Frozen Light at the State Fair

For the 2nd year in a row I tried my hand at taking long-exposure images of the carnival rides at the Kansas State Fair.

Though the rides were mostly the same as last year, I was able to get quite a number of photos that are quite different from the year before.

As last year, these taken using a Canon 40D DSLR, with a Canon 17-55EF lens, mounted on a tripod. I shot at 100, for 1-10 seconds, with an f-stop of 18.

Here’s a link to this year’s Kansas State Fair Frozen Light photos, and also a link to last year’s Fair photos, both on flickr.

I was interesting in evaluating MarkSpace’s SyncTogether program as a potential solution for keeping 2 Mac OS X address books, owned by two different users, in sync.

Well, right off the bat I ran into problems. Immediately upon launching the program I received this error:

An SSL certificate for mike@terrapin-pro could not be generated.

Contacting customer support resulted in a fairly quick response, but it didn’t help. They pointed me to an FAQ entry that didn’t match my symptoms.

Then, in typical busman’s holiday fashion (I nominally took today off), I spent a couple of hours debugging the problem this afternoon.

First, via the console app, I found the SyncTogether script that was failing. It was calling the utility certtool and getting a permission denied error.

I tried this and I tried that (including running SyncTogether as root, w/no problems) and finally ended up finding the answer when I searched for “os x keychain location and permissions” which lead to a very useful Mac OS X Hints page.

It turned out the answer was to launch /Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app and perform a Keychain First Aid. Doing so revealed this error:

User differs on ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain, should be 501, owner is 0

and once it was corrected SyncTogether launched without incident.

Hopefully later today I’ll get a chance to actually evaluate SyncTogether!

Oh, and here it is in FAQ format:

Q. I’m getting the following error, what should I do?

An SSL certificate for user@host could not be generated.

A. Launch /Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app and perform a Keychain First Aid.

Two things that I found useful this weekend when working on my Ubuntu Linux system. There are a lot of good Linux distributions to choose from; we use Debian at work, so Debian-based Ubuntu is a logical choice for home usage.

Disable Desktop Effects

If you turn on Desktop Effects and your hardware doesn’t support it, you can end up with an unreadable display. Even power-cycling and rebooting won’t help.

The easiest way to fix this is to switch to another console (ctl-alt-f4, for example), login, and run the following command, which removes the desktop-effects package:

sudo apt-get remove --purge compiz-core desktop-effects

More information and discussion is available at ubuntuforums.

Change Resolution

The typical way to change screen resolution is to click “System->Preferences->Screen Resolution” and select the desired setting. If the resolution you want isn’t available, you need to reconfigure your X server.

Begin by exiting X windows (by stopping gdm or kdm):

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop #(or kdm for KDE)

Reconfigure X; you may need to know your video card’s specs as well as your monitor’s specs; these are usually available online.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

To start Gnome/KDE again:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start #(or kdm for KDE)

More information and discussion is available at ubuntuforums.

There was a minor kerfuffle on the intertubes earlier this week as Digg tried unsuccessfully to limit links to web sites that contained a 16-digit hexadecimal number that is part of the built-in copy protection system used in HD-DVD players. The reason Digg undertook to limit these links is because the AACS Licensing Authority, which controls the anti-copying technology underlying HD-DVD, sent out hundreds of legal threats to sites that had posted the key, including Digg.

Digg eventually caved, having no real choice as users posted the number so often that Digg’s entire front page was filled with links to the forbidden number. As it turned out, trying to suppress the number only caused it to grow like wildfire. One the first day of the excitement, there were about 30 thousand entries when searching for the magic number; by week’s end there were over one million results!

In addition, a variety of creative expressions of the number were posted on web sites around the world and via other means, such as t-shirts, Google Maps mashups, and more. Wired has a nice collection of related entries for your enjoyment (though some are much more creative than others).

One of my favorites, from the Wired article, is this riddle, also available at Flickr.

Finally then, a poem that reflects on the whole crazy affair:

Zero and her Origin

Zero, the number said to be discovered
Nine times by ancient magicians, was
Found again by a mysterious order of
Nine modern alchemists, who built
One machine after another, until finally
One exploded with fascinating results.
No fire emerged from its
Twin engines, but instead
Nine small automata crawled out,
Denying the proposition that energy,
Seven millenia or more in the accumulation,
For most purposes, remains
Ever constant, throughout the
Three ages of man’s civilization.

Five hundred years after the death of Cesare
Borgia, whose image infected those of the
Divine Lamb (so called), still she who
Ate of the pomegranate seeds
For her indiscretion, must ever wend her
Solitary path amongst the
Five true worlds, stopping only for
Sex and occasional rending of garments.
Constant travel drains her.
Five worlds is too many for one lifetime, yet the
Sixth can never claim her.

Three wise men write, of the sefirot,
Five are false, and four are lies.
Tiferet alone among them holds the world’s truth.
Eight lifetimes of study,
Eight generations of blind encoding,
Cannot release the final answer:
Zero defined by itself; no further emblems exist.

by Jeremy Bornstein

For some time I’ve been wanting to upgrade the firmware (built-in software that controls most modern electronic devices) in my wireless router. I use a Linksys WRT54G, which is a typical wireless router that acts as a wireless access point, 4-port hub and internet router, all in one small package.

To some degree the reason for performing an upgrade like this is simply because it’s possible, though there’s no doubt that the new firmware does offer a much cleaner design than the factory default software; almost every interface screen is improved compared to the original. In addition, there are bug fixes and new, advanced features such as the ability to increase the transmitter’s power, more informative status pages and the ability to manage bandwidth usage by application (so that bit-torrents don’t consume the entire network, ahem).

Additionally, while on vacation I haven’t checked my work email (not even once) for the past week (a true rarity for me!) and this mini-project (3-4 hours last evening) provided a bit of a technical outlet for me. Also, I suppose this report is related to the concept of experiential learning we’ve discussed at work; I hope it’s useful for someone contemplating upgrading their router.

I began by refreshing my memory about the topic of wireless router firmware upgrades and found an excellent article that provides a good history and overview of the subject: The Open Source WRT54G Story.

The Linksys Routers Tricks, Tips and Firmware page provides some very useful background information.

A variety of firmware upgrade options are available, and this 3rd Party Firmware Comparison provides details about 4 of the most popular choices.

After a while I began zeroing in on a selection, and this first-hand account of someone’s experiences upgrading their own router helped solidify my choice: DD-WRT.

I quickly found a great (clear and accurate) set of WRT54G upgrade directions and shortly thereafter was back on the internet via a router that had just had the electronic equivalent of a brain transplant. After I finished my upgrade I found another page with upgrade directions that looks pretty informative and includes a photo gallery of screen-shots taken during the upgrade process.

Just in case there were any problems, I had a great router firmware upgrade troubleshooting page open for reference; thankfully it wasn’t needed.

Overall, while this wireless router upgrade isn’t necessary, it isn’t terribly hard to perform (though carefully following the instructions is important), and does provide both a better interface and some extra new features, including the ability to increase the transmitted power (useful if you have a computer that is a bit too far away from your wireless access point).

One caveat if you’ve read this far: only a few modern routers support this type of upgrade, so carefully read the above pages to ensure you have (or purchase) a model/version that will work with these router firmware upgrades that are available. If you have a newer model, the DD-WRT “micro” distribution is said to work, and if so is still likely better than the default software provided with the unit.