Hwarf Nugen

Photo-a-Day 2009

Joshua Glemza — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 19:15:43 +0000

So I go this idea from Photojojo to take one new picture a day for the entire year. So please feel free to critique anything I’ve taken. I’m mostly trying to learn how to use my camera and explore different techniques. Hopefully during this process I’ll also be able to come up with some good compositions and end up with some cool shots.

Below you can see the latest photos taken. You can also view the entire set.

www.flickr.com

Isn’t it Beautiful!

Joshua Glemza — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 13:37:23 +0000

I’m a hypocrite. I’ve gone back to Time Warner Road Runner service. 3Mbps was just too slow and TW decided to charge me the correct price. I’m loving the new speed!

Reward for Missing Left Ear

Joshua Glemza — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 22:38:55 +0000

For having really large ears, Ollie seems to have made one of them vanish.

HTTP to HTTPS Forwards Please

Joshua Glemza — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:25:00 +0000

Why do some sites that require a secure connection not automatically forward you to the secure site? How hard is it to do? Not very! (with Apache at least)

#How about a simple .htaccess file in the webroot?

#Force SSL for example.hwarf.com

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} example.hwarf.com

RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !443

RewriteRule ^(.*) https://example.hwarf.com/ [R,L]

Hopefully some sites will pay attention to this. I’m not mentioning any URLs.

Digital Photo Frames

Joshua Glemza — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:50:07 +0000

What is the deal with the majority of digital photo frames having a 16×9 aspect ratio? The vast majority of digital cameras take pictures in either 2:3 or 3:4. So who was the genius that though we should stretch our pictures when we view them on a device that’s sole purpose is to display pictures! I guess my PowerShot does have a 16:9 mode, but I’m probably one of very few who actually use that feature. And what about my DSLR? Pictures from that should be what this device is designed for!

Windstream 3Mbps DSL

Joshua Glemza — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:18:42 +0000

Well, the new DSL line is installed. Below is a speed test result. Sadly this will probably be the fastest I’ll ever be able to get here as my attenuation is 59 and signal-to-noise ratio is 11.

Time Warner Cable / Road Runner - The Rip Off

Joshua Glemza — Sat, 31 May 2008 00:43:32 +0000

After 6 months with Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner Internet service at home I was hit with a nice surprise. Month 7th would cost me $70.95, instead of the $44.95 that was/is advertised on their site. For some reason my location does not get their standard pricing. While my initial service was great, below I’ve identified some issues I have with Time Warner that has led me to cancel my account.

Their 800 Number - Whenever I try to call their customer support number I have to call at least five to ten times to get through. For some reason I keep getting a busy signal. Annoying!
Hold Times - It takes about 10-15 minutes to get someone on the phone. I really wish I would’ve bought a speakerphone.
Getting Bounced Around - During my first of three calls I was bounced around to three different operators that could not help me. However, before I reached the third person I was conveniently lost in phone-space and had to call back.
Lack of Logic - There was no good explanation as to why the Road Runner service costs so much more in my area than someone who lives a couple miles from me.
Customer Support Staff - While the staff was very nice, they were unable to help me. It was quite frustrating having someone tell me, “I agree that $70.95 is ridiculous and I have no idea why it is priced that way. I can understand why you would want to cancel.”

As of next week I will no longer be a Road Runner customer and have since signed up with the Windstream Greenstreak service. The biggest disappointment about their DSL service is that they claim I only qualify for 3Mbps service. After living with 7Mbps and 15Mbps for the last year and a half, 3Mbps is going to feel pretty slow. I guess no more streaming HD movies from the iTunes store to the AppleTV.

Googlebot and FreeDNS from afraid.org

Joshua Glemza — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:28:27 +0000

Back on January 8th I canceled my Dreamhost account and began hosting my site off of my cable modem. Only receiving ~15 hits a day I figured I might as well save myself $120 a year. So I chose freedns.afraid.org to host my DNS. They were free and had all the options that I wanted, including working with Tomato.

After the switch I noticed that my traffic had declined dramatically, down to ~1 hit per day. So I starting doing a bit of investigating and found that Google was no longer crawling my site and had deleted my previous results. Logging into the Google Webmaster Tools I found that Google was having DNS issues connecting to my site. Well, after pulling my hair out for an evening I found that FreeDNS was blocking the googlebot from crawling my site.

Solution: I have switched my DNS provider to ZoneEdit. ZoneEdit offers similar features to that of FreeDNS. Now Google can access my site again, but I’m no longer in the results for some searches. I guess it will take some time. Yahoo and Live search were totally unaffected by FreeDNS.

So this is a warning to all people using FreeDNS and want Google to crawl their site.

Installing Netbackup Enterprise Server 6.5 on CentOS 5 / RHEL 5 with SELinux

Joshua Glemza — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:29:18 +0000

It took me almost a whole day to come up with this solution. This should get Veritas Netbackup Enterprise Server 6.5 up and running on a CentOS 5 / RHEL 5 box with SELinux enabled.

HOWTO: Server

Install a couple of dependencies:

yum install compat-libstdc++-296 xinetd libXp
Make sure that the hostname is set correctly. This is very important.
Temporarily disable SELinux:

setenforce 0
Untar the installation files:
tar xvf NetBackup_6.5_LinuxRedhat2.6.tar.gz
tar xvf NetBackup_6.5_ICS_LinuxX86.tar.gz
Start the installation:

./NB_65_LinuxR_x86_20070723/install
.....
#ICS Directory: ./NB_65_ICS_1.4.37.0_LinuxX86/
Fix SELinux:

chcon -t textrel_shlib_t /usr/openv/lib/*
setenforce 1
Start Netbackup:

/etc/init.d/netbackup start

HOWTO: Client

Untar the installation file:

tar xvf NetBackup_6.5_CLIENTS2.tar.gz
Start the installation:

NB_65_CLIENTS2_20070723/install
Fix SELinux issues:

chcon -t textrel_shlib_t /usr/openv/lib/*
Start the client:

/etc/init.d/nbclient start

TVDBgrabber 0.1.5 Released

Joshua Glemza — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 15:10:16 +0000

A small, but important, bug fix was made to TVDBgrabber. Filenames with numbers in them should function correctly now. Grab version 0.1.5.