Category: Geek (page 26 of 36)

July 6, 2008

Raw NEF files and WD’s MyBook

I take pictures in Nikon’s raw NEF format because I can use Photoshop Element’s raw importer to tweak the exposure, clarity, black level, etc. But the NEF files are often 9 MB files and I have almost 3,000 of them and that’s just since May. That came out to 22 GB’s and counting. Even cleaning up the ones I don’t want to keep still leaves me with a mess.

Time to get more storage. Instead of just installing another drive in my system, I wanted to get an external drive. In the past I was put off on USB hard drive cases, so this time I went looking for a complete out of the box solution.

Costco had a instant manufacturer’s rebate on the 1 TB Western Digital MyBook Home Edition. We went and picked it up very quickly. It supports USB 2.0 (480 Mb/s max), Firewire (400 Mb/s max), and eSATA (3Gb/s max).

Guess which interface I picked? But my Dell XPS 700720 does not have a built in eSATA port. So I went to Bestbuy and picked up a DYNEX eSATA card and a 6 foot long cable (the MyBook only comes with USB and Firewire cables).

After I installed the card and hooked up the drive, I ran “Command Prompt” as Administrator and ran this command:

convert F: /FS:NTFS

The drive ships with a FAT32 file system and I prefer NTFS for Vista. The mostly empty drive converted quickly and I started to move data to it.

It’s a fast drive when using eSATA. I went to my Pictures short cut and right clicked the icon. I selected Properties -> Location, clicked Move…, typed in the new location on the MyBook and clicked Apply.

It moved 22 GBs of files onto the drive in no time at all. Less than 10 minutes. Using USB or my Firewire port would have taken a lot longer than that.

Right now I’m playing with my Photoshop Elements catalog, but so far I’m satisfied with the new drive. It’s got a LED bar on the face of it that does the vertical Cylon eye thing. I may keep that covered up when I’m watching old episodes of Battlestar Galactica just to be safe.

July 4, 2008

Disney and digital photography

The whole family came back from Disney World Wednesday and here are some of my notes for the pictures I took.

From Thursday the 26th to Wednesday the 2nd I took 1,600+ pictures with my Nikon D60.

What I have been doing since I got back is going through each vacation day and selecting photos for Flickr. So far I completed up to Sunday June 29th and have uploaded some 88 pictures. You can see the Disney World 2008 set on Flickr here.

The Lowepro Fastpack 200 was a great idea.

It’s a great backpack and easy to use. It was raining on and off everyday. Being able to quickly take the camera out, shoot the picture, and pack the camera away was fantastic. The only thing I think I may change is replace the Nikon neck strap with a hand strap.

I need to buy an 18-200mm lens.

Stefan lent me his Nikkor lens and it was great for the trip. Being able to take pictures close up and zoom out immediately without changing the lens was just way too useful. I’m thinking of getting the Sigma 18-200mm f/3.5-6.3 DC OS just to be different.

The Sigma 30mm f/1.4 EX DC HSM lens is still my main lens and does not disappoint.

In either Aperture or Program Auto mode it works great. It covers low light really well and I took a lot of shots with it.

I forgot to switch to the zoom lens once and left the 30mm on during the Animal Kingdom tour. I found out that Shutter Priority works well too; I took this picture from a really bouncy “safari” tour bus. For that shot, the camera was set at ISO 400, f/4.5 and shutter speed was 1/2000 of a second.

I saw more Canon cameras than I did Nikons.

I guess Canon markets better in the U.S. 🙂 I don’t know what the Canon models were but the Nikons I saw were mostly D60s with the 18-55mm kit lens. The camera that all the wandering Disney staff use for taking shots of the guests? A Nikon D70. The person I spoke to recommended it highly saying that they never have any problems with it.

I did see several D200s and one D300 with a Nikkor 17-35mm AF-S wide angle lens and a Manfrotto mono-pod stand (not that I pay attention to such things). I tried not to be jealous, but the fact is I would not know what to do with a camera like that.

I am still uploading more pictures to Flickr and I should be done by Monday with the whole set. I could dump all 1,600+ straight to Flickr but what would be the point? I prefer to share only the good ones and not show people all the ones that were not in focus.

June 20, 2008

The exploration of Mars

NASA Phoenix Arm

Since I’m convinced that there is little intelligent life in the world (or at least in the U.S. government) let’s head to Mars for a moment. From Gizmodo I followed this link to The Big Picture’s Martian Skies.

The NASA Phoenix Mars lander has confirmed water on Mars. That does not mean there is life on Mars but it’s a huge discovery and can lead to a better understanding of how Mars formed. Was it always like this? And if not how did it become like this?

The web page is an amazing collection of pictures from various missions. Just look at the picture of Phobos. Head over to that page, I feel better knowing that we’re still capable of such exploration.

June 18, 2008

Gears of War for Windows

The other day I was in Best Buy getting some Nintendo DS Lite games for the kids. The Windows version of Gears of War was on sale for $30 so I got it. I always get last year’s games.

After the nightmare known as Halo 2 for Windows I was worried that the game would crash. So far it’s stable but there is one problem. The game stutters a lot. The whole screen pauses then jumps and it’s really annoying.

To minimize the problem, I’ve shut down all the added background programs such as the iTunes helper, Java updater, and other odds and end junk. The stuttering is acceptable now but the game definitely runs better on the Xbox 360.

It plays well, and I already know how the story will end. I was afraid that without an XBox controller that the experience would be not so good but the keyboard/mouse combination works well. And I aim much better with the mouse than I ever did on the Xbox 360.

Now if I can only work out dodging the berzerker using the keyboard then I’d be all set.

June 17, 2008

Firefox 3 is out

Get your latest copy of Firefox 3.0 here. Thursday openSUSE 11 comes out. It’s like an open source cosmic alignment of the planets.

I’ve avoided the openSUSE 11 beta only because I don’t have the time. I’ve been kicking around Firefox 3.0 RC version and a couple of days ago, even Greasemonkey got updated for version 3.

June 16, 2008

WordPress file monitoring

Over a week ago I complained about WordPress users crying security wolf and not being able to recover their blog when the “Bad Thing(tm)” happens.

Since then a real brawl developed on the support forum that could be summed up like so:

One or more users is insisting that there is an XMLRPC exploit in 2.5.1.
The same one or more users refuses to back this claim up with data, or apparently send the WordPress security e-mail alias any info (maybe, how would other people know what was sent via e-mail?)
Many people tried to reasonably explain that such an exploit may exist but without data there is nothing to solve.

This discussion was just plain nuts and went around in circles. Complaining about a problem without providing any proof and then getting all pissy about it is totally useless. It is entirely possible that such an exploit exists and many people replied so. But without any providing data other than saying “I can assure you that the hack occurs via XMLRPC”, then everyone’s time gets wasted.

Fortunately, Donncha provided a page that covers the issue succinctly and today he added another post on setting up aide. His two posts are good and anyone considering monitoring their WordPress files for modification should give this a try.

Aide will let you see if your installation files and directories have been tampered with. It won’t protect you against HTTP POSTS or database attacks but it’s very good if someone succeeds in modifying your files.

There are ways to log what’s being sent via an HTTP POST and examine that information; if (or even when) I get hacked, I’ll try to start looking at that data. MYSQL database monitoring, that could be interesting but for now I’m not aware of a good tool to do that.

On my OpenSuSE installation, installing aide is simple. As root run

zypper install aide
aide --init
mv /var/lib/aide/aide.db.new /var/lib/aide/aide.db
aide --check
cp /usr/share/doc/packages/aide/examples/etc/cron.daily/aide.sh /etc/cron.daily/

All of which I just did. I ran the check option to make sure I did not create any issues with the aide.conf file. I’ll play with the aide.conf file and see what kind of output I get when the daily cron job gets run. If I add and modify files and I set it up correctly then I should see that in daily cron job’s output.

Update: this worked but in /etc/aide.conf change the line verbose=1 to verbose=5. That will get you a useful output of which files and directories changed.

June 9, 2008

Optimum Online: EPIC FAIL!

Around 5:30 PM today I had gotten an e-mail letting me know that my web server was down. I figured that since my server is in my basement, I must have had a brownout. No big deal I’d deal with it when I got home.

Only it was not me for a change. My cable modem was not establishing a connection up stream. TV was working fine, just no Internet access.

The Cablevision support phone number kept ringing busy. When I did get through it played a message saying “If you are calling about an Internet outage and live in the following towns, then an outage has been reported.”

The message played the name of every town I had ever heard of in Long Island. My town was listed at the last one at the very end with “and Dix Hills”.

At 8:30 PM we got sporadic access back. The connection is not good and it keeps going down in the middle of a page load. I’m sure it will be all fixed before midnight. But I’m really dying to know what part of their backbone caused this outage.

Meh. It happens. Wonder if Verizon will market this outage?

With my old ISP in Queens had a page bulletins from their NOC. You could look and at least find out what happened and what the ETA was for a fix. If I find the equivalent page on Optimum Online I’ll update this post.

June 3, 2008

Sigh, WordPress users and hacking

If you are not running the latest version of WordPress and you get hacked, don’t go to the WordPress forum and tell the world. Odds are you invited the disaster yourself.

When WordPress 2.5 came out I was disappointed to find that the old version 2.3.x was basically abandoned. There would be no more planned patches for 2.3.x just the current 2.5. The 2.0.x branch would continue to be supported as part of the commitment to the Debian version model.

So as of right now versions 2.0.11 and 2.5.1 are supported. If you are running 2.2.x, 2.3.x, 2.5(.0), or any other version then you run the risk of being exploited.

So why do users continue to use the old versions? Everyday there are posts in the support forum that (so far) always deals with someone’s blog getting hacked and they are not using the current 2.5.1 version (as of this writing). Eventually someone writes “I’ve been hacked” and some other user writes “Is this a vulnerability of insert current version HERE?!? Why are the developers not doing SOMETHING?!”.

It’s like there is some axe to grind and the first one to find the axe gets 1000 gold points. The moderators usually show great patience; I’d get ticked if I were them. These users seriously should just avail themselves of WordPress.com and stop trying to self host a blog.

The freely available WordPress from WordPress.ORG is not commercially supported, and commercial support if often not that good anyway. So for anyone who is thinking about using WordPress.org’s software, they should be able to do the following by themselves.

You need to be able to make backups.

Read this Codex article for backing up your WordPress installation.

WordPress uses two components. The easy one is the file system and backing that up should be trivial. I use a shell script that creates a tar.gz archive every night. Another cron job deletes backups that are older than 30 days. Why fill up my disk? The backups are not for historical use, just to get me back to the state I was 24 hours ago if need be. 30 days is too much but hey, disk space is cheap.

The mysql database is the other component. The same backup script also creates a text dump of my entire WordPress database. This copy gets gzipped and added to my file backup. The mysqldump command is your friend and should be used.

You need to be able to know how to restore those backups.

The Codex has a good article on how to restore your blog database here.

Making the best backups is pointless if you don’t know what to do with them when the “Bad Thing” happens. Take your backup and restore it to a WAMP or LAMP installation on your own PC. If you need a Windows Apache Mysql Php setup, use Google and install the one you feel comfortable with. In Linux just add the packages (See this link for Ubuntu).

Once you have the Apache web server, Mysql, and PHP running locally on your PC then start playing. Install WordPress locally, restore your backup and just change the name of your installation in wp-config.php to localhost and test. To adjust your local installation to run on your PC just add these two lines to the copy of the wp-config.php on your PC:

define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://localhost');
define('WP_HOME', 'http://localhost');

Then on your PC point your browser to http://localhost/ and test it. Beat it up; it’s a local copy on your PC. Go nuts on it and confirm that your posts, categories, tags, comments, etc. are all there. Anything on your PC that you mess up in WAMP or LAMP should be no big deal. Just start over if you get lost.

Play with it until you understand what you are doing, because when you DO lose your blog you’ll need to do this for real.

Practice performing an upgrade on your PC’s local copy.

That sounds like a plan right? Some plugins don’t work with the latest and greatest version. If the version you are running is vulnerable to an exploit then you don’t need that plug in.

Security updates are the number one driver for minor number version releases such as 2.5 to 2.5.1. Yes, there are bugs but they usually are tolerable. Exploitable code is serious business and usually gets fixed quickly.

Once you are comfortable with upgrading and testing your local installation, upgrade your real blog. I personally keep good backups and know how to restore them so I never bother with this step.

If you know how to backup and restore your blog, then even if the upgrade is bad, you will be able to put it back the way it was before the upgrade.

May 29, 2008

Getting into photography

I’ve been playing around with the D60 and some digital editing. Nothing much, just minor adjustments and cropping.

Since I’m doing such minor editing I don’t bother purchasing any photo applications like Adobe Photoshop Elements. The freely available Paint.NET is more than enough for me so far and the more I look at it, the more impressed I get.

Per Stefan’s recommendation I’m shooting photos in RAW. I was using JPEG normal but even I noticed defects in images that I’m taking, so RAW seems to make sense for now.

In order to start using NEF files (Nikon RAW format) I have done the following:

Install the Nikon NEF codec. For my Vista 64 bit system I had installed this one. The 64 bit one is beta, so check that web site often for updates. Installing the codec is for ease of use. All it buys me is the ability to see a thumbnail in windows so I can find the file I really want to edit.
Install this plugin for Paint.NET. It lets me import RAW files. I can’t save them in the same format but TIFF works out well for that. When you install the plugin on a 64 bit system, make sure it installs in the correct directory. For faster processing you can get optimized dcraw binaries here at the dcraw web site. Update: Per Benni’s comment, also see the Dave’s dcraw web page here. Dave is the author of dcraw and has a good FAQ about the program and the portable source code.
Install this plugin WordPress Media Flickr. Okay, not for editing exactly but I use it to link images on Flickr into my blog posting. I had to make a change to my PHP5 installation but no big deal. I can select my photos easily and if I wanted to I could search other peoples Flickr photos.

Now I can load up images and just work on then pretty easily. I plan to check out Paint.NET’s forums and work on some goofy edits.

May 24, 2008

I got the Nikon D60

Well that was not too difficult. After doing some shoping we went to Costco and picked up the Nikon D60.

We went the next day to Strasburg, PA and I took about 300 pictures of the kids and the trains. Got back today and used Paint.NET to touch up some of them before uploading them to Flickr.

Paint.NET rocks. Once I got into a work flow, croping, rotating, and adjusting the colors became a breeze. You can see what I’ve uploaded at my Flickr page.