GlitchNYC.com

Weekend fun at the Bronx Zoo

We made our (almost) yearly trip to the Bronx Zoo yesterday, and it was amazing as always. I'm a sucker for Zoo photography, and I always take too many photos, but this time I had good reason. My awesome camera (it's a Canon PowerShot A75 if you're curious) has a great zoom lens, takes wonderful pictures, and gives me lots and lots of control. I'm spending most of my time in manual mode now forcing longer exposures than the camera would choose itself and then taking 5 or 6 shots until I get one in perfect focus without any motion blur. It really makes the colors pop and gives me lots of detail when I get it right.

The camera also allows me to switch to manual focus, and I've been bringing it right down to 5cm and taking some amazing macro shots (as you might have noticed).

I'm going to queue up a few of the best ones here in the blog, but I've thinned the herd a bit already and posted the better ones here

• See the photos

1:22 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Remembering New Orleans

One year ago this weekend Sara and I were finishing up our honeymoon, escaping New Orleans just before a storm hit.

We'd learned a lot over the course of our stay there and had seen how the city had been built to withstand (and rebuild after) storm after storm.

Exactly one year later, New Orleans is getting slammed with a category 5 hurricane, possibly the most destructive in US history. I was absolutely unaware until Wil sent his mojo their way tonight. Good luck New Orleans. Here's hoping everyone and all the wonderful history are still there in the aftermath.

"This is going to quickly go from a weather story to one of the biggest news stories in the world, certainly the biggest either of us has ever covered... Everyone's saying "I hope I'm wrong" when talking about this storm. The truth is that we've dodged this bullet so many times before, this is going to be the one." -WWL TV, streaming live here

...conditions are already deteriorating along portions of the central and northeastern Gulf Coast and will continue to worsen through the night. Maximum sustained winds are near 160 mph with higher gusts. Katrina is a category five hurricane.

Wikipedia's quickly evolving entry on Hurricane Katrina

12:59 am | permalink | /life/travel | 0 writebacks |

Delicious Links

Over the past few years, I've changed the focus of this blog to match my moods and interests. I've also grown my own sensibilities about what "personal publishing" should look and feel like and what I aim to do here.

In doing that, I've dropped many of the "cool links" I used to feature. There's plenty of blogs that do that sort of thing (boing boing and slashdot spring to mind), and I didn't want to simply repost their stuff with some added comments.

That said, I still find a handful of cool sites a month, and my bookmarks were getting really out of hand (and out of sync) between my work and home copies of Firefox.

http://del.icio.us came to the rescue, and provided me with a way to archive and access all my bookmarks in one place. It even integrates with firefox through a very unobtrusive plugin, so all I have to do is right click on any webpage to add it to my list of cool links. I also "tag" the links I put up there so it's easy to search for them later without remembering exactly what they were called.

When I post a link, it gets added to both my "home" and then general tally of what people are looking at. When sites are getting noticed and bookmarked by a lot of people, they move quickly up the ranks at del.icio.us. Watching that feed through Oishii! has been fun, and I've found some amazing sites for CSS web design, acquiring software and media, and other fun stuff. Because the Oishii feed tracks sites that are being bookmarked now (and not just the most popular overall), the signal to noise ratio is just slightly better than random. Which is just about how I like it. These aren't the sites that everyone knows about yet, but damn some of them are neat.

Because del.icio.us provides RSS feeds of just about everything, it was easy for me to syndicate into my blog. It won't show up in the feed, so I may occasionally cross post some of these links here in the main story section, but if you go to http://www.glitchnyc.com and look on the right you'll see a new "del.icio.us" links section that features the 5 most recent sites I've bookmarked.

To give you a taste of what's in there, here's my latest 5.

• The Pirate Bay - The worlds largest BitTorrent tracker
  
• Random - Google Video Search
  
• Revolutionary Venom Line Being Developed by Specialized
  
  crazy looking bikes
• .: UNEASYsilence :.
  
  has info on installing mac on PC
• Agata Report
  

2:48 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Spiderman, Spiderman, Radioactive Spiderman

Lots and lots and lots of spidermen, in the "crane game" at Coney Island. I think this one would make a really fun desktop background. The top left is even kind of dark and our of focus - good for placing icons!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

4:12 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Shattered Glass

Shattered glass on the F train. The spider-web pattern just looked kind of cool to me.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

4:07 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Photo Fun at Coney Island

Last weekend, a bunch of us went to Colleen's and then to Coney Island for some Fluff in Brooklyn fun.

I was hoping to catch Ravi the contortionist at the freakshow and see how he's doing but I guess that he's thought better of a career in the sideshow industry. According to the barker there, his wife talked him out of it. Hopefully he's pursuing college like he planned. I interviewed and photographed Ravi last summer after meeting him twice in a week by pure coincidence. He's a really nice kid.

This weekend, I took quite a few pictures, and continued on my macro photography and long exposure kick. You can check out my photos here and then see what Colleen did with her set in today's comic here.

Speaking of comics, I hear-tell that our friend Chris Moreno's real ink+paper comic #2 is hitting stores right about now. King Arthur Vs. Dracula sounds silly, but honestly, it's the first comic I've enjoyed reading in ages.

Well, 15 straight hours of coding an IT Help Desk system in PHP/MySQL later, I'm finally getting tired, so I'll close this up before I fall asleep at the keyboard like I did last night.

Before I go, I figure I ought to mention the amazingness that is the picture at on the right here. I didn't intend to do a patriotic photo shoot, I just happened to be in the right spot at the right time, and although I think the picture's ridiculous, it's just funny enough to be my new favorite. That, and I'm really still quite enamored of my tattoo. I guess that's a good thing seeing as I've had it almost 2 years now. I figure if I can make it to 30 without regretting it, I'll have done better than your average tattoo-getter.

"I do not regret the things I've done, but those I did not do." - Lucas, Empire Records.

4:01 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Seashell Cluster

Did I mention I was on a macro photography kick? I'm obsessed with the detail in this one. You can see every single grain of sand, down to its translucency and the little glint of light shining off it. This one will definitely also have a round as my desktop wallpaper.

Anyone know what once lived in these little shells? they were about 2 cm long each.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

11:45 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Vista

Before I even got 3 feet on my photo hunt, I was struck by the vivid contrast of the blues and greens in this shot. The sky was almost unnaturally clear and the grass was thriving in the sea-spray and the hot sun of the dunes.

I'll probably set this to my desktop wallpaper on my linux machine at home just so I can say I had a Vista on my Desktop long before Microsoft trademarked the word.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

10:45 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Beach Plum Blossoms

I was all set to do some snorkeling in the ocean Sunday, but it turned out to be super windy and the surf was up, meaning I couldn't see more than 6 inches in front of me. No go.

Instead I went on a photo-safari, and got some amazing shots of the different flora in the area, the dunes, and the amazingly rich colors of that sunny day. Check this one out in full res, it's all about the macro focus. I've always loved photos with a tight depth-of-field, bringing just your subject into sharp resolution, but hinting at what's nearby with fuzzy images and vibrant colors, and I spend a lot of time playing with it that day.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

9:45 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

The Sunset Panorama

This sunset in Cape Cod was unbelievable. Over the course of an hour, the sky turned every possible color,and some I didn't know it can do. In this picture alone, there's yellows, greens, blues, purples, pinks, and reds. It was even more stunning in person.

If you click the picture, you can see it in all its super-high-res glory. This was 6 pictures stitched together, and will be hanging on a wall here in the apartment sometime soon.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

2:18 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

The Photostream

I've been taking a lot of photos lately, and I'm really happy with how some of them have turned out. Since I've got my own webserver, I don't need to host photos at Flickr, but lately I've been jealous of the cool tagging, sorting, and photo-stream functions there. For example, check out the "cute" clusters to get a feel for how it works. Neato.

If you want to see the whole bunch, you can check out the Cape Cod photos here, but I'm going to be featuring some of the best of them right here in my blog over the next few days, as my own sort of tagging and photofeed, letting google do the sorting for me. If you check back later, you'll probably see a bunch of photos here, but those "reading the feed" (I recommend Mozilla Thunderbird or Feedreader if you don't have an RSS reader already) will get to play along as I pick my favs and fill in some details.

Enjoy!

2:17 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Love Song for A Web Server.

Modest at the time of its assembly, the little workhorse serving these pages is chugging away at 133 mhz. By comparison, the slowest desktop I would consider purchasing this year is 2800 mhz. Beyond that, it's got 128 megs of ram and a single hard drive. Not exactly what you would call robust.

Everything says it should have crumped or become obsolete ages ago, but it's biggest problem right now is not wanting to come back on without an fsck after a hard power outage. Between the influx of searchers from google images and the ever increasing traffic generated by simply being around for a few years and consistently writing articles, it's pushing over 50000 pages a month and at least 5000 unique visitors.

Not bad for a little 133mhz machine.

This would seem simple if all it was doing was pushing out static HTML and images, but amazingly, all of the pages it's serving are dynamically generated, either by php or the blosxom cgi script. My photo archive is even tied into a database backend, something that anyone planning a web sever deployment will tell you you need extra processing, memory, and throughput capacity to handle.

Still going strong.

So thank you, little web server, for chugging away in my basement apartment back in 99 while I learned linux, for staying up years at a time even though something's a bit awry with your harddrive, and for making it through this steady ramp up in traffic. I promise I won't get you slashdotted, but somehow, I feel like you could handle it. Tough little guy.

You've even gracefully handled multiple domains, and running HomelessConnectNYC in a pinch seemed to be effortless for you. Nice work. (As an aside, my little server owes most of its success to the sleek and stable software that makes the most of its meager hardware, those bastions of the Open Source movment, Apache, MySQL, the Apache JAMES mailserver, and GNU/Linux.)

1:49 am | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Google for Dorky Teen

Hahaha... I was just looking at my webstats and I got a bunch of hits for the search terms Dorky Teen (no quotes). Turns out I'm #2 on google for that search. Hahaha, well, at least its true. I mean, the dorky part... Can I even call myself post-teen anymore? I'm going to be 25 in a month and a half. Wow.

3:59 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Lex Chapters 3-6

Here are chapters 3-6 of my "always in progress" cc-by-sa novel "Lex." Some pieces of these chapters may have been featured here perviously (that was a typo, but I'm leaving it, it fits too well, lol). With that said, fair warning - depending on your definition, this story may not be worksafe. Don't read if you or your boss is made squeamish by R->NC17 rated material. This story is going to be as gritty, vulgar, sexy, and real as I can make my twisted version the 25th century come across.

Since it's been quite a while since the last Lex post, here's the previous installments:

Chapter 1 (pdf)

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

I awoke in a bed for the first time outcity.

My face was throbbing, swollen and bruised from the falls I'd taken learning on the stripwear. My ribs hurt, too, and I could feel the dirt clinging to my body, crusty in the scabs and caked blood where my body had met the ground.

The stripwear, sensing I was awake, began to organize itself and I could feel little breezes as it swished through the air above my skin, lifting itself ever so slightly away from my body and unweaving itself from the blanket it had formed while I slept.

I know I shouldn't marvel at the technology, we're surrounded by so much of it now. I guess the thing that's different about stripwear is the marvelous gumption of it. Most technology today attempts to hide itself, to become part of the organic landscape, disappear out of conscious recognition.

This house was certainly a perfect example of that. Every detail of the aging mansion was no-doubt meticulously kept up by nanosystems and smart materials. The only evidence of this was the slight shimmer to many of the cracks in the ancient wood. Nearly invisible, you could just make out the spider-web like nanotube linkages in the way they splintered the sunlight as it passed over them. I could imagine the little machines, applying their microscopic wires to keep the structure stable and keep the wood from crumbling away.

See more ...

2:25 am | permalink | /fiction/lex | 0 writebacks |

Samba Not Authenticating to Windows Domain?

I've been bashing my head against the keyboard for a few days at work wondering why our intranet, which is running samba to serve files and to check usernames/passwords against the Active Directory server, suddenly stopped working. I'd figured this out a few weeks back, so having it just break suddenly and not cooperate when I did the "fix" again and again was trying to say the least.

Today, I finally stumbled upon the actual culprit. There is some incompatibility between Windows 2000 SP4 SR1 and the newer builds of Samba.

If you've found this article, chances are you were running wbinfo -u and got the error "Error looking up users". If you turn the debugging level on winbind up, which I did, perhaps a bit clumsily, by editing /etc/init.d/winbind, and changing

you'll find the error NT_INSUFFICIENT_RESOURCES

Although I'm not exactly certain of the cause of this, it seems that the samba daemon is somehow confusing the SP4 SR1 windows box, which summarily closes its doors for a bit.

Luckily there's an easy fix. Simply set

in the global section of smb.conf

Link to the forum where I found this fix. Many thanks to Gerald (Jerry) Carter <jerry <at> samba.org>, for the excellent tip!

11:57 pm | permalink | /technology/linux | 0 writebacks |

Hello Dollar!

Well, things are a little quieter around here for the moment, but rest assured that I've got some stuff brewing behind the scenes that should set up the next few months rather nicely. I'm not one to hype things too early here, but the words Podcast and Invention have something to do with it, although the two aren't related.

In the meantime, I've been spending my self-allotted web-browsing-minutes nightly flipping through the Oishii feed, checking out what other people find cool enough to bookmark. HelloDollar.com is tonight's stand out for its level-headed advice on building wealth. Anyone starting to save (or struggling to do so) should take a look at this blog. In daily doses, advice like "Brown-Bag It to Half a Million" is actually quite palatable, and I like the Author's measured approach to building wealth.

10:34 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |