inside aebrahim’s head

I’m wondering if anyone has suggestions for good email footers that are 2-3 lines long that can be used for plugging Firefox. One that I came up with is:

Tired of popups, spyware and viruses?
Download Firefox 1.0 today: http://getfirefox.com/

Can others think of something better? My rationale for not advertising new features is that people are more likely to be annoyed by current problems than enticed by new features that are merely buzzwords to them.

I knew while writing my blog entry for the Firefox 1.0 release that I’d see a spike in my bandwidth usage because of the large images I had in my post, but I didn’t expect anything like this! Thanks for dropping by and taking a look! I hope you took the hint and grabbed Firefox 1.0.

According to my pair.com account manager, I pushed approximately 1.1GB of data yesterday, which is more than I’ve pushed before in any single month.

Yesterday, shortly after posting my blog entry, I also set up cache-friendly headers to serve everything under http://blog.ebrahim.org/media/ in a way that doesn’t hit my server too hard. In short, the way it works is that I’ve used the Apache Expires module to instruct clients and caching proxies to cache images for one month from the date of the client pull. That means that if someone on AOL pulls an image from me, for one month, everyone on AOL who tries to pull that image doesn’t touch my server, and pulls it directly from AOL. It’s the next best thing to multicasting. It’s also cool because it reduces server load, because the images don’t generate requests on the Apache server. Not a big issue for me, but huge for those who are load limited rather than bandwidth limited. Here is a sample implementation using an .htaccess file:

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000
ExpiresByType video/x-ms-wmv A2592000
ExpiresByType video/mpeg A2592000
ExpiresByType application/pdf A2592000

For more detailed information, the Apache docs have good info for both 1.3 users and 2.0 users. Credit goes to yusufg for hooking me up with the above implementation. One can only wonder what my bandwidth graph would have looked like if every single person who viewed my blog entry hit the graphics.

Well not quite with his pants down, but something just as bad given his position. According to the BBC, he was caught travelling on a train without a ticket! On the bright side, at least they caught him and he paid up.