Watched the latest daily show, and was struck by how we really are complicit in the treating of employees in Chinese factories. I feel pretty helpless, as electronics do feel completely integrated in our modern lives. But one thing I thought I could do, apart from pray, is send feedback to Apple. You can watch the clip and see my message to Apple below. You can send your own feedback to Apple here, or find your preferred electronics company and send something similar.

Dear Sir or Madam,

I have been using Apple products for many years and as I’m sure many people have told you, your design and your products are the best around.

I am very glad for the leadership Apple has taken on it stance on the environmental impact of its products, and has gone beyond what is legally required.

I would like to add my request for you to take a similar stance on the use of Foxconn and other manufacturers in China. As you may be aware, conditions in those factories are often far less than ideal, so it would show real courage and integrity if you were to extend your care for the environment to a care for people employed by your outsourcing partners, either by pressuring the manufacturers to improve conditions, or choosing manufacturers that treat their workers better.

I hope you take seriously this request, as I believe it is important for our values as people that live in parts of the world with more freedom, to seek that freedom for our other fellow humans.

Yours Sincerely,
James David Low

I switch auto-lock on and off a lot, and I wish they combine the auto-lock setting with the brightness setting, and make a new “screen” setting. This would make it far fewer clicks to turn auto-locking on and off.

You can do as search for issue #10661356 at https://bugreport.apple.com if you want to add your support.

For those of you who want Google Safe Search enabled all the time:

http://www.safe-search.org

At Onoko, I’ve been using Quercus to run PHP applications on Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon’s scalable Java stack.

Quercus is great, although I’ve found I have to work round some of its unimplemented methods or implementation differences from PHP. I test on a plain Linux/Apache/PHP server though, and wanted a way to detect Quercus so I can conditionally use different work arounds. You can do this with the following PHP:

$IS_QUERCUS = strpos($_SERVER["SERVER_SOFTWARE"],’Quercus’) !== false;

This WordPress plugin allows you to use Amazon’s Simple Storage Service to host your media for your WordPress powered blog.

It is an extension of the Tantan S3 plugin adding support for setting a CloudFront distribution for your files.

Get it from WordPress here