Author: Jan Dembowski (page 19 of 96)

August 14, 2011

Postpartum compassion…?

Oh, that Jon Stewart. It’s almost like he’s coming right out and saying Megyn Kelly is a hypocrite.

The best line is this:

See this, this is the problem with entitlements. They’re really only entitlements when they’re something other people want. When it’s something you want, they’re a hallmark of a civilized society, the foundation of a great people.

I just had a baby and found out maternity leave strengthens society. But since I still have a job, unemployment benefits are clearly socialism.

What’s sad is that she’s not a dummy. Wonder if it ever bothers her?

August 12, 2011

µ[mjuː]-II Manual

One of my film cameras is an Olympus Stylus Epic DLX camera that I picked up on eBay. It was a good buy but I was looking for a copy of the manual.

And today I’ve found out that someone uploaded a PDF of it on Flickr!

Very useful.

July 31, 2011

2011 Trip to China

It’s amazing what can happen in a few months.

The whole family and I went to China for 21 days and it was a great trip. In order we flew from JFK -> HKG -> PEK/BJS -> XIY ->PVG -> CAN -> Zhaoqing -> HKG -> TSA -> HKG -> JFK.

In plain English we went to Beijing, Xi’an, Shanghai, Guanzho (briefly), Zhaoqing, took a bus to Hong Kong (NEVER EVER AGAIN!) flew to Taiwain, toured the country by car and then came back to Hong Kong.

All that in 21 days. I took over 4,500 photos with my Nikon D300s and 6 rolls of film with the Olympus Trip 35. We met Lily’s family and everyone had a good time. But the tour was intense and we’re all still decompressing 3 weeks later.

You can see the photos I took at my Flickr page.

June 15, 2011

Olympus Stylus Epic DLX

Okay, I like the new Olympus Stylus Epic DLX. The DLX portion has panorama and a quartz clock but aside from that it’s identical to the non-DLX version. I’m putting these into a set on my Flickr page, go take a look.

For this photo I left the flash on (I normally turn flash off) and I am really happy with the result. The camera is fully automatic, weather resistant, and with a little practice I think I’ll be able to take some good photos with it.

Read up on Rob Nunn’s post and video for some good information. I got mine on eBay and I consider it a good bargain.

The Stylus Epic is not as much fun as the Trip 35 but it’s small and takes really nice shots. And I’ve already taken it in the rain without any worry.

June 13, 2011

Still a sucker for WordPress beta

I took the plunge and once again used SVN to switch from running WordPress 3.1.3 to 3.2 beta. The betas are usually solid and I test my nightly backups on a different server from time to time.

Unless something really drastic happens to the WordPress repo, I’ll be fine with the beta.

The new fullscreen distraction free interface for composing posts? It’s unreal. The keyboard commands work fine, it’s just that the minimal GUI is hidden until you move the mouse. You “Just write” and that’s all there is to it. It’s just a blank page for you to type on.

The other improvements so far seem to be GUI based. I haven’t dug deeply into the documentation yet but my plugins work fine and I’m running a network of blogs from this installation. There is an oddity that when I load the post edit page, the TinyMCE does weird things during the load. Not a big deal and it sorts itself out in a second, just strange is all.

So far I like it. WordPress continues to improve and the beta keeps that record going strong.

June 11, 2011

Using IPv6

When IPv6 day came around, I installed Squid3 and a IPv6 tunnel setup on my in-house Linux server. I used the instructions from Ubuntu’s Wiki and made some minor configuration changes to Squid3 and that was it. You need to use version 3; version 2 of Squid lacks the right support.

The tunnel broker I am using is Hurricane Electric’s excellent Tunnel Broker. Just create an account, provide some information and you are good to go.

Easy! Now using Squid3 I can browse to Google and CNN’s IPv6 pages without any hiccup. I preferred to do it this way because setting up my Linux server as an IPv6 gateway would have required more (not much) work from me. This was quick to do and I had no problems.

Moving on, I created another HE tunnel on this web server. Using Apache 2 virtual hosts, I just added to the config file these lines.

<VirtualHost [2001:470:1f10:f10::2]:80>

 ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
 ServerName blog.dembowski.net
 ServerAlias *.blog.dembowski.net
 ServerAlias photo.dembowski.net
 ServerAlias blog.epyon-1.com

 DocumentRoot /var/www/vhosts/blog.dembowski.net/
 #DocumentRoot /home/jan/public_html/

 <Directory />
 Options FollowSymLinks -Indexes
 AllowOverride All
 </Directory>

 ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/blog.dembowski.net-error.log

 # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
 # alert, emerg.
 LogLevel warn

 CustomLog /var/log/apache2/blog.dembowski.net-access.log combined
 ServerSignature On

</VirtualHost>

The lines are duplicated from the existing vhost entry. I substituted the A record address of 209.20.89.108 with the AAAA record address of 2001:470:1f10:f10::2. This address was provided by Hurricane Electric.

Next up was to update my dembowski.net DNS zone by adding the AAAA record. This is the IPv6 address record and now my DNS name blog.dembowski.net has two entries.

blog.dembowski.net. 900 IN A 209.20.89.108
blog.dembowski.net. 900 IN AAAA 2001:470:1f10:f10::2

I restarted Apache and now when a IPv4 or v6 request comes in, it gets handled by correct IP address and all is well. My server and proxy logs show which address I am hitting, and the site validates.

So what did this get me? Nothing really, except to show how easy it is to add IPv6 to your site and web connection. A buddy of mine almost exclusively uses IPv6 only at home. The old address space is or has ran out (depending on how and who you ask). Migrating to anything new can be a challenge but really, there is no reason for ISPs or hosting providers to not support IPv6.

June 5, 2011

Waiting for my new toy

The film camera bug has hit me pretty hard. I’ve been using one of my Olympus Trip 35 cameras (see above taken last weekend) and have purchased an Olympus Stylus Epic DLX from someone on eBay. The new one is it’s way and should be here next week.

You can read up on the Olympus Stylus Epic here and for here is a copy of Popular Photograhy’s review here. The DLX version is the same but adds Quartz date and a panoramic mode. This model was introduced in 1997 and like many older cameras is available on eBay.

I’m getting this one because it’s compact, opens wide (f/2.8), and has a reputation for taking sharp photos. It’s also weather resistant (splash proof) and is fully automatic.

Unlike the Trip 35, it’s very electrical and has no manual features. It should be perfect for the kids to use and I’ll give it a try as a walk about camera for street photography.

May 28, 2011

Nikon GP-1

Sometimes you just like to know where you were when you took the photo. Luckily there are many options available for a DSLR and I went with the default Nikon solution.

Last week on a whim I ordered a Nikon GP-1 for my camera. This GPS receiver plugs into my D300s and when it has a lock onto enough GPS satellites (3 or more) it embeds the coordinates and UTC time for when and where you took the picture.

I like it a lot but it’s an imprecise technology. The receiver is only as accurate as the data sources it locks onto, meaning if it locks onto 4 or more satellites, it’s good for ~20 feet or so. My first photos didn’t have any GPS coordinates recorded. Later on I was getting a good signal and got better results.

The default camera settings is to enable Auto Meter off, which from the manual explains

Auto Meter Off

If Enable is selected for GPS > Auto meter off in the setup menu for D3, D700, D300, and D90 cameras, the exposure
meters will turn off automatically after the time specifi ed in the camera Custom Settings menu. This reduces the drain
on the battery but may prevent GPS data from being recorded if the exposure meters are not activated until immediately
before the picture is taken.

I had some problems keeping a lock on the GPS with that feature enabled. Once I disabled the feature, the GPS receiver took a couple of minutes to acquire the satellites. But once it found them, I had a solid green light and was floored as to how accurate the readings were.

If you look at the above map, you can see where the GP-1 did not quite get a lock onto my position. After I disabled Auto Meter Off, the GP-1 put me (correctly) onto 23rd Street. Even with 3 satellites it still puts me in the general vicinity and that’s good enough for my street photography.

After I uploaded the photos to Flickr, I Googled for a tool and found iMapFlickr. After providing a small amount of info I was able to generate the above map in no time. I’ll continue to play around with it but so far it works exactly as I thought it would.

May 26, 2011

Middle age? It took me forever to get here

As you get older, your habits change and you do different things. In the past I have spent a great deal of time building Linux servers and running my domain’s mail and spam filters, my own web servers for family web sites, ftp server, and sometimes hosting a game server.

Linux and open source software is cool and exciting.

This past week? I’ve been working on my own time preparing the pool for Sunday. Last year we opened the pool up for the first time on Memorial day and had a great summer. Since it was the first time the pool company took care of balancing the water, adding salt, etc. This year it’s all me and Lily.

It’s not a great deal of work (vacuuming was a pain), and the pool is really low maintenance. It’s just that I used to spend my time doing geeky things.

Now my geek tasks are actually managed.

My domain’s mail is handled by Google Apps because I was spending serious time losing the spam battle.
I update my WordPress site using the automatic upgrade feature while I weep for my lost SVN commands.
I never host any game servers anymore and feel like I should yell “you kids get off the lawn!”
My Linux distro of choice for my servers is Ubuntu 10.04 LTS because I got tired of updating Linux distros every 6 months.

My hobbies have changed too. I used to play PC games much more frequently but lately I’m more into photography. Unlike other family members, I’ve only gotten into this about 3 years ago. And my 35mm film infatuation is more recent than that, I carry an Olympus Trip 35 everywhere.

I still plan on working on my Gunpla collection, but I’m finding it funny how my spare time is being used. I’m not upset about it, but the observation makes me laugh.

May 16, 2011

Okay, this may be a setup but it’s really funny

It’s been a busy month, with no sign of it slowing down either! In the meanwhile enjoy this cute video.

Even if it’s all setup, it’s still pretty funny.