Mushroom
Catching some z’s
Are you Lost?
I’d heard tons about how good Lost is but never really got into it. Well, I rented the DVD’s of Season 1 and I’m addicted. I’ve watched all of Season 1 in the past week. I’m now trying to download Season 2 from the torrents, since the DVD for Season 2 doesn’t come out until October and I don’t want to wait that long to get caught up!
So, when does Season 3 start? :)
On another note I’ve been listening to the soundtrack to Lost and am digging it. It makes me want to go home and watch the show!
Update: I finished watching all of Season 1 and Season 2. Alot of questions were answered by the end of Season 2 but there’s still much that isn’t. Of course if there wasn’t I wouldn’t be looking forward to Season 3 would I? :)
Soft water
Dell Axim x51v problems
Ever since I’ve had the Axim x51v I’ve had a couple of issues that have irritated me.
Firstly the device would mysteriously lose either the SD or CF slot altogether. Sometimes it would lose both. After a reset they would return.
Secondly, sometimes the device just would not turn on. Even though the battery had plenty of charge.
Thirdly, the battery would periodically drain itself dead after being off for a day or two.
Apart from these issues I’ve been extremely pleased with this handheld and it’s easily the best out of the many Pocket PC and Palm handhelds. The battery life is good, the screen is great, the BlueTooth and Wife work great. I love that it has both a SD slot and a CF slot. The shape and design are great and the device itself is solidly built.
So, needless to say I was estatic when I found this posting on Aximsite.com. Each of the above issues and a couple of others are said to be fixed by their little work-around. Apparently all of these issues are caused by the Activesync application on the handheld attempting to do a sync even though it’s not on the dock. Basically the fix is setting up an exchange server link and changing the sync timing to manual. If you actually do use an exchange server link to update your info on the pocket pc then you have to change the sync frequency to manual. The only downside to this is you have to trigger the sync on your own, which I actually prefer myself.
I made the change 2 days ago and I haven’t lost my SD nor CF card yet and the battery is still showing full charge. It’ll take another week or so to see if this really has fixed the above problems.
Spiral
Looking down
I went on a camping trip this past weekend, maybe it’s because I’m tired but it doesn’t seem like I managed to get very many good shots. I don’t know I’ll look at them again tommorrow. Besides the season finale of 24 is on tonight so I have more important things to do!
Photographer’s Tips #1 – Take Off!
When going out to shoot water by a river or lake make sure you bring along some bug spray. The makers of Off! have some handy wipes that you can easily fit in your camera bag and take along with you. This is especially important if you are going to be shooting by the water around sunset, because the mosquito’s and other little impolite creatures will work you over! On a camping trip this past weekend I spent some time as the sun was setting getting long exposures by a river. I had thankfully sprayed myself with Off! and still managed to get a couple of decent bites. Although I managed to keep the bugs away for the most part I didn’t get as many decent shots as I had hoped for.
Update: 06/21/2006 I didn’t take my own advice and went out shooting in some tall grass. I now have a bite from a spider or tick on the back of my leg that is a large dark color now. I ended up going to the doctor and getting some prescriptions (anti-biotic and one with cortisone). It’s much easier to give advice than to take advice, especially taking your own advice.
Red Flower
Mr Trickster
My son experimenting with his scooter.
I’ve gone camping this weekend so the photoblog is running on automatic mode for a couple of days. See ya when I get back and hopefully I’ll get a bunch of good shots!
Orange spots
I’ve gone camping this weekend so the photoblog is running on automatic mode for a couple of days. See ya when I get back and hopefully I’ll get a bunch of good shots!
Little Vine
I’ve gone camping this weekend so the photoblog is running on automatic mode for a couple of days. See ya when I get back and hopefully I’ll get a bunch of good shots!
Samsung Q1 first impressions
We received one of the Samsung Q1 UMPC devices. I haven’t even had time to play with it yet, but so far it seems like a very solid machine. It really reminds me alot of an oversized PSP. The display is sharp and the touch screen seems very responsive. I’ll write a more thorough review in the coming days. It showed up just in time for me to take it on the road with me this weekend.
Communications tower
Nothing spectacular, but I like it for some reason.
Purple Flower
Make your image look the same on the web as it does in Photoshop
I’ve been posting images to my photoblog for over a year now, I’ve so far managed to have a new shot every day for 479 straight days. Now, I’m not bragging and saying look at what a great guy I am because I would consider only a handful of them all that great. But, my point is I’ve been doing this for awhile now and I learned something today that I wish I knew 479 images ago.
I’m guessing that most of you probably already know what I learned today and are probably going to say, duh! But there may be some of you for whom, like me, bright lights and singing from heaven was heard when I came across it.
Before I get to the great revelation, let me start with some background. I’ve long known that my images just don’t look the same in Photoshop as they do on the web. The pop and the color just don’t match what I see when I work on shots and when I post them. I just figured it was some color calibration thing of my monitor or something I was doing wrong or something that only the truly gifted and wise like David from Chromasia knew.
I searched Google and kept running into monitor calibration tutorials and other such advice that never worked. I even played a bit with color profiles in Photoshop, but that didn’t seem to help either.
Then I watched a video tutorial on Radiant Vista and found the magic ingredient I needed. The video is called “Sizing images for the web.” And they walk you through the steps that you should take when saving images for viewing on the web. One of the steps is to convert your image’s color profile from Adobe RGB to sRGB by going to edit/convert to profile. I had done this but never saw a difference in the image from within Photoshop, so went back to Adobe RGB and figured I was cursed with this problem forever. Why did i never convert the color profile and upload the picture I’ll never know. I’m a computer guy and I do programming and network administration and computer trouble shooting so my mind is generally programmed to work through problems by process of elimination but the process broke down here for some reason. Consider these two pictures: (the difference is harder to notice at this small size. Check out this page for larger versions.)
Adobe RGB Color Profile
sRGB Color Profile
The difference between the two seems small, but to me who worked with the image to get it where I wanted, it’s huge. This difference has been a thorn in my side for some time, sitting there nagging me and irritating me.
Hopefully this helps someone like myself who’s fought with this issue for sometime. If I had money I would give generous amounts of it to the Radiant Vista crew or if I didn’t already have children I’d offer my first-born or something. Maybe some day when I get rich and famous I’ll look them up!
Update: I found a place to make donations on Radiant Vista’s website and made a small donation. I encourage you to make a donation also since their content is so valuable and useful. Every little bit helps with the costs of bandwidth and such.
Out of curiosity, how many of you already knew this?
Water beads up close
Windows Live Portal
This may not be news to some of you, but I just found it so it’s news to me. While poking around some blogs I found a link to live.com and being the adventurer I am I followed the link.
What I found was a site called Windows Live beta. From the live.com blog: “Live.com is about three things:
1. The best place to search on the web. There are many ways where this is true today and we still have many areas to improve upon.
2. A personalized portal. This is the thing we are doing the most of today because most of the technology is available. It’s all about customization and control, themes, layouts, content, etc. Make it yours.
3. Get the benefits of Windows and Windows Live services. Today we have a dashboard with interactive mini-applications called gadgets where you can have easy access to the Windows Live services that matter most to you.”
You can read more on their blog here. I realize that this is certainly nothing new and that Microsoft is doing what it does alot, which is imitate stuff that is already out there. Google has it’s personalized home portal which looks very similiar. I used it for awhile, but it tended to be somewhat slow to me. So I’m going to try this for awhile and see how it performs. Besides that I have wanted to give Microsoft’s search engine a spin but never liked the MSN home page at all. They do also have a clean version of their search engine as well taking from Google’s cue of a nice clean page. I like the idea of a portal where you can customize the contents, but being the picky person I am, never really took to any of the portals out there.
Happy mothers day!
Flower with water beads
Reptiles Hot and Cold
Simple DNS Plus
For about a week our internet connection was coming to a crawl. I searched and searched and couldn’t put a finger on what was causing the problem. Then for some reason I decided to run our domain through dnsreport.com’s excellent domain checking website.
What I found was we were getting a failure on the Open DNS servers section. What the heck does this mean, I thought. We’ve run our own DNS servers for several years that are both authoritative for our domain as well as answering dns requests for the clients on our network.
Here’s what dnsreport.com says about open dns servers “Open DNS servers increase the chances that of cache poisoning, can degrade performance of your DNS, and can cause your DNS servers to be used in an attack.”
Our DNS servers are Windows Server 2003 using the built in DNS software from Microsoft. To close a Microsoft DNS server you have to disable recursion. To do this do the following: (keep reading before you actually do this though.)
- Open DNS.
- In the console tree, right-click the applicable DNS server, then click Properties.
- Click the Advanced tab.
- In Server options, select the Disable recursion check box, and then click OK.
Ok, great, now our DNS servers are not open servers and sure enough our internet connection is working much better. However, now my clients on the inside are having problems getting to websites on the internet. Why is this? Well, by disabling recursion you also disable forwarding and forwarding is needed for my clients DNS requests to get answered. What now?
After some research I find out that Microsoft DNS server can’t do forwarding without recursion and that most people recommend using Bind (which I found to be un-friendly.) I did some more searching and found a DNS server software called Simple DNS Plus and the short version is, I love it! I installed it, shut down the Microsoft DNS service on one of my DNS servers, imported DNS records from one of the other servers and it was up and running. Then I went to the other server and did the same process. This software does a great job, it allows forwarding without the recursion so my DNS servers are no longer open and my internet connection is working great. It has great monitoring and other features like automatic IP blocking for address that try to flood the DNS server. Another great thing about this software is the price. The license is $79 for up to 5 zones which is perfect for us.
Simple DNS Plus has been running for a week now and it’s working great!
Google Sitemaps for WordPress and Pixelpost
I’ve been doing research lately on increasing traffic and search engine results to my various websites. One thing I ran across from Google is called Sitemaps.
From Google’s website “Google Sitemaps is an easy (and free) way to submit all your URLs to Google and help improve their visibility in our search results.” Sounds good, so I started trying to figure out how to make a sitemap. Well, it turns out that the site maps are a form of XML and Google’s instructions talk about downloading some files and running some scripts from Python (which I have no clue about and wouldn’t know where to start.) I use WordPress for my blog and a couple of other sites I manage and I use Pixelpost for my Photoblog. So after some more looking I found that there are some plug-ins for WordPress and addons for Pixelpost.
The WordPress Plugin was created by Arne Brachhold and is located here.
I found the Pixelpost addon here.
I have no idea if doing this will really help with Google visibility, but it was fairly easy to implement and doesn’t require ongoing maintenance. We’ll see I guess.
Update: (05/13/2006) I ran across a plug-in for WordPress concerning meta tags. From what I understand most search engines ignore these tags, but there are some out there that pickup on meta tags. The plugin can be found here at Project Arcanum. As with the Google sitemaps, I’m not sure if adding meta tags will make any difference.
ISA Server 2004 and FTP Access denied
We’ve had Microsoft ISA Server running for a couple of weeks and ever since we upgraded to the new version we haven’t been able to write new files or delete existing files from an FTP connection.
The wierd thing is that we could make a FTP connection and download anything we wanted. We checked the permissions first because that’s what it really seemed like. However, we could make a FTP connection on a computer that wasn’t behind the ISA Server and delete to our heart’s content, so we knew it had to be something to do with the proxy server/firewall.
After some research on the web and some trial and error I finally figured it out. By default ISA Server 2004 restricts FTP traffic to read only. To change this you need to configure the FTP filter that allows the FTP traffic. For our setup the rule that allows the FTP traffic is called “Unrestricted Internet” rule, right-click and select Configure FTP. You’ll get the “Configures STP protocol policy” dialog bog and you’ll notice that the Read Only is checked. Remove the check box and hit ok. Then you’ll have to hit apply to save changes to the configuration.
After that make sure you disconnect your FTP session and reconnect since the new configuration has been applied. Once you re-connect you’ll be able to upload and delete all the files you want!
Fly
Turn to clear vision
So that’s where my time went!
Interesting read over at Google Blogoscoped about multi-tasking that made me go hmmmmm, that’s why I don’t seem to get as much done as I feel like I should!
and then I woke up
I was about to delete this because it isn’t in focus. But then I thought I’d just play around a bit and for some strange, maybe demented, reason I like it.
My Audio – You’ve got a friend
WinConnections Las Vegas Conference
While reading the recent copy of Windows IT Pro magazine I saw an ad for their upcoming conferences and decided to look into them. This coming November Microsoft and Windows IT Pro will be holding several conferences in Las Vegas. The conferences cover a number of topics like Exchange, Windows, SQL Server, Office, ASP.NET, Visual Studio .net and others. We are looking at attending the Exchange and Windows conferences which you can attend both for the same price. Here is just a sample of the sessions to be held:
- Achieving High Availability without Clustering
- Getting Rid of PSTs
- Hit the Road: Maximize Your Exchange 2003 Mobility
- Protecting Microsoft Exchange Server with ISA 2006
- Regulatory Compliance and Records Management with Exchange, Outlook, OWA, and SharePoint
- Troubleshooting Disaster Recovery with Exchange Server 2003
- Common Active Directory Attacks and How to Protect Against Them
- Distributing Your Data with DFS Namespaces
- In-Depth Group Policy Troubleshooting
- Regulatory Compliance and Active Directory
- VBScript Basic Training
- Wireless Security – WPA2 with Certificates
There are also supposed to be a number of hands on workshops that cost extra. The conference looks to be packed with good info, not to mention being held in Las Vegas. The cost for the conference is $1295 if you register before September 18th and $1395 if you register after. The dates for the conference are November 6th-9th and is being held at the Mandalay Bay Resort. Maybe we’ll see ya there!