virtual hosts configuration.

This is the bit I found tough - the syntax to use. Luckily for you, all you have to do is copy what I write and fill in the blanks with your bits:

Quite obviously, you’ll see you will need to create a site directory within the htdocs directory to hold your site. Next, you should have noticed the ServerName and ServerAlias conditions. This bit - specified as “ge” for the purpose of this guide - should be the name of your local server that you’ve already configured to point back to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file.

There isn’t much else to write on this topic. Obviously, it goes without mention, before expecting any changes to take effect you’ll need to restart your XAMPP installation.

If you have any problems, leave me a comment and I can help you out. Good luck and happy developing!