If you are looking for a pet that is very easy to take care of, then a leopard gecko is one of the best choices you can make. This is one of the many reasons why people think these reptiles are so wonderful. They are inexpensive and do not require a lot of extra care like other pets night. Before buying or bringing home your Leopard gecko, here is some -gecko” target=”_blank”>basic care information you should really know.

Choosing the Right Home or Enclosure

An aquarium is by far the best choice for your Leo to live. They are relatively cheap and come in many different sizes. Probably the most common choice as a home for your new pet is a 10 gallon aquarium. This is definitely sufficient, but I would recommend that you house your Leo in at least a 20 gallon aquarium. Just doubling the size will do wonders for your pet.  They will have more room to run around and exercise, as well as, be less stressed.

Once you have chosen the right enclosure, you need to decorate it.  When creating a habitat for your gecko, the more natural, the better!  One of the keys to a healthy Leo is creating a stress free environment.  Having natural looking decor such as rocks, twigs, branches, etc will create a virtual oasis for them.

Suitable Substrates

If you are wondering what substrate is, it is what is going to cover the bottom of your Leo’s cage. There are many different choices of substrate, however some work better than others. Some examples of acceptable substrates are: kitchen paper towels, unused computer paper, Reptile Carpet, slate or tile. These are all considered solid substrates.

Some gecko owners use loose substrates like sand or coconut husks. It is not recommended to use loose substrates because Leo’s have been known to swallow this loose material which results in severe or deadly stomach problems.

Under Tank Heating Systems

The natural environment for your reptilian friend is an arid, dry environment.  the best way to replicate that is to use an Under Tank Heating System or Pad.  this is specifically designed to gradually provide the proper warmth for your pet from underneath your pet’s enclosure.

These are the best choice because they can be adjusted accordingly to make sure the temperature is just right.  If you do not want to use a UTHS, a simple light bulb will work.

Whats for Dinner?

Insects are your geckos favorite food. They will eat crickets, meal worms, cockroaches, etc. feeding a gecko will be an exciting time! However, just eating insects is a going to be nutritious enough for your Leo. You are going to have to provide some type of nutritional supplement to help keep your gecko well-nourished.

As you can see, there is a little work involved in caring for your Leopard gecko. Did you know that most Leo’s die within the first 30 days in their new environment? If you are curious to know why and want to know what you need to do to save your Leopard gecko, you must visit “10 Secrets to Save Your Leopard Gecko”

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Another beard dragon quiz?
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Leopard geckos are lucky in that there are relatively few health issues which tend to affect them. However, tail loss is one of these issues. Dropping their tail is a defense mechanism which enables leopard geckos to escape from predators, though it can cause some problems.

A gecko will grow a new tail if they lose theirs, though the tail which they grow back won’t usually look much like the tail they have lost; it tends to be a different shape and is often white rather than its original color. Of course, a gecko doesn’t worry too much about its looks, though you might prefer the way your pet looks with their original tail!

However, the way your pet leopard gecko’s new tail looks isn’t the real problem. The problem is that losing their tail can make your pet less healthy – a gecko which has lost their tail will be stressed and weakened and more susceptible to disease.

If your pet should lose their tail, they’ll need special care to keep them in good health and prevent infection from setting in as their tail grows back. You may want to keep the injured gecko in a different tank (if you currently house your leopard gecko with others). Make sure that the tank is kept very warm; in fact, any time your gecko is sick you should increase the temperature of their tank. They should have plenty of fresh water and food available while they heal as well.

Shedding is another thing which can pose a health hazard to your leopard gecko. Some of these animals have difficulty shedding for a variety of reasons. It may be too cool inside the tank, the humidity level may be too low, they may have a vitamin deficiency (usually it’s more vitamin A that they need) or even be infested with parasites. This is rare, but a leopard gecko with parasites won’t shed. You can check for parasites by looking carefully at their skin, especially between their toes.

If your leopard gecko is unable to shed for too long they can become sick. Rather than letting things get to this point, make sure to properly care for your pet to prevent these problems from occurring in the first place.

http://theultimateleopardgeckomanual.com

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We are Leopard Gecko enthusiasts who were tired of finding incomplete information about our pet Geckos. We enlisted the help of some serious gecko enthusiasts,breeders,owners, and veterinarians who helped us compile information for people who just wanted to know how to take care of their Leopard Geckos knowledgeably and safely. Please visit our website to learn every thing you need to know.

Hardware, licenses, applications, remote hands, even the expense of redundancy—none of it compares to the price of power in the data center; and power needs are increasing exponentially as processing intensifies and demand for rack space rises.

More Power Equals More Heat

Data center power is partly to keep physical servers running, but it’s also to keep them cool enough to run: as servers increase in processing power, so does heat generation. A rack that five years ago produced about five kilowatts of heat may today produce as much as 28 kilowatts. To give some idea of how much heat that is: 28 kilowatts equals 95,000 BTU or roughly 8 tons of air conditioning. A typical house air conditioner is three tons, 10 kilowatts, or 34,000 BTU. That means that it takes as much power to cool a high density rack as it would to cool about three single family homes—if it was high noon in that equatorial neighborhood 24 hours a day.

Sources of Inefficiency

Data centers have traditionally been inefficient environmentally. Compared to other costs, power has been cheap, and computing precious—if a little power was wasted, the result was incredible amounts of information analyzed, communicated and stored. The world seemed to have plenty of power, and a data center from the 70s or even the 80s would only be a blip on the power grid.

These days, data centers are much more prevalent: the Data Center Map, a free web service linking data center providers and customers, lists 1,297 colocation data centers in 59 countries. In addition, power has become more expensive and less available. However, data centers still use power like it’s cheap: a McKinsey & Company report on data center efficiency, released in 2008, says that on average, only six percent of server capacity is being used, and the data center facilities run at no more than about 56 percent capacity.

Three Ways to Cool Down the Data Center—and Save Money

Virtualization, resource management and physical server consolidation are three methods your hosting company and you can use to increase data center efficiency.

Virtualize Servers

One way to conserve power is to get every bit of computing power out of each piece of hardware. That’s where virtualization comes in. Virtualization allows you to consolidate your server requirements onto fewer physical machines, with the virtual machines consuming only about 1/50th the amount of power. Email servers, web servers and applications all act just as if they were running on individual boxes, but for a fraction of the cost, both in capital expense and power consumption.

According to many sources, including The Green Grid and the EPA, virtualization is one of the key ingredients of a more efficient, greener data center. In implementing virtualization, a product such as VMware provides some of the highest consolidation rates on a secure and reliable platform. With VMware, unused physical servers can even be powered off, and turned back on when needed.

Of course, virtual servers, especially VMware’s hardware-based virtualization, also offer increased application access for users, faster installation of new servers and better uptime. So not only will your virtual servers help reduce your carbon footprint and save you money, they’ll also improve your company’s competitiveness.

Allocate Resources with VMware DRS and DPM

Virtualization from VMware provides two additional technologies that help you reduce your costs through virtualization.

VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) allows a hosting company and its clients to continuously monitor utilization and intelligently assign resources as needed. With DRS, resources can be allocated to higher priority applications, according to your rules, ensuring that your mission critical activities always have what they need. It also provides dedicated infrastructure for business units, without letting resources stand idle.

Supporting DRS, Distributed Power Management (DPM) optimizes power consumption by continuously monitoring power usage and automatically consolidating workloads and powering down unneeded resources. During lower use periods, DPM moves virtual server workloads onto the optimum number of physical servers and turns off the others. When requirements increase, DPM brings physical servers back online—without impact on the virtual server or the customer.

Consolidate Servers with Blades

Blades help reduce the energy footprint of servers by allowing multiple physical servers to be consolidated on one chassis, with one management interface per blade, while adding more advanced management features. The ProLiant BL490c Virtualization Blade solution being adopted by Infinitely Virtual will more than triple the number of virtual machines hosted in the same energy footprint.

According to HP, the BL 490c blades offer several key performance and management advantages: eighteen DIMM slots allow more virtual machines to be housed on each blade; integrated dual-port 10 GbE server adapter with Flex-10 technology offer the ability to fine-tune network bandwidth; conserve power without performance impact with the built-in HP Power Regulator, and reclaim trapped power in your data center by safely limiting server power consumption with Dynamic Power Capping.

The Future of the Green Data Center

Projects and organizations are being formed all over the world to address the problems of power consumption and heat generation. Here are three:

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are working to reduce the portion of electricity used to cool data center equipment by as much as 15 percent. In a simulated data center, Georgia Tech scientists are trying to optimize cooling strategies and develop new heat transfer models.

The Green Grid is an organization created by many of the big names in computers, power conditioning and data centers, including HP, AMD and Intel. Together, they are developing standards to measure data center efficiency, with the goal of reducing power requirements, waste heat and carbon emissions.

In the future, waste heat like that in a data center could be recycled into energy. Engineers at Oregon State University are taking waste heat and using it to run a cooling system.

To Save Money (and Help Save the Planet), Think Infinitely Virtual

Contact Infinitely Virtual to find out how virtualization and data center efficiency affect your company’s bottom line. Let us show you how hosting with Infinitely Virtual can help you reduce your company’s server costs, while simultaneously making your applications faster, your data more secure, and your planet a little bit cooler.

Find out more about the power and cooling advantages of VMware, HP Blade servers and virtualization at InfinitelyVirtual.com. Hardware, licenses, applications, remote hands, even the expense of redundancy—none of it compares to the price of power in the data center; and power needs are increasing exponentially as processing intensifies and demand for rack space rises.

More Power Equals More Heat

Data center power is partly to keep physical servers running, but it’s also to keep them cool enough to run: as servers increase in processing power, so does heat generation. A rack that five years ago produced about five kilowatts of heat may today produce as much as 28 kilowatts. To give some idea of how much heat that is: 28 kilowatts equals 95,000 BTU or roughly 8 tons of air conditioning. A typical house air conditioner is three tons, 10 kilowatts, or 34,000 BTU. That means that it takes as much power to cool a high density rack as it would to cool about three single family homes—if it was high noon in that equatorial neighborhood 24 hours a day.

Sources of Inefficiency

Data centers have traditionally been inefficient environmentally. Compared to other costs, power has been cheap, and computing precious—if a little power was wasted, the result was incredible amounts of information analyzed, communicated and stored. The world seemed to have plenty of power, and a data center from the 70s or even the 80s would only be a blip on the power grid.

These days, data centers are much more prevalent: the Data Center Map, a free web service linking data center providers and customers, lists 1,297 colocation data centers in 59 countries. In addition, power has become more expensive and less available. However, data centers still use power like it’s cheap: a McKinsey & Company report on data center efficiency, released in 2008, says that on average, only six percent of server capacity is being used, and the data center facilities run at no more than about 56 percent capacity.

Three Ways to Cool Down the Data Center—and Save Money

Virtualization, resource management and physical server consolidation are three methods your hosting company and you can use to increase data center efficiency.

Virtualize Servers

One way to conserve power is to get every bit of computing power out of each piece of hardware. That’s where virtualization comes in. Virtualization allows you to consolidate your server requirements onto fewer physical machines, with the virtual machines consuming only about 1/50th the amount of power. Email servers, web servers and applications all act just as if they were running on individual boxes, but for a fraction of the cost, both in capital expense and power consumption.

According to many sources, including The Green Grid and the EPA, virtualization is one of the key ingredients of a more efficient, greener data center. In implementing virtualization, a product such as VMware provides some of the highest consolidation rates on a secure and reliable platform. With VMware, unused physical servers can even be powered off, and turned back on when needed.

Of course, virtual servers, especially VMware’s hardware-based virtualization, also offer increased application access for users, faster installation of new servers and better uptime. So not only will your virtual servers help reduce your carbon footprint and save you money, they’ll also improve your company’s competitiveness.

Allocate Resources with VMware DRS and DPM

Virtualization from VMware provides two additional technologies that help you reduce your costs through virtualization.

VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) allows a hosting company and its clients to continuously monitor utilization and intelligently assign resources as needed. With DRS, resources can be allocated to higher priority applications, according to your rules, ensuring that your mission critical activities always have what they need. It also provides dedicated infrastructure for business units, without letting resources stand idle.

Supporting DRS, Distributed Power Management (DPM) optimizes power consumption by continuously monitoring power usage and automatically consolidating workloads and powering down unneeded resources. During lower use periods, DPM moves virtual server workloads onto the optimum number of physical servers and turns off the others. When requirements increase, DPM brings physical servers back online—without impact on the virtual server or the customer.

Consolidate Servers with Blades

Blades help reduce the energy footprint of servers by allowing multiple physical servers to be consolidated on one chassis, with one management interface per blade, while adding more advanced management features. The ProLiant BL490c Virtualization Blade solution being adopted by Infinitely Virtual will more than triple the number of virtual machines hosted in the same energy footprint.

According to HP, the BL 490c blades offer several key performance and management advantages: eighteen DIMM slots allow more virtual machines to be housed on each blade; integrated dual-port 10 GbE server adapter with Flex-10 technology offer the ability to fine-tune network bandwidth; conserve power without performance impact with the built-in HP Power Regulator, and reclaim trapped power in your data center by safely limiting server power consumption with Dynamic Power Capping.

The Future of the Green Data Center

Projects and organizations are being formed all over the world to address the problems of power consumption and heat generation. Here are three:

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are working to reduce the portion of electricity used to cool data center equipment by as much as 15 percent. In a simulated data center, Georgia Tech scientists are trying to optimize cooling strategies and develop new heat transfer models.

The Green Grid is an organization created by many of the big names in computers, power conditioning and data centers, including HP, AMD and Intel. Together, they are developing standards to measure data center efficiency, with the goal of reducing power requirements, waste heat and carbon emissions.

In the future, waste heat like that in a data center could be recycled into energy. Engineers at Oregon State University are taking waste heat and using it to run a cooling system.

To Save Money (and Help Save the Planet), Think Infinitely Virtual

Contact Infinitely Virtual to find out how virtualization and data center efficiency affect your company’s bottom line. Let us show you how hosting with Infinitely Virtual can help you reduce your company’s server costs, while simultaneously making your applications faster, your data more secure, and your planet a little bit cooler.

Find out more about the power and cooling advantages of VMware, HP Blade servers and virtualization at InfinitelyVirtual.com.

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At the risk of sounding unkind, I need to discuss this subject, not in order to vent, but in an attempt to study the creatures that inhabit the outer grounds of my childrens’ HIGH PERFORMING MAGNET SCHOOL.  Don’t forget it, anyone.  No parents would actually state that overtly (false modesty is a perfected art among the upper middle class), but they shout it louder than ever with the revs of their Lexi engines, which form the sparkling sea of abundance, that celebrates the consumption of pricey fossil fuels at every pick up and drop off on each school day.  They will say it with the swagger on the dirty little path to the next PTA meeting, and in the way they elbow you at the volunteer sign-up table or when they tell you that that OTHER school has a lot of kids on the “free and reduced lunch program.”  Normal, boring, ordinary magnet school parent behaviors, right?

What peeks my interest is that I found that most of these turbo mommies can be likened to certain animals.  Not in the Native American way of having an “animal totem,” which they embody spiritually, but these beings actually resemble animals as if their parents were extraordinary pets of humans that were invited to sit at the dinner table.  They received scholarships and went on to meet and marry other similarly bred animals and produced high-functioning, grant-worthy human-like animal children who eventually found themselves married to, yes, other animals, working for Cisco, living in million dollar tract housing and driving their children across town to their lottery assigned placement at the magnet school.  This is where I come in.

I was taken aback lately by an upright, Caucasian toad who stands daily in front of my child’s classroom, waiting to pick up her little land and water creature, I mean child.  The toad (I assume that she is actually a toad living a double-life as a well-to-do woman) and I cross paths often as we have children together in two grade levels and they attend the same snooty violin school  (Disclaimer:  My husband and I are theater arts bohemians.  Music is more important to us than algebra.  Not sure what the toad’s motivation is other than that the violin school goes nicely with her brand new Chrysler 300.  But honestly, I have no good reason to assume that she lacks the passion for music that we have.)  After all these interactions, one might expect that we could be, possibly, best friends, good acquaintances, or at least motivated hello-wavers.  Unfortunately, the toad has communicated her unwillingness to communicate with “my kind” (Does she hate me because I’m human?), by averting her eyes from my sweat suit clad slovenliness and, when unable to do so, she croaks a cold, guttural “huheye.”  What’s even more interesting is that her sister in coldness is a Channel bespectacled Gecko:  a lankily lean, wiry, curve-backed critter, with an over-dyed ebony bob that highlights the unsightly pallor of her face (a convincing human disguise, indeed).  They stand and stare at the other less established parents who have yet to cup their blood sucking three-tiered jaws into the host that is the public school system.  A good 40% of their conversation is concealed in whispers, so unless they are planning a heist of Best Buy or Costco, they are likely to be talking badly about them.  But perhaps I’m too cynical.

Please don’t get me wrong.  There are wonderfully lovely creatures of the PTA, too.  The smiling salamander is an absolute sweetheart.  At first, her manic grin in the teacher’s direction at Back-to-School Night frightened me.  I thought her to be a sycophantic, Botox-frozen human being.  But I was wrong.  Her wiry thin build was not a result of too much time in Pole Dancing Class at the Bayside Club.  The shiny, over-tight, wet look to her skin was not the result of over-toning or body butter.  It is clearly the slick slime of her actual salamander skin.  She is a nice creature.  Not predatory.  Plant-eating (I’m certain I can verify this).  And she’s only annoying when she shows up in your pool.  If that’s not a salamander, I don’t know what is.  The rodent PTA president is pretty nice for a rodent PTA president.  She still smiles a cold mousey grin even after you quit her fundraiser because she kept redoing your letters citing her “10 years in the corporate world” as the reason for her superior writing capabilities and necessary interventions.  (Never mind that I was the star of my sophomore high school English class.)

Perhaps I mistake these (we’ll call them) humans for animals because of their behavior:  cut-throat, survival oriented, and scrapping their way to the top of the food chain.  Or they exhibit their beastly behaviors BECAUSE they are animals.  PTA volunteer Veronica Tomsen (please note that it took every ounce of restraint I have to use an alias for her) resembles a bear cub.  Despite her ferocity, she is actually kind of cute.  When she works with you on a project, she growls and swipes her little bitty claws at you.  You don’t feel the danger of the moment, but you fear what damage she could do with a few years and several more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches under her belt.  And, above all, she’s probably pissed that she’s the mama bear in her household, but remains a bear cub in the world at large.  In any case, the primal swats of catty behavior seem more animal-like than human.  Perhaps, they are simply the more animal side of human.  Hmmn…

Moreover, I should probably not be so reactive and sensitive to these behaviors or I may start to resemble an animal that may not be so cute as a little toad, lizard or rat.  I wonder which animal my behavior connects me to?  I would love to be something friendly, easy-going, and lovable like the eucalyptus eating koala.  Or maybe even something glamorous, though slightly useless, like the flamingo.  Though with the excess bit of weight I’ve collected in the past few years and due to the fact that I often pick up my kid from the drive-through lane instead of getting out and walking, I think I might be called a sloth or (goodness, no) a cow.  Here’s the scariest part:  Do they know what animal I secretly am?

Maybe I should take on the persona of my own daughter, clearly a golden retriever, and let my friendly, fluffy exuberance encourage the friendlier sides of their instincts. How ‘bout on Monday, I run up to everyone and lick their faces?

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Greta Koenigin is a retired high school teacher who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, 3 children, and unruly cat. She enjoys live theater, reading, and decorating. She writes of her adventures, at home and at-large, on her blog:
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While most people don’t associate coffee farms with Hawaii, it is the only state in the Union that has the climate and soil where coffee plants can flourish. Rich, slightly acidic volcanic soil, sunny mornings with cloudy afternoons and over 60 inches of rain during the summer months provide the perfect environment to grow primo coffee.

There are numerous traditional Hawaiian coffees cultivated in the Hawaiian Isles, but for this trip, I chose to visit the Big Island of Hawaii to tour the agricultural region where Kona Coffee is farmed.

To further experience the real “aloha” of Hawaii, husband Shaun and I opted to kip at two very distinctive Bed & Breakfasts nestled in the Kona Coffee Belt instead of the typical resort hotel where most palm tree smitten tourists go.

Roger Diltz, proprietor of Aloha Farms Bed and Breakfast formerly A Place of Refuge B&B, gave us crucial directions to find his home (elevation 800 feet) in between Kealakekua Bay and Puuhonua O Honaunau National Park (City of Refuge). When trying to find any location in this region, it is wise to drive during daylight as the roads are not well marked and street signs that not so easily discernible during the day are almost invisible at night.

Prior to our arrival at this eco-tourist B&B, Roger, off fishing for the catch of the day, left his dog Koa and a note on the door to greet us. Disarming at first, this Rottweiler/Lab mix became our companion for an early walk of the grounds before breakfast at 7:30 a.m.

We thought an alarm might be necessary. But as daylight broke, the sounds of the “jungle” began as single twitter and within 20 minutes the birds had orchestrated their calls into a full blown crescendo of tweets, cackles and whistles.

The aroma of Kona coffee wafted through the house as Roger prepared a rib-sticking breakfast complete with Jaboticaba syrup over coconut hotcakes. The view during breakfast from the lanai (covered porch) was exactly as you would imagine, a tropical forest of exotic flora backdropped by an indigo ocean as far as a person could see.

The evenings at Aloha Farms were quite amusing. We were invaded by hordes of nocturnal Geckos as they arrived in full force sticking to the walls like gum to a shoe. These timid chartreuse lizards kept the mosquitoes at bay as did the potted Citronella plants. In the distance, the echoing thump of five-pound avocados dropping from over-burdened tree limbs would usually lead Koa to investigate just in case it might be a wild pig.

Still each morning we didn’t plan the normal tourist diet of snorkel, kayak or swim-with-the-dolphin excursions. Instead, we tediously tried to map out the hidden farms nestled in this region that is only two to three miles wide, twenty miles long and spans the southwest coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. We wanted to find out how Kona coffee was grown, picked, pulped, fermented, dried, milled (hulled) and roasted. (You didn’t realize that there were so many processes to get that eye-opening cup each morning, now did you?)

Our itinerary took us first to Langenstein Farms where manager Darcee Lucas met us for a non-traditional cupping.

As we entered the roasting room, Darcee had placed three china cups starkly alone with a pot of freshly brewed coffee on a corner table; no cream or sugar in sight. Shaun, an instant coffee drinker, frowned; I got the “How am I going to drink coffee without milk?” look.

As Darcee poured, she said, “Now take your cup and look at the oils floating on top of the coffee. Notice the colors. Smell the coffee. Now, drink the coffee.” We sipped this classically delicate, cleanly fruity, floral Kona cup of coffee. I could see a sigh of relief from Shaun. “I can actually drink this coffee black, it almost tastes sweet and without the sugar,” said Shaun.

My ulterior motive had now been exposed; I wanted to get my instant coffee drinking Brit of a husband down the path to enjoying a proper brewed cupper. Its mild taste appeared to have won him over.

Our trek took us on to Pele Plantations, overlooking Kealakekua Bay, where Captain Cook discovered the Hawaiian Islands. Owners Gus and Cynthia Brockson were busily roasting and packing online orders ready to be shipped.

Their Kona Coffee farm is Certified Organic, which means that the coffee is grown using methods and materials that have a low impact on the environment. These organic production systems replenish and maintain soil fertility, reduce the use of toxic and persistent pesticides and fertilizers, and build biologically diverse agriculture.

According to the Brocksons, it is not enough to have a certified organic coffee farm: “In order to call Kona coffee ‘organic,’ it must also be processed at a facility with equipment and procedures that are certified organic. We’re proud to be one of only four processors in Kona to have received this status.”

Heading up Koa Road, we visited KOA Plantations, which is situated at an elevation of 2,500 feet on the slopes of the Hawaiian volcano, Mauna Loa. Located in the small town of Captain Cook, this is the only farm where we were able to see Kona blossom as well as green and red cherry all on the same plant. The sweet smell of the blossom — fondly dubbed “Kona snow” – reminded me of its sister plant, the Gardenia. During May, the blossoms give way to the green coffee fruit; it is a rare sight to see red cherry at the lower elevations this time of year.

KOA Plantations has a state-of-the-art wet mill facility from Colombia, a dry mill from Brazil and their entire parchment/green bean is temperature and humidity controlled.

In the roasting room, we watched the beans being roasted in a large commercial roaster. The temperature and time were carefully monitored so as not to burn the beans. “The most important thing is to listen for the first crack,” said tour guide John Langenstein. After about 15 minutes, the coffee beans literally “pop” as they expand. This first “crack” signifies the first roast, which a mildly roasted coffee commonly referred to as American roast. The second “crack” is a much darker roast of coffee.

Tired and hungry, we made our way down the highway to Old Tobacco Road, which is an old farm road and rough enough to suggest that a four-wheel drive vehicle might be necessary. It is a mile long drive up to our next digs through orchards of coffee and macadamia nuts. We arrive at the upscale Aloha Guest House owned and operated by Johann Timmerman and Greg Garriss along with resident artist Lino Laure.

The grounds at Aloha Guest House were impeccably manicured for a tropical estate where the vines and foliage grow at an accelerated rate! Exotic flowers and fruits thrive in this volcanic rock.

We are greeted by Lino and pooch Mango, who, as it turned out, liked to scratch her back – every morning — on a chair just outside our room’s private entrance creating quite a commotion. (She became our onsite alarm clock.)

Aloha Guest House — located 1500 feet above the Kona coast where the climate is tempered by the cool ocean breezes — features such amenities as a seven-person Jacuzzi spa, HDTV, WI-FI, a shared guest kitchenette and a 24-hour coffee and tea bar serving up freshly brewed 100% Kona Peaberry coffee – their own private label grown and roasted by Kena Coffee Farms.

Breakfast, prepared by Johann, was usually a simplistic version of haute cuisine and was served at a grand dining table with elegant table settings; exotic flowers included.

Throughout the B&B paintings by Lino Laure are showcased. Lino’s natural talent is apparent; he paints the wonders of the Hawaiian Islands taking into account the minutest details only an artist would note.

Yet, daytime beckoned us to leave all this luxury behind in order to complete our eco-tour.

A trip to Greenwell Farms in Kealakekua, Hawaii, took us on a historical familial journey that dates back to 1850 when Henry Nicholas Greenwell left England and first set foot on the fertile soil of rural Kona.

Together with his wife, Elizabeth Caroline, Henry spent the next forty years farming, ranching and perfecting his Kona Coffee, soon exporting it to Europe and the Americas.

Today, the farm is managed by the descendants of Henry and Elizabeth, and grows its own coffee on 150 acres of the most productive land in the Kona District. Greenwell Farms offers walking tours of the coffee fields and processing facilities that run continuously from 8 a.m. through 4 p.m. Monday through Friday; Saturdays, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.

A stone-throw away is the Kona Historical Society’s Living History Farm Tour. This seven-acre farm was homesteaded in the 1900’s by Japanese immigrants. The tour is an interpretation of the daily life of coffee farmers in the early 20th century brought to life through the use of historic buildings, artifacts, authentic landscapes, live animals, working machinery, and producing gardens, orchards and fields.

David Bateman, owner of Heavenly Hawaiian Farms, observed that the process is much the same today: “Because not all the cherry ripens at the same time there usually are four to six pickings during the picking season. Pickers manually pick the red cherry fruit containing the coffee beans. A good picker can pick 400 pounds of cherry in a day. Some pickers have picked as much as 1,200 pounds per day, all by hand, bean by bean.” The standard ratio of cherry to produce a pound of roasted coffee is seven to one.

Nearby at Lehuula Farms, Owner Bob Nelson readies his equipment for a batch of cherry that needs to be pulped and dried. Besides owning a pulper, Bob – a transplant from Alaska — has one of two unique apparatuses in the Islands that dry the coffee bean through a dehumidifying process that he uses to speed up the drying process. Most farms – including Lehuula — still sun-dry their beans on large decks to a moisture level between 10 and 13 percent.

This four-acre coffee farm – sited at 1400 feet on the western slope of Hualalai Mountain — currently supports more than 4,000 coffee trees many of which are 90 or more years old and are said to provide an exceptionally tasting coffee that cannot be found in younger trees. “The cherry is as good as it is ever going to be,” said Bob about the picked cherry, reminding us that there is always a way to spoil it through the many steps that it takes to process coffee.

Dr. Joe Alban explained that on his coffee farm he produces 35 percent more cherry than at other coffee farms due to his unique vineyard style coffee groves. Sold at $65 per pound, it is the world’s first trellised coffee plantation owned and operated by Dr. Joe Alban and wife Deepa.

Kona Joe® Trellised Coffee holds USA Patent 6,449,898 B1 for “Method and Apparatus for Enhancing Coffee Bean Production” and has been recognized for adapting fine wine growing techniques to coffee production. “The inspiration for adapting traditional viticultural practices to coffee growing came from our family vineyard, Alban Vineyards, an award-winning vineyard and winery located in the Central Coast of California,” said Joe.

Kona Joe Coffee will sponsor the first-ever Barista competition to be held at this year’s Kona Coffee Cultural Festival, a 10-day festival that takes place in early November when the harvest of Kona Coffee is well underway.

I came to Kona to see how coffee was grown and what an education I received. Anyone can go on this journey to see the workings of a coffee farm, without a passport and without apprehension about traveling to a foreign country.

Each morning as I grab my freshly-brewed cup of java, I have a deep respect for the labor intensive process it takes to produce coffee and the farmers that who work tirelessly to bring us this commodity we can’t seem to do without.

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Lorren Repton has written for several trade and lifestyle publications in the U.S.

URL Rewriting is the process of manipulating an URL or a link, which is send to a web server in such a way that the link is dynamically modified at the server to include additional parameters and information along with a server initiated redirection. The web server performs all these manipulations on the fly so that the browser is kept out of the loop regarding the change made in URL and the redirection.

URL Rewriting can benefit your websites and web based applications by providing better security, better visibility or friendliness with Search Engines and helps in keeping the structure of the website more easy to maintain for future changes.

You can read about the theory and benefits of URL Rewriting from my Previous article, which can be accessed from here. In this article we will be taking a look at how we can implement URL Rewriting on an Apache based web server environment using the mod_rewrite module for Apache.

What is mod_rewrite?

Mod_rewrite is one of the most favored modules for the Apache web server and there are many web developers and administrators who will vote this module as the best thing to happen on Apache. This module has a lot of tricks up its sleeve so that it can be called the Swiss Army Knife of all Apache Modules. Apart from providing simple URL Rewriting functionality for an Apache based website, this module arms the website with better URL protection, better search engine visibility, protection against bandwidth thieves by stopping hot linking, hassle free restructuring possibilities and options to provide friendliest of URLs for the website users. This module due to its versatility and functionality can at times feel a bit daunting to master, but getting a through understanding of the basics can make you a master of the craft of URL Rewriting.

Lets Begin! – A look at all the stuff you need to have on your test environment to get mod-rewrite alive and kicking.

First and foremost you should have a properly configured Apache Web Server on your test machine. Mod_rewrite is usually installed along with the Apache server, but in case it is missing – this can be the case on a Linux machine where the mod_rewrite module was not compiled along with the installation – you will have to get it installed. For using mod_rewrite on your Apache box you will have to configure this module to load dynamically on demand made by Apache. On a shared server you will have to contact your web hosting company to get this module installed and loaded on Apache.

On your local machine you can find if the module is installed along with Apache by having a look at the modules directory of Apache. Check for a file named mod_rewrite.so and if it is there then the module can be made to load in to the Apache server dynamically. By default this module is not loaded when Apache starts and you need to tell Apache to enable this module for dynamic loading by making changes in the web servers configuration file, which is explained below.

How to Enable mod_rewrite on Apache?

You can make the mod_rewrite module load dynamically in to the Apache web server environment using the LoadModule Directive in the httpd.conf file. Load this file in a text editor and find a line similar to the one given below.

#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

Uncomment this line by removing the # and save the httpd.conf file. Restart your Apache server and if all went well mod_rewrite module will now be enabled on your web server.

Lets Rewrite our first URL using mod_rewrite

Ok, now the mod_rewrite module is enabled on your server. Lets have a look at how to make this module load itself and to make it work for us.

In order to load the module dynamically you have to add a single line to your .htaccess file. The .htaccess files are configuration files with Apache directives defined in them and they provide distributed directory level configuration for a website. Create a .htaccess file in your web servers test directory – or any other directory on which you want to make URL Rewriting active – and add the below given line to it.

RewriteEngine on

Now we have the rewrite engine turned on and Apache is ready to rewrite URLs for you. Lets look at a sample rewrite instruction for making a request to our server for first.html redirected to second.html at server level. Add the below given line to your .htaccess file along with the RewriteEngine directive that we have added before.

RewriteRule ^first.html$ second.html

I will explain what we have done here at the next section, but if all went well then any requests for first.html made on your server will be transferred to second.html. This is one of the simplest forms of URL Rewritting.

A point to note here is that the redirect is kept totally hidden from client and this differs from the classic HTTP Redirects. The client or the browser is given the impression that the content of the second.html is being fetched from first.html. This enables websites to generate on the fly URLs with out the clients awareness and is what makes URL Rewriting very powerful.

Basics of mod_rewrite module

Now we know that mod_rewrite can be enabled for an entire website or a specific directory by using .htaccess file and have done a basic rewrite directive in the previous example. Here I will explain what exactly have we done in the first sample rewrite.

Mod_rewrite module provides a set of configuration directive statements for URL Rewriting and the RewriteRule directive – that we saw in the previous sample – is the most important one. The mod_rewrite engine uses pattern-matching substitutions for making the translations and this means a good grasp of Regular Expressions can help you a lot.

Note: Regular Expressions are so vast that they will not fit in to the scope of this article. I will try to write another article on that topic someday.

1. The RewriteRule Directive

The general syntax of the RewriteRule is very straightforward. RewriteRule Pattern Substitution [Flags]

The Pattern part is the pattern which the rewrite engine will look for in the incoming URL to catch. So in our first sample ^first.html$ is the Pattern. The pattern is written as a regular expression.

The Substitution is the replacement or translation that is to be done on the caught pattern in the URL. In our sample second.html is the Substitution part.

Flags are optional and they make the rewrite engine to do certain other tasks apart from just doing the substitution on the URL string. The flags if present are defined with in square brackets and should be separated by commas.

Lets take a look at a more complex rewrite rule. Take a look at the following URL.

http://yourwebsite/articles.php?category=stamps&id=122

Now we will convert the above URL in to a search engine and user friendly URL like the one given below.

http://yourwebsite/articles/stamps/122

Create a page called articles.php with the following code:

$category = $_GET['category'];

$id = $_GET['id'];

echo “Category : ” . $category . ” “;

echo “ID : ” . $id;

This page simply prints the two GET variables passed to it on the webpage.

Open the .htaccess file and write in the below given Rule.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^articles/(\w+)/([0-9]+)$ /articles.php?category=$1&id=$2

The pattern ^articles/(\w+)/([0-9]+)$ can be bisected as:

^articles/ – checks if the request starts with ‘articles/’

(\w+)/ – checks if this part is a single word followed by a forward slash. The parenthesis is used for extracting the parameter values, which we need for replacing in the actual query string, in the substituted URL. The pattern, which is placed in parenthesis will be stored in a special variable which can be back-referenced in the substitution part using variables like $1, $2 so on for each pair of parenthesis.

([0-9]+)$ – this checks for digits at the last part of the url.

Try requesting the articles.php file in your test server with the below given url.

http://yourwebsite/articles/coins/1222

The URL Rewrite rule you have written will kick in and you will be seeing the result as if the url requested where:

http://yourwebsite/articles.php?category=coins&id=1222

Now you can work on this sample to build more and more complex URL Rewritting rules. By using URL rewriting in the above example we have achieved a search engine and user friendly URL, which is also tamper proof against casual script kiddie injection sort of attacks.

What does the Flags parameter of RewriteRule directive do?

RewriteRule flags provide us with a way to control the way mod_rewrite handles each rule. These flags are defined inside a common set of square brackets separated by commas and there are about 15 flags to choose from. These flags range from those which controls the way rules are interpreted to complex one’s like those which sent specific HTTP headers back to the client when a match is found on the pattern.

Lets look at some of the basic flags.

• [NC] flag (nocase) –. This makes mod_rewrite to treat the pattern in a case-insensitive manner.
• [F] flag (forbidden) – This makes Apache send a forbidden HTTP response header – response 403 – back to the client.
• [R] flag (redirect) – This flag makes mod_rewrite to use a formal HTTP redirect instead of the internal Apache redirect. You can use this flag to inform the client about the redirection and this flag sends a Moved Temporarily – Response 302 – by default, but this flag takes an extra parameter, which you can use to modify the response code. If you wish to send a response code of 301 – Moved Permanently – then this flag can be written as [R=301]
• [G] flag (gone) – This flag makes Apache respond with a HTTP Response 410 – File Gone.
• [L] flag (last) – This makes mod_rewrite to stop processing succeeding directives if the current directive is successful.
• [N] flag (next) – This flag makes the rewrite engine to stop process and loop back to start of the rule list. A point to note is that the URL, which will be used for pattern matching, will be the rewritten one. This flag can create an endless loop and so extreme care should be given while using it.

There are other flags too but they are complex to explain with in the scope of this article so you can find more info on them by referring the mod_rewrite manual.

2. The RewriteCond Directive

This directive gives you the additional power of conditional checking on a range of parameters and conditions. This statement when combined with RewriteRule will let you rewrite URLs based on the success of conditions. RewriteCond are like the if() statement in your programming language but here they are for deciding whether a RewriteRule directive’s substitution should take place or not. Things like preventing hot linking and checking whether the client meets certain criteria’s before rewriting the URL etc can be achieved by using this directive.

The general syntax of the RewriteCond is:

RewriteCond string-to-test condition-pattern

The string-to-test part of the RewriteCond has access to a large set of Variables like the HTTP Header variables, Request Variables, Server Variables, Time variables etc so you can do a lot of complex conditional checking while writing directives. You can use any of these variables as a string to test by putting it in a %{string} format. Suppose you want to use the HTTP_REFERER variable then it can be used as %{HTTP_REFERER }.

The condition part can be a simple string or a very complex regular expression as your imagination is the only limit with this module.

Lets take a look at an example for conditional rewriting using RewriteCond directive:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/4(.*)MSIE
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ /index.ie.html [L]

RewriteRule ^index\.html$ /index.other.html [L]

This example uses the HTTP_USER_AGENT as the test string with the RewriteCond directive. What it does is that it uses the HTTP_USER_AGENT header variable to find the browser of the visiting user and match it against a set of pre known values to detect the browser and serve different pages to the visitor based on the match result. The first RewriteCond checks the HTTP_USER_AGENT to find a match for the ^Mozilla/4(.*)MSIE pattern. This match will occur when a user visits the page using IE as browser. Then the RewriteRule given just under that statement will kick in and will rewrite the URL to server index.ie.html page to the IE visitor.

Similarly a checking is made for mozilla specific browsers in the second RewriteCond and the RewriteRule will do the substitution for index.netscape.html when a positive match is made on the ^Mozilla/5(.*)Gecko pattern. The third RewriteRule is there to catch other browsers. If both the first and second RewriteCond fails then the last RewriteRule will be considered. A point to note in the above example is the usage of the [L] flag with all the RewriteRule directives. This is used to avoid the cascading of applying the rules when a positive RewriteRule is applied.

Two flags which can be used to further control the way the RewriteCond directive behave are [NC] – case-insensitive – and [OR] – chaining of multiple RewriteCond directives with logical OR.

By using these two directives – RewriteRule and RewriteCond – you can implement a lot of powerfull URL Rewriting functionality on your website.

Other mod_rewrite Directives

1. RewriteBase Directive – This directive can solve the problem of RewriteRule creating non-existent URLs due to difference in the physical file system structure on web server and the structure of website URLs. Setting this directive to the below given statement can solve this problem.

   RewriteBase /

2. RewriteMap Directive – This directive is very powerful as it allows you to map unique values to a set of other replacement values from a table and to use it in the substitution to generate on the fly URLs. This can be especially useful for huge e-commerce or CMS kind of applications where you need to replace each section name or category name in the URL with a corresponding id taken from a database.
3. RewriteLog Directive – This directive can be used to set the log file that the mod_rewrite engine will use to log all the actions taken during processing on client requests. The syntax is:

   RewriteLog /path/to/logfile

   This directive should be defined in the httpd.conf file as this directive is applied on a per-server basis.

4. RewriteLogLevel Directive – This directive tells mod_rewrite module the amount of information on the internal processing done while rewriting URLs to be logged. This directive takes values from 0 to 9 where 0 means no logging and 9 means all the information is logged. A higher level of logging can make Apache run slow, so a level above 2 is desired only for debugging purposes. This directive can be applied using the below given syntax.br/>
   RewriteLogLevel levelnumber

Conclusion

In this article we have taken only a brief look at the power of the mod_rewrite module. It is only a scratch on the surface but I hope it is enough to get you started on using this module on your web server environment.

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A research loving computer teacher interested in Paranormal Science, Martial Arts, Military History and Security, Pramod S Nair is now the C.T.O of Humming Bird Informatics – An Internet based business solutions provider.

There are four basic elements to any successful advertising campaign: “keep it simple, a catchphrase is nice, brand recognitions is vital, and sex, violence, animals, and kids sell.”  Advertising that can capitalize on these features tend to be the most-talked about ads that sometimes even become part of the culture.  Here are some examples of extremely successful marketing campaigns and how you can emulate their success.

Catchphrases that people can associate with your product or brand can be extremely helpful to a company.  They have the ability to cement a positive message with the brand or give more information about it.  In the 1930s Campbell’s Soup introduced the iconic phrase, “Mmm mm good.”  Almost a century later that phrase still makes people think of Campbell’s.  Because of clever catchphrase marketing everyone knows what “Only you can prevent” or what “Melts in your mouth, not in your hands.”  Time has not diminished or lessened the strength of these classic slogans.  Unlike the more recent “Wazzup” commercials, these catchphrases “just keep going and going and going.”  A solid slogan in some cases can create a market for a product.  Before De Beers taught us, “A diamond is forever” women didn’t receive diamonds for engagements.  Now it is unusual not to!

“Sex, violence, animals, and kids sell” is a historically proven idea.  Consider Smokey the Bear, the Energizer Bunny, Tony the Tiger, Bill Cosby and the Jell-O Kids, Geicko’s Gecko, or Taco Bell’s Chihuahua.  Each is unique, memorable, and clearly associated with the product or brand it is selling.  Violence was a major component of recent Super Bowl commercials, namely Tabasco’s mosquito ad and Reebok’s Office Linebacker series.  One of my favorite commercials featured a girl telling her little brother exactly why a Hallmark card was “a keeper.”  And did you ever see the “Hey Mikey” ads for Life cereal when you were a kid?  Sexually themed marketing is effective, but also somewhat controversial depending on the media used.  For example, Volvo was criticized when they ran an ad in the Sidney Gay and Lesbian Program book which showed an inventive shot of their parking brake with the caption, “We are just as excited as you.”  Celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Holly Madison have also appeared in marketing campaigns, Paris in a bikini to promote Carl Jr. Burgers and Holly wearing nothing to promote PETA.

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If you are familiar with the benefits of Microsoft Exchange Server, and you are considering deploying this robust messaging & collaboration platform, you should become familiar with your installation options. They include:

• Self hosted
• Shared hosted
• Privately hosted

Many large companies and organizations have made the investment in hosting their own Microsoft Exchange Server environments. What they have found is that the costs associated with purchasing equipment and licensing, installing the messaging system, and maintaining it over the years can be prohibitively expensive. That doesn’t mean that self-hosting is always a bad option: if you have a large, well-trained IT staff and your users are highly centralized, you may find that self-hosting is the best choice for you.

Why is Self-Hosted Exchange so Expensive?

A properly configured Microsoft Exchange environment requires two dedicated Active Directory Domain Controllers and at least one dedicated Exchange Server. All three servers must be licensed for Microsoft Windows Server 2003, and the mail server must be licensed for Microsoft Exchange. Additionally, you must license each user for both Windows Server and Exchange Server. So before you even consider hardware and implementation, a 20 user system costs between $4000 & $5000 in licensing alone. Even if you decide to get the least expensive hardware available, it is hard to conceive you could get the entire system installed for less than $6000.

The system described above is just the basic building blocks of your messaging system. There are several important components missing from the configuration, including:

• Data Backup
• Anti-virus / Anti-Spam
• Internet connectivity
• Ongoing support and maintenance

A more realistic price for installing this state-of-the-art messaging & collaboration system is roughly $10,000.

So why would any organization install Exchange Server?

Large companies get the benefit of economies of scale. The incremental cost of adding a single user to this environment is around $100. This means that systems with hundreds of email accounts can spread the equipment and licensing costs among a larger pool of users. Also, they tend to have IT staffs equipped to handle the day-to-day management of a sophisticated email system.

What is Shared Hosted Exchange

A number of companies have sprung up on the web that have created large Microsoft Exchange Server infrastructures capable of supporting thousands of users. They offer a simple solution for single users or small companies to host Exchange email. They generally offer their customers a flat fee per user. Their plans include a specific amount of storage for each user account, and they charge a nominal fee per user per month.

There are many benefits to a shared hosted Exchange Server environment. The most obvious is cost. A small organization immediately takes advantage of the economies of scale only large enterprises enjoy. And since the monthly fees are fixed, there are no surprises. In addition to having access to all the features and capabilities of Microsoft Exchange Server, most hosting companies offer access to services like Blackberry Enterprise Server and Good Link Server.

Shared Hosted Exchange has its share of drawbacks. Email accounts for your users are hosted in large cumbersome information stores, commingled with users from all over the world. Many times your users’ accounts can be spread among many different servers, leading to long delivery delays.

These systems are a one-size-fits-all approach, meaning that your organization has no control over how the massaging system is configured. If you find a great piece of software that integrates with Exchange Server, you can forget installing it. If you want to enable a protocol or integrate with a great anti-spam solution, there is no way to do it.

Management of your email system is limited to cumbersome, web control panels. System administrators prefer to have the flexibility of using Active Directory Users & Computers, System Manager, and other integrated management tools. Plus there are hundreds of specialized management utilities available for Exchange and Active Directory, all of which are off limits to shared hosted customers.

Single Sign-on is another great feature of Exchange server that is unavailable to shared hosted customers. In a traditional Exchange Server environment, users login using their Active Directory user account, and this account is also used to access their email system. That means that a single login, a single password, gives them access to all of their applications and data. This level of integration is not possible with Shared Hosted Exchange. So for companies that are public or thinking of going public, or those that are subject to IT audits, this service is not even a possibility.

Privately Hosted Exchange: Get the benefits of Shared & Self Hosted

Privately Hosted Exchange by Infinitely Virtual overcomes all the shortcomings of both Shared & Self Hosted Exchange environments. Using our state-of-the-art virtual server hosting environment, we create for every PHE customer a complete messaging system, including two dedicated Active Directory Servers and a dedicated Exchange server. And we do this for a flat monthly fee per user.

Customer designated users have access to management utilities. Every feature of Active Directory and Exchange Server may be customized to meet your organization’s needs. All third-party applications are supported.

You can add VPN to any PHE plan, and with that we support single sign-on. We can establish a trust with an existing Active Directory or you can join your servers to your Active Directory in our datacenter. Either way, you can enjoy all the benefits of an enterprise AD environment without having to design and implement it.

If any of this sounds complicated, you don’t have to worry. Our engineers provide free user account management, free implementation plans, and of course we can provide professional services to integrate your email system with the rest of your network.

How we protect your organization and your data

Every virtual server is hosted in our Enterprise VMware Virtual Infrastructure environment. Servers are clustered using VMwareHA technology, ensuring that hardware failures won’t lead to significant down time. All data is stored on our clustered SAN and connected to the Internet over our redundant switching fabric. We take six snapshots of your data per day. And every server in our environment is an HP Proliant with redundant power supplies, connected to our fully redundant power system, backed up by uninterruptible power Supplies and generators.

Find out more about guaranteed reliability for your organization’s MS Exchange Server at InfinitelyVirtual.com.

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