Yesterday, we finally received a letter from the Secretary of State. After about 1.5 month of waiting, we are now finally a ‘legal’ company.

As you may/may not have noticed, we’ve already changed the footer of into stating ‘(c) WireLoad, LLC‘ rather than just Alex and Viktor.

So what’s next? Now we’re going to apply for a FBN (Fictitious Business Name).

A while back Viktor had to make a server redirect from http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com. He experienced some issues because of his lack of control over the server which he wrote about here.

Also the other day we featured an article about the importance of having a unified URL. Since

http://www.domain.com/article.html

looks different than

http://domain.com/article.html

to del.icio.us and similar services, you might not get all that nice attention you deserve. In our article we suggested using Cuzimatter to alleviate the problem. We also linked to a suggestion by Pronet Advertising’s URL’s matter. This article mentions that redirecting everyone to the same URL, if possible, is useful too.

We already use our own solution, Cuzimatter to promote unified links to our articles. But today as you might have noticed, we have also added the other solution: any address on http://playingwithwire.com now redirects to http://www.playingwithwire.com.

Luckily, we have a little bit more control over our own server than Viktor did when he was working with this earlier. So on Playing With Wire, the redirect is as simple as it gets. We use Apache 2 as our web server. Our httpd.conf used to look something like this:

<virtualhost>
  ServerName playingwithwire.com
  ServerAlias www.playingwithwire.com

All we had to do was to change this a little bit. (Note that the Redirect pemanent thing should be just one line including the http://… part.) Here’s the modified configuration:

<virtualhost>       
  Servername playingwithwire.com
  Redirect permanent / http://www.playingwithwire.com/
</virtualhost>

<virtualhost>
  ServerName www.playingwithwire.com
  ...

All done! Works for every page on the site and does not require slow .htaccess files or complicated mod rewrite rules.

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Hey. Just thought I’d let you know that Cuzimatter now has support for Reddit buttons too, complete with that little cute dude with the antenna. Remember, applying a good helping of Cuzimatter to your blog is good for you!

An Appleinsider article on Digg claims that “Parallel, Inc. is preparing to make a quantum leap in the art of Windows virtualization software for Mac with [a] new version of its Parallels Desktop software that introduce a refined user interface and greater support [for] Apple Computer’s Boot Camp software. Graphics performance increases of up to 50%, seamless drag-and-drop, tons more features!”

This is exciting news. The ability to run your Parallels software together with your Boot Camp partition is the most interesting new feature. Power users will no longer need to keep two Windows installations – one for rebooting into Windows and one for running in OS X – and can save some much needed hard drive space.

Unfortunately the most important thing has still been left out: support for OpenGL and DirectX. I believe that the main reason owners of the Parallels software still might run Boot Camp on occasion is because they use 3D software or games. Of course, even with some good 3D support in Parallels, hard core game players might still be inclined to use Boot Camp to get every drop of performance out of their machine, since Parallels only virtualizes one processor core. But for most users – those who are not hardcore – basic last generation 3D support would be enough to alleviate the need for the dreaded Windows reboot.

From a technical point of view it might be ‘tricky’ to do 3D graphics since a lot of those unruly games expect to be able to bang the metal, and take control of the whole graphics card. But most 3D games on the Windows platform can somehow run in a Window as well as fullscreen, meaning they must already have some means for sharing the hardware. A good driver pretending to be a 3D card should be able to accept OpenGL commands, and then simply turn around and give them to the OpenGL drivers in OS X for execution. On the OS X side the OpenGL environment would be set up to draw into a hidden frame buffer which then is copied right back into the virtual environment.

Either way, I use Parallels on an almost daily basis on my Mac. It comes in very handy when I need to run Internet Explorer to check what kind of damage Explorer does to the rendering of our websites. :)

See the Digg article. | Digg story