Going on holiday is fun, but it's also a time of concessions on several levels. Especially if you can't bring every lens you own or (in theory) might need. Since the awesome Nikon 5-500mm f/1.8G VR ED N (small, <€1000, <1kg) isn't widely available. This means deciding what to bring in your camera bag.
In my case, I wanted to experiment with primes during my holiday. this also means that you have to use the foot-zoom, and on several occasions that won't work because of certain limitation (walls, buildings, ravines, etc.). In those cases you have 3 options;
- Don't make the photo
- Make a photo, but know immediately that it will end in /dev/null when you get home (a just-for-the-record photo).
- Improvise
So as you might have guessed, I ran into such a situation in Toledo, Spain. They have this great cathedral in the middle of an old town with narrow streets. You need a ultra-wide angle lens for almost anything there.
My area of expertise in the professional world is Network Security. This includes protecting network from intrusions, but also delivering reports about the network status. For the latter we use SIEM(like) environments like the Cisco CS-MARS and the Juniper STRM.
The 'problem' with these devices is that they are great in reporting incidents and creating awesome reports about everything, but they lack the functionality to do some serious investigating.
I have several customers with a SIEM, and most of them still use (Linux) commandline tools like awk, grep, etc. these tools work, but you need to scrape everything together yourself, and building queries can be quite challenging. This is where Splunk> comes in.
Ever since I've been playing with my Mac mini with OS X server 10.6.4 I have had on-and-off problems in the authentication/Open Directory area.
- Some accounts authenticate really quick, while others take minutes to authenticate.
- Accessing the Open Directory through the Workgroup Manager is as slow as a slow boat to China. Changing users (just by selecting them) takes another boat along the Pacific.
So it was time to start digging into the phenomenon called 'Open Directory'.
The manual from Apple isn't much help in troubleshooting a slow Open Directory, so it was time to search the interwebs and start experimenting. If it didn't work, I can always reinstall the entire server from scratch.
After Apple updated the Mac mini to it's current form (mid 2010), I decided that it was time to start replacing my 'faithful' Windows 2003 server with something a bit less power consuming. The original Mac Mini was basically a consumer device, but a while back, Apple released a server version of the device. The main differences are:
- Only 1 CPU model available (2.66GHz at this moment)
- No DVD drive
- 2 * 500GB internal disks
- OSX 10.6.4 Server edition (unlimited clients)
Basically everything you could ever need for a server with a very small footprint.
The installation of Coldfusion is not straight forward. Not that I expected it to be [1], [2], [3], but one keeps hoping on an installer that actually installs the complete package, and where you don't have to edit files yourself to get it to work. It's not that it's the very first version of the scripting engine......
Anyway, the installer guides you through everything needed to INSTALL the software. Getting it to work comes next....
Most of the regular iPhone / iPod Touch users already know that there's no sign of porn or erotica to be found in the Apple App Store. Reason for this is (according to Steve Jobs);
You know, there’s a porn store for Android. You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go – so we’re not going to go there.
So no porn for the iPhone (at least not the jailbraked versions), or is it? It seems that Apple facilitates the biggest 'app' for getting your porn 'fix'. The app is called 'Safari'. The good old browser. The application that made the Internet for what it is today. As an alternative you can use iTunes to provide you your 'fix'.
Note that eventhough I'm talking porn/erotica here, you can project this to any piece of content.
Before continuing, I must warn you. The complete article might have some explicit pictures, so continue at your own risk. I can't and won't be held responsible for the consequences.
Not being able to fly has its advantages. In response to the widespread chaos caused by the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano (pronounced as 'whatever'), Lonely Planet is offering 13 of its European iPhone guides for free (as in 'free beer').
Oké. Day 2. After the successful installation and configuration of CentOS with Adobe Coldfusion, I needed to install MySQL as a database. So, I started the virtual machine, and found out why Linux will (probably) never cut it as a common desktop environment.
X11 - No DesktopYesterday I (properly) shutdown the system (which had the GNOME Desktop), and today it started with some back to the 60's desktop. Every icon gone. All that I'm left with was a terminal window, clock, and a FireFox window. This environment is the basic X11 desktop.
A while back I figured out how to install Adobe (could have been Macromedia back then) Coldfusion MX on an Ubuntu linux server. This config still runs as it should, but in the mean time several things have changed in the world of software. I've been leaning towards Centos 5.4, and Adobe released Coldfusion 9 somewhere in 2009. These two 'events' made me decide to combine the two.
Before I continue, I must warn you that the Coldfusion installer is still broken..... So there's some manipulation of code involved.
Since the new 'server' is going to run in a virtual environment I started in a VMWare Workstation. This way I could make snapshots of my progress. This made it easier to start from scratch. The problem with Linux and me is that I tend to reinstall the OS when things go haywire. So VMWare is a safe way out in this case.
The general consensus on flashing is that you should take the flash of the camera (take the flash off the damn camera). It just results in better (more flattering) photos In some cases this is impossible. Especially when the flash is integrated. But there's hope. There are several point & shoot camera's (P&S) that feature a hot-shoe. The Panasonic Lumix LX3 [1] is one of those camera's.
;)