Joseph Burford Photography

A friend of mine was in Melbourne recently and wandered into the public access areas at the Port of Melbourne and grabbed a few pictures of the docked ships being loaded. While there, security from one of the terminals came up and stated:
No photos allowed.
You must show me your camera.
You must delete all photos now.
I [...]

Some of the photos of the kids from June in a slideshow.

Recently I did a spot of night time photography including some time lapses with my 50D, on examining the photos a few days later I noticed a nasty little red spot on one of the images. Closer inspection found me three of the little blighters, so it looks like I’ve got myself some hot pixels [...]

Some pics of the kids during May 2009, put together using Animoto.

As is obvious to everyone living here in Adelaide, South Australia, we are the middle of a fairly decent heatwave.
I’m going to use this post to add links to stories and news items as they happen, aiming to update this post every few hours.
* Tuesday 27th January 2009
Adelaide suffers biggest scorcher in 5 years
Power restored [...]

Firmware version 1.2 has been released for the Panasonic LX3.
Improvements are listed as:

Improved white balance flash mode setting when DMW-FL220 is connected.
Proper setting of shutter speed on iA mode and Scene mode when OIS is turned ON.
Proper Exif information in the JPEG picture file.

Considering I haven’t had any issues relating to these I’m not [...]

To challenge myself to be a better photographer I decided to embark on a “Photo A Day” adventure for 2009.
I’ll see how the first month goes, however all being well I’ll be able to keep it up and do the whole year.
Wish me luck

Got a few hours away from the kids last night thanks to the inlaws!
Had dinner in Rundle Street with Michael & Pris and then went for a walk shopping in Rundle Mall afterwards. We were window shopping, the girls were actual shopping, our poor credit cards
I had the LX3 with me and managed [...]

TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that allows you to interact with Twitter from within the browser. Get your tweets, replies and messages without having to go to the Twitter website or have another application running.
My free tip of the week

Luca had his first try at cricket yesterday. It was a hot Boxing Day and while the real cricket on TV was at lunch, we setup in the hallway with a plastic cricket set

Video: Panasonic LX3
Photos: Canon 50D
Some video and pics of lightning last night up near my mum’s place. In some of the footage you can hear the 50D shutter when I was taking pics
In the first few clips the lightning is towards the left hand side, later on it’s towards the middle. Don’t blink, [...]

Here’s the ASCII art logo you get when you SSH to a Chumby.

Have been playing with some CGI scripts, to make it a more useful alarm clock

I notice recently that coments on some photos appear to be timewarping into the future. Looks weird

A couple of the photos I took in November of the kids.

For those who are:

Into Linux & server management
Interested in building fail over Linux VPS solutions
Happy to play about creating your own hosting environment

This one might be for you…
Webbynode have a coming soon Beta. According to their blurb.
…the killer new flexible Xen VPS service for developers & for people in need of better hosting.
….advanced features to [...]

So last week my Dell Mini9 arrived, thanks Michael!! It took long enough to arrive, we ordered 3 of them a day before they were removed from the Dell website. They’ve returned now, a hundred dollars more expensive though… and in white, gah!
Anyway mine arrived safely about 3 weeks after the original order, and it’s [...]

Yesterday after work I dropped my broken 300d off to Diamonds Camera in Rundle Street. It’s now on it’s way to Canon for a check and quote on a fix.
If I don’t choose to go ahead with the fix, it’s still $60 for the quote, mmm. In the mean time I’ve been looking around an [...]

My Canon EOS 300D had an attack of “Epic Fail” today.
Was taking pics as per normal, got a pic like this:

Next one was like this:

Not happy Jan.
Once I got home and did a closer inspection of the body, I see that the sub mirror (for auto focus) is not lifting when taking a photo. I [...]

IPv6 on a Cisco 877w doesn’t work… well it does… providing you don’t want to use the wireless bit.
rtr1(config)#int dot11radio0
rtr1(config-if)#ipv6 ?
% Unrecognized command
rtr1(config-if)#
Despite what you might read on the interwebs, you can’t actually apply an IPv6 address to either the dot11radio interface or sub interfaces.

In my current config I use a single vlan for ethernet [...]

Taking a few weeks off from work which is the longest break for quite sometime for this workaholic
So on my first day off we did some walking around our local suburbs and spent some time having fun at one of the local parks. Photos here.
Found an auto setting (Aperture Priority) on [...]

A short clip with a random selection of my pics of Luca & Leah from August 2008, they grow up fast.

Spent most of the day looking after Luca, we kept ourselves busy doing all sorts of things

If you ever see this in your Apache logs:
Permission denied: /path/to/web/data/html/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable
Think permissions, permissions, permissions. If you have chmod’ed your .htaccess 644 or even 777 and it’s still not working, start traversing up your directory tree and make sure apache can access everything at each level.
Permissions [...]

This will teach me for even trying to upload my photos somewhere else other than Smugmug
What was I thinking…

I can write in Russian now! Looks like in my sleep I’ve been composing emails in cryllic or some strange language, or so it appears going by this email that bounced back to me.
Nasty spammers using fake from addresses

You would hope that recruiter’s could spell a bit better
Definitely need those communication skills and attention to detail.

So my first Centos 5.1 to Centos 5.2 upgrade on a VPS didn’t go so well.
After “yum update” and a reboot, we see:
[/sbin/fsck.ext3 (1) -- /] fsck.ext3 -a /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1:
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not [...]

Spam Email FAIL

It’s important that you get it right…  Gah! No more spam.

I look after a number of servers in my spare time One of the guys who I help out contacted me recently with a weird Joomla issue when trying to install a particular component.
* JInstaller::install: SQL Error. DB function failed with error
number 2006
MySQL server has gone away SQL=CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS
`jos_comprofiler` ( [...]

Reading a recent advert that made it’s way into my inbox, I was bemused by the amount of small print and clarifications you see in advertisements of this type.
Is it because consumers are too uneducated or the product supplier over complicating a product?

Seems to be like this across many products and services these days, maybe [...]

I’ve had a crack at HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography a couple of times over the last few months.
The idea is that you take multiple pictures of the same scene bracketed at different settings, ie. plus or minus 1 Fstop. You then combine all the images together with something like Photomatix and maybe tweak things [...]

Don’t you just love free stuff? It’s awesome that people are happy to create and give away stuff on the Internet for free, like Wordpress themes.
You just have to be aware that spammers are also in the free Wordpress theme game!

I recently tried a theme call Blue Glow. It all looked nice enough on the [...]

Pingdom offer a commercial web site monitoring service, they also offer a free monitoring solution that you can join, GIGRIB.
Pingdom GIGRIB is a unique, distributed website monitoring service. GIGRIB users can add websites they want monitored, and in return their computers become a part of the GIGRIB monitoring network.
A while back I setup the GIGRIB [...]

Last Saturday I took a Luca for a drive up to the NERC buy & sell. Caught up with a few guys I haven’t seen for years.
Anyway the APRS track worked pretty well, so that was cool, looks like I’ve finally got the settings in my OpenTracker+ all sorted.

Topology map, showing tracking box.

Standard street map [...]

I’ve been using the same wordpress theme for about 3 years, time for a change I think.
I’ve been trying out a new theme over at my ham radio site, seems to be ok, might have to duplicate it here sometime along with the twitter integration.

After a bit of mucking about I got the OT+ from Argent Data going in my car.
Here’s a track from one day this week.

Home to my parent’s in law, where I catch the bus, then from there back home again.
Nothing exciting but you get the idea Will probably do some more driving over [...]

A few weeks ago I installed the latest version of Zenphoto gallery to manage my photos. I’ve been using the software for 18months or so now and it just gets better and better with each release.
Highly recommended if you are looking for a simple piece of photo gallery software for your site, refreshing after the [...]

Some time back John NA3J told me he would be in AU some time around the beginning of April, I hadn’t heard a lot back about it and had forgotten about it.
This morning on the way to Office Works to get a printer cartridge I turned on the rig in my car and who do [...]

My APRS parcel of bits arrived today. We were out this morning when the postie came past so this afternoon I went for a drive with Luca to the local post office.
Now to see what damage we can do!

APRS tracker I ordered has shipped, now tracking via USPS

Leah arrived at 11:45am today, she is pretty cute.

Today I ordered some APRS gear from Scott at Argent Data, looks like some of it is on backorder
Should be fun to get back into APRS, I used to enjoy it a lot and it looks like a number of cool things are now available since I last used APRS about 8 years [...]

Because I’m not using an optimal antenna (actually far from it) I recently purchased an antenna tuner. I ended up getting an LDG Z-100 which is a nice small compact unit that goes well with my Yaesu FT 857D.
After reading reviews I ended up ordering direct from the US and saved myself about $80 compared [...]

This afternoon I managed to put my newly acquired G5RV up. It’s on a wooden pole at 8ft in the centre and about 6 feet at the ends. Just fits inside the backyard
It’s not ideal, will have to get it up permanently somehow in a better position but I can hear tons more [...]

Bought a 40m to 10m G5RV on Ebay for $50, should be a bit better to hang in the yard than my dodgy wires at the moment.

Recently I wrote about the monitoring services from mon.itor.us that I use.
As I shifted the last of my sites from Dreamhost to a VPS I was wondering about some of the values I was seeing. For example here’s a fairly normal day in the life of a wordpress site hosted at Dreamhost.

Lots of spikes all [...]

So it’s my birthday today, yay!
One of my brothers had novel way of addressing his present to me, neat!

Living in suburbia doesn’t give you a huge number of options for antennas on HF. When I was at my parents earlier in the week I collected a bunch of wire dipoles that I used to have hanging in the sky.
I’ve hung up what was a 15m dipole in a little V behind the garage, [...]

Some random professor with too much time on his hands:
“Every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years, … a ‘baby levy’ in the form of a carbon tax should apply, in line with the ‘polluter pays’ principle.”
mmm we’ll have to stop at two then [...]

Got pesky friends trying to talk to you on old school email? Here’s a good pic to send them!

I made it using one of the lolcat generator sites

If it’s not one thing it’s another at Dreamhost.
Like a lot of people I just forward all my email to Gmail, it’s got a great spam filter, plenty of storage, accessible via web, POP & IMAP, maybe the only downside is they can just de-activate your account without warning
Recently my email seemed to [...]

So like a good admin I graph various hosts of mine and recently looking through one of the graphs sets I noticed this.

The hourly spikes are just webmin / virtualmin doing bandwidth calcs and stats generation, other than that it’s not a loaded box, so it was suprising to see an extended period of load.
A [...]

Less than a week after helping one of my brothers move 500mb of email to a shiny new gmail account he gave me a frantic call.
At login he was getting an error stating “Your account has been disabled”, new email to his gmail account was just bouncing with a user unknown error.
When you have done [...]

I look after a couple of servers for a friend who I met earlier this year, as a token of thanks for helping out a new Yaesu 857D arrived today. Thanks Michael
Unfortunately as we drove up the street tonight the power went out So I opened the box and had a [...]

So tonight I was browsing through the normal daily run of spam advertising that arrives in my inbox and I noticed this Jetstar advert.

Looks like Jetstar or their advertising/marketing/design company thought a Macbook Pro would be a good look, and it is.
I must admit I love the design and look of my Macbook Pro, infact [...]

After a long time of not taking any photos I’ve been out and about the last few months. Here’s a couple of pics taken this month.
However I’ve realised that my 300d has dust somewhere on the sensor, thankfully it’s only minor and only shows up on certain pics taken in certain conditions.
So I’ll live with [...]

Do you ever get random stuff in your inbox? Here’s a recent sample of some randomness

Lovely!

Have you ever wished that Gmail had IMAP capability? Well the wait is nearly over it seems!
I noticed today under the settings area for one of my Gmail accounts “Forwarding & POP” has been expanded to be Forwarding & POP/IMAP” and there is the appropriate section to to enable/disable IMAP.

So now there is another option [...]

During last week I managed to make some time to play around with Apple’s new iMovie 08, it’s not a bad package at all, lots of options and capabilities. Not having used iMovie previously it didn’t take me long to get the hang of it.
I managed to waste an hour or so and make a [...]

Quite a while ago I setup an account at mon.itor.us and recently I was looking at the various stats that they are producing, not too bad for a freebie
Here’s an example of the recent http response times for my website.

As you can see in the graph above, from the monitoring stations in Austria, [...]

Browsing my Google Analytics stats for the last month I noticed bit of a peak, waaaay more than the normal amount of traffic to my site. You can see the huge peak in the pic below, I mean really who wants to read stuff about me!

Digging around I see that the visits all came from [...]

We went out to Henley Beach on Sunday afternoon with some friends who were visiting from interstate. I blew the dust off my camera and took some photos, it’s been a while!

Tonight we had a total lunar eclipse. It was the best chance to witness a total lunar eclipse in Australia since 2000, apparently there won’t be another opportunity until sometime in 2011.
I managed to take some photos and have put them up in my gallery.

Ever wished that your Mac had a better picture viewer or quick way or running a slideshow of a group of photos?
Phoenix Slides is a neat little program that provides exactly this. It’s simple, has a clean interface and does an admirable job. I love it!
Read more and download here.

Recently I started looking for a replacement for the task bar clock/calendar
on my Mac. I eventually found and started using Magical, it’s free, has a ton of features and seems to work very well.
Although it is still an Alpha release I haven’t had any dramas with it and have enjoyed the extra functionality it provides. [...]

Brian Regan has a new DVD coming soon, you can pre order at his store! I always enjoy his comedy, it’s helped pass many an hour on the road

We had a higher than usual amount of thunderstorms earlier in the year. However just because there is a storm around it doesn’t mean you will get any good photos!
One night back in May I went up to the hills over looking Adelaide and didn’t get much at all, this was about the only photo [...]

So you download via Bit Torrent (only legal files of course), but do you share?

I sure do
I was thinking about this the other day because I’ve been helping out providing bandwidth to one of my favorite Linux distros, Sabayon Linux.
I provide a ftp mirror for Sabayon and also a bunch of other smaller [...]

Luca cut his first tooth this week, plus he has had bit of a cold. So he’s been in the wars and has been a grumpy little man from time to time, however he still has plenty of time to be cheeky!
He has also been going to swimming lessons with mum, so I’ve had him [...]

So you want to create an online video from various video clips or pictures that you have? Want to add some music to the background and also have some basic effects to spruce it all up?
Sounds like you are looking for Eyespot
A while back I was looking for an easy way to put [...]

While driving home tonight we saw what looked like a spaceship!
On closer inspection it was the Holden balloon flying fairly low and slow over the Adelaide suburbs.
I took a little video which came out ok.

I found some interesting stats while trawling the web for more information, the screen on the side is reported to be [...]

A lot of people ask me where I host my sites. Well a lot of them are hosted at Dreamhost.

One of the guys at work referred me to them 18 months ago and I’ve been using them ever since. One day soon I’ll write a full review but in the meantime a few people have [...]

Caterina’s honorary grandpa (nonno) passed away on Sunday. We went to the viewing last night which was a bit sad.
Here’s a photo that Caterina took a few months ago of me & Luca with Fr & Sr Pace.

We went and visited him in hospital a few days before he passed away, his last words to [...]

We had a storm last night that went for over 10 hours. I managed to get out and take a few photos, I got pretty wet though
I had to hold the camera stand still as the wind was howling at the spot in the Adelaide Hills where I was taking pictures from. In [...]

Eli gave me a laser pen for my birthday recently and I’ve been having some fun playing around with it. It is just a standard 650nm red laser with under 5mw power but it is suprising how far you can see it.
Well actually how far you can see the reflection. So far I’ve gotten up [...]

I got this email in my Gmail account the other day.
Sent through Yahoo web mail, signed by Yahoo as valid email, tagged with a signature proclaiming the best spam protection….

The image attached was an advert for rx555.com

pfft to their spam protection.

Not much news lately. We got aircon installed recently, went for a reverse cycle ducted system. While it is a bit more expensive it will be worth it in the long run. It’s pretty handy considering it looks like it is going to be a warm summer this year. Already we have had some shocker [...]

Rant time! I don’t drive my car much lately, we drive Caterina’s car around as it has the baby seat fixed in it. But anyway it’s been a month since I needed to get fuel for my car. So the other night about 10:30pm on my way home I decided to stop and grab some [...]

Ok, so who else has been to the Post Office lately and found it such a pain to actually post something? Today I wasted nearly 20mins of my (late 2:30pm) lunch break in a massive long queue at the local Post Office.
I walked in, selected a CD box for the CD I wanted to post, [...]

Am I resting and relaxing on my week off?
mmm not really, have been helping Caterina with Luca a lot

This is from this morning, Luca waking up for another day!

I brought Caterina & Luca home from the hospital on Monday morning. We had bit of a sleepless night but thankfully he has now settled in a bit and is sleeping better, which means we sleep better too!!
Last night I uploaded some more photos of Luca from the week that he was in hospital. He’s [...]

Well he finally arrived!
Luca Burford was born at 10:22pm last night.
I’ve uploaded some photos of him to my photo gallery.
I’ve also made a little video using some of the clips I took on Caterina’s digital camera.

This is about 1 hour after he was born
7mb Quicktime file.

Well today was “D Day”, our baby was due! However we are still waiting patiently, the last week or two seems to go the slowest.
We spent the day doing a few chores around the house and not much more. I was moving some long wooden plank shelves in the rafters of the shed and didn’t [...]

Speaking of baby things, Caterina got this one in an email today.
It’s a flash animation of babies singing to various Grease songs, it’s a laugh.

Caterina did some washing of baby clothes during the week.
Here’s a couple of pics of some of the cute little outfits and socks.

Cute huh!

My rib is still sore but slowly getting better and I can’t wait until it’s fully fixed, the quicker the better I reckon!
Walked home from work on Friday night, was a good way to clear my head and made me feel a lot better after a long week at work. Might try to walk home [...]

Last week I sneezed at work and I felt something go “pop” in my rib area. Over the weekend it got really sore, so today I stayed home from work and went to the docs. Turns out that I have a fractured rib and some torn muscles, nothing can be done except rest and taking [...]

Made another short video, it is from video clips and pics I took when I spent a few days on Kangaroo Island with Ben back in October 2004.

This compilation was from Emu Bay near Kingscote, the beach is around 5 miles long and is just a fantastic place. Usually it’s fairly busy as a [...]

I made a small video tonight, it’s a few combined clips that I took using Ben’s camera back in May 2005. I was out with Ben & Scott for a weekend travelling around in the “Mid North” of South Australia.

This compilation was taken around Mongolatta, east of Hallett and Mount Bryan, 2 or 3 hours [...]

Pretty much halfway there now

Pretty much halfway there now

Last week I sneezed at work and I felt something go “pop” in my rib area. Over the weekend it got really sore, so today I stayed home from work and went to the docs. Turns out that I have a fractured rib and some torn muscles, nothing can be done except rest and taking [...]

Caterina did some washing of baby clothes during the week.
Here’s a couple of pics of some of the cute little outfits and socks.

Cute huh!

Speaking of baby things, Caterina got this one in an email today.
It’s a flash animation of babies singing to various Grease songs, it’s a laugh.

Well today was “D Day”, our baby was due! However we are still waiting patiently, the last week or two seems to go the slowest.
We spent the day doing a few chores around the house and not much more. I was moving some long wooden plank shelves in the rafters of the shed and didn’t [...]

Well he finally arrived!
Luca Burford was born at 10:22pm last night.
I’ve uploaded some photos of him to my photo gallery.
I’ve also made a little video using some of the clips I took on Caterina’s digital camera.

This is about 1 hour after he was born
7mb Quicktime file.

I brought Caterina & Luca home from the hospital on Monday morning. We had bit of a sleepless night but thankfully he has now settled in a bit and is sleeping better, which means we sleep better too!!
Last night I uploaded some more photos of Luca from the week that he was in hospital. He’s [...]

Am I resting and relaxing on my week off?
mmm not really, have been helping Caterina with Luca a lot

This is from this morning, Luca waking up for another day!

Luca cut his first tooth this week, plus he has had bit of a cold. So he’s been in the wars and has been a grumpy little man from time to time, however he still has plenty of time to be cheeky!
He has also been going to swimming lessons with mum, so I’ve had him [...]

Some random professor with too much time on his hands:
“Every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years, … a ‘baby levy’ in the form of a carbon tax should apply, in line with the ‘polluter pays’ principle.”
mmm we’ll have to stop at two then [...]

Spent most of the day looking after Luca, we kept ourselves busy doing all sorts of things

A short clip with a random selection of my pics of Luca & Leah from August 2008, they grow up fast.

Taking a few weeks off from work which is the longest break for quite sometime for this workaholic
So on my first day off we did some walking around our local suburbs and spent some time having fun at one of the local parks. Photos here.
Found an auto setting (Aperture Priority) on [...]

A couple of the photos I took in November of the kids.

Luca had his first try at cricket yesterday. It was a hot Boxing Day and while the real cricket on TV was at lunch, we setup in the hallway with a plastic cricket set

Some pics of the kids during May 2009, put together using Animoto.

Some of the photos of the kids from June in a slideshow.

I made a small video tonight, it’s a few combined clips that I took using Ben’s camera back in May 2005. I was out with Ben & Scott for a weekend travelling around in the “Mid North” of South Australia.

This compilation was taken around Mongolatta, east of Hallett and Mount Bryan, 2 or 3 hours [...]

Made another short video, it is from video clips and pics I took when I spent a few days on Kangaroo Island with Ben back in October 2004.

This compilation was from Emu Bay near Kingscote, the beach is around 5 miles long and is just a fantastic place. Usually it’s fairly busy as a [...]

Speaking of baby things, Caterina got this one in an email today.
It’s a flash animation of babies singing to various Grease songs, it’s a laugh.

Got pesky friends trying to talk to you on old school email? Here’s a good pic to send them!

I made it using one of the lolcat generator sites

You would hope that recruiter’s could spell a bit better
Definitely need those communication skills and attention to detail.

Last week I sneezed at work and I felt something go “pop” in my rib area. Over the weekend it got really sore, so today I stayed home from work and went to the docs. Turns out that I have a fractured rib and some torn muscles, nothing can be done except rest and taking [...]

My rib is still sore but slowly getting better and I can’t wait until it’s fully fixed, the quicker the better I reckon!
Walked home from work on Friday night, was a good way to clear my head and made me feel a lot better after a long week at work. Might try to walk home [...]

Well today was “D Day”, our baby was due! However we are still waiting patiently, the last week or two seems to go the slowest.
We spent the day doing a few chores around the house and not much more. I was moving some long wooden plank shelves in the rafters of the shed and didn’t [...]

Not much news lately. We got aircon installed recently, went for a reverse cycle ducted system. While it is a bit more expensive it will be worth it in the long run. It’s pretty handy considering it looks like it is going to be a warm summer this year. Already we have had some shocker [...]

Eli gave me a laser pen for my birthday recently and I’ve been having some fun playing around with it. It is just a standard 650nm red laser with under 5mw power but it is suprising how far you can see it.
Well actually how far you can see the reflection. So far I’ve gotten up [...]

We had a storm last night that went for over 10 hours. I managed to get out and take a few photos, I got pretty wet though
I had to hold the camera stand still as the wind was howling at the spot in the Adelaide Hills where I was taking pictures from. In [...]

Caterina’s honorary grandpa (nonno) passed away on Sunday. We went to the viewing last night which was a bit sad.
Here’s a photo that Caterina took a few months ago of me & Luca with Fr & Sr Pace.

We went and visited him in hospital a few days before he passed away, his last words to [...]

While driving home tonight we saw what looked like a spaceship!
On closer inspection it was the Holden balloon flying fairly low and slow over the Adelaide suburbs.
I took a little video which came out ok.

I found some interesting stats while trawling the web for more information, the screen on the side is reported to be [...]

Brian Regan has a new DVD coming soon, you can pre order at his store! I always enjoy his comedy, it’s helped pass many an hour on the road

Tonight we had a total lunar eclipse. It was the best chance to witness a total lunar eclipse in Australia since 2000, apparently there won’t be another opportunity until sometime in 2011.
I managed to take some photos and have put them up in my gallery.

We went out to Henley Beach on Sunday afternoon with some friends who were visiting from interstate. I blew the dust off my camera and took some photos, it’s been a while!

Browsing my Google Analytics stats for the last month I noticed bit of a peak, waaaay more than the normal amount of traffic to my site. You can see the huge peak in the pic below, I mean really who wants to read stuff about me!

Digging around I see that the visits all came from [...]

So it’s my birthday today, yay!
One of my brothers had novel way of addressing his present to me, neat!

Leah arrived at 11:45am today, she is pretty cute.

I’ve been using the same wordpress theme for about 3 years, time for a change I think.
I’ve been trying out a new theme over at my ham radio site, seems to be ok, might have to duplicate it here sometime along with the twitter integration.

I can write in Russian now! Looks like in my sleep I’ve been composing emails in cryllic or some strange language, or so it appears going by this email that bounced back to me.
Nasty spammers using fake from addresses

As is obvious to everyone living here in Adelaide, South Australia, we are the middle of a fairly decent heatwave.
I’m going to use this post to add links to stories and news items as they happen, aiming to update this post every few hours.
* Tuesday 27th January 2009
Adelaide suffers biggest scorcher in 5 years
Power restored [...]

A lot of people ask me where I host my sites. Well a lot of them are hosted at Dreamhost.

One of the guys at work referred me to them 18 months ago and I’ve been using them ever since. One day soon I’ll write a full review but in the meantime a few people have [...]

Quite a while ago I setup an account at mon.itor.us and recently I was looking at the various stats that they are producing, not too bad for a freebie
Here’s an example of the recent http response times for my website.

As you can see in the graph above, from the monitoring stations in Austria, [...]

So like a good admin I graph various hosts of mine and recently looking through one of the graphs sets I noticed this.

The hourly spikes are just webmin / virtualmin doing bandwidth calcs and stats generation, other than that it’s not a loaded box, so it was suprising to see an extended period of load.
A [...]

If it’s not one thing it’s another at Dreamhost.
Like a lot of people I just forward all my email to Gmail, it’s got a great spam filter, plenty of storage, accessible via web, POP & IMAP, maybe the only downside is they can just de-activate your account without warning
Recently my email seemed to [...]

Recently I wrote about the monitoring services from mon.itor.us that I use.
As I shifted the last of my sites from Dreamhost to a VPS I was wondering about some of the values I was seeing. For example here’s a fairly normal day in the life of a wordpress site hosted at Dreamhost.

Lots of spikes all [...]

Pingdom offer a commercial web site monitoring service, they also offer a free monitoring solution that you can join, GIGRIB.
Pingdom GIGRIB is a unique, distributed website monitoring service. GIGRIB users can add websites they want monitored, and in return their computers become a part of the GIGRIB monitoring network.
A while back I setup the GIGRIB [...]

I look after a number of servers in my spare time One of the guys who I help out contacted me recently with a weird Joomla issue when trying to install a particular component.
* JInstaller::install: SQL Error. DB function failed with error
number 2006
MySQL server has gone away SQL=CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS
`jos_comprofiler` ( [...]

So my first Centos 5.1 to Centos 5.2 upgrade on a VPS didn’t go so well.
After “yum update” and a reboot, we see:
[/sbin/fsck.ext3 (1) -- /] fsck.ext3 -a /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1:
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not [...]

If you ever see this in your Apache logs:
Permission denied: /path/to/web/data/html/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable
Think permissions, permissions, permissions. If you have chmod’ed your .htaccess 644 or even 777 and it’s still not working, start traversing up your directory tree and make sure apache can access everything at each level.
Permissions [...]

For those who are:

Into Linux & server management
Interested in building fail over Linux VPS solutions
Happy to play about creating your own hosting environment

This one might be for you…
Webbynode have a coming soon Beta. According to their blurb.
…the killer new flexible Xen VPS service for developers & for people in need of better hosting.
….advanced features to [...]

Recently I started looking for a replacement for the task bar clock/calendar
on my Mac. I eventually found and started using Magical, it’s free, has a ton of features and seems to work very well.
Although it is still an Alpha release I haven’t had any dramas with it and have enjoyed the extra functionality it provides. [...]

Ever wished that your Mac had a better picture viewer or quick way or running a slideshow of a group of photos?
Phoenix Slides is a neat little program that provides exactly this. It’s simple, has a clean interface and does an admirable job. I love it!
Read more and download here.

During last week I managed to make some time to play around with Apple’s new iMovie 08, it’s not a bad package at all, lots of options and capabilities. Not having used iMovie previously it didn’t take me long to get the hang of it.
I managed to waste an hour or so and make a [...]

So tonight I was browsing through the normal daily run of spam advertising that arrives in my inbox and I noticed this Jetstar advert.

Looks like Jetstar or their advertising/marketing/design company thought a Macbook Pro would be a good look, and it is.
I must admit I love the design and look of my Macbook Pro, infact [...]

To challenge myself to be a better photographer I decided to embark on a “Photo A Day” adventure for 2009.
I’ll see how the first month goes, however all being well I’ll be able to keep it up and do the whole year.
Wish me luck

We had a higher than usual amount of thunderstorms earlier in the year. However just because there is a storm around it doesn’t mean you will get any good photos!
One night back in May I went up to the hills over looking Adelaide and didn’t get much at all, this was about the only photo [...]

Tonight we had a total lunar eclipse. It was the best chance to witness a total lunar eclipse in Australia since 2000, apparently there won’t be another opportunity until sometime in 2011.
I managed to take some photos and have put them up in my gallery.

After a long time of not taking any photos I’ve been out and about the last few months. Here’s a couple of pics taken this month.
However I’ve realised that my 300d has dust somewhere on the sensor, thankfully it’s only minor and only shows up on certain pics taken in certain conditions.
So I’ll live with [...]

A few weeks ago I installed the latest version of Zenphoto gallery to manage my photos. I’ve been using the software for 18months or so now and it just gets better and better with each release.
Highly recommended if you are looking for a simple piece of photo gallery software for your site, refreshing after the [...]

I’ve had a crack at HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography a couple of times over the last few months.
The idea is that you take multiple pictures of the same scene bracketed at different settings, ie. plus or minus 1 Fstop. You then combine all the images together with something like Photomatix and maybe tweak things [...]

This will teach me for even trying to upload my photos somewhere else other than Smugmug
What was I thinking…

My Canon EOS 300D had an attack of “Epic Fail” today.
Was taking pics as per normal, got a pic like this:

Next one was like this:

Not happy Jan.
Once I got home and did a closer inspection of the body, I see that the sub mirror (for auto focus) is not lifting when taking a photo. I [...]

Yesterday after work I dropped my broken 300d off to Diamonds Camera in Rundle Street. It’s now on it’s way to Canon for a check and quote on a fix.
If I don’t choose to go ahead with the fix, it’s still $60 for the quote, mmm. In the mean time I’ve been looking around an [...]

Video: Panasonic LX3
Photos: Canon 50D
Some video and pics of lightning last night up near my mum’s place. In some of the footage you can hear the 50D shutter when I was taking pics
In the first few clips the lightning is towards the left hand side, later on it’s towards the middle. Don’t blink, [...]

Got a few hours away from the kids last night thanks to the inlaws!
Had dinner in Rundle Street with Michael & Pris and then went for a walk shopping in Rundle Mall afterwards. We were window shopping, the girls were actual shopping, our poor credit cards
I had the LX3 with me and managed [...]

To challenge myself to be a better photographer I decided to embark on a “Photo A Day” adventure for 2009.
I’ll see how the first month goes, however all being well I’ll be able to keep it up and do the whole year.
Wish me luck

Firmware version 1.2 has been released for the Panasonic LX3.
Improvements are listed as:

Improved white balance flash mode setting when DMW-FL220 is connected.
Proper setting of shutter speed on iA mode and Scene mode when OIS is turned ON.
Proper Exif information in the JPEG picture file.

Considering I haven’t had any issues relating to these I’m not [...]

Recently I did a spot of night time photography including some time lapses with my 50D, on examining the photos a few days later I noticed a nasty little red spot on one of the images. Closer inspection found me three of the little blighters, so it looks like I’ve got myself some hot pixels [...]

A friend of mine was in Melbourne recently and wandered into the public access areas at the Port of Melbourne and grabbed a few pictures of the docked ships being loaded. While there, security from one of the terminals came up and stated:
No photos allowed.
You must show me your camera.
You must delete all photos now.
I [...]

Ok, so who else has been to the Post Office lately and found it such a pain to actually post something? Today I wasted nearly 20mins of my (late 2:30pm) lunch break in a massive long queue at the local Post Office.
I walked in, selected a CD box for the CD I wanted to post, [...]

Rant time! I don’t drive my car much lately, we drive Caterina’s car around as it has the baby seat fixed in it. But anyway it’s been a month since I needed to get fuel for my car. So the other night about 10:30pm on my way home I decided to stop and grab some [...]

I got this email in my Gmail account the other day.
Sent through Yahoo web mail, signed by Yahoo as valid email, tagged with a signature proclaiming the best spam protection….

The image attached was an advert for rx555.com

pfft to their spam protection.

Do you ever get random stuff in your inbox? Here’s a recent sample of some randomness

Lovely!

Some random professor with too much time on his hands:
“Every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years, … a ‘baby levy’ in the form of a carbon tax should apply, in line with the ‘polluter pays’ principle.”
mmm we’ll have to stop at two then [...]

Reading a recent advert that made it’s way into my inbox, I was bemused by the amount of small print and clarifications you see in advertisements of this type.
Is it because consumers are too uneducated or the product supplier over complicating a product?

Seems to be like this across many products and services these days, maybe [...]

Spam Email FAIL

It’s important that you get it right…  Gah! No more spam.

So you want to create an online video from various video clips or pictures that you have? Want to add some music to the background and also have some basic effects to spruce it all up?
Sounds like you are looking for Eyespot
A while back I was looking for an easy way to put [...]

So you download via Bit Torrent (only legal files of course), but do you share?

I sure do
I was thinking about this the other day because I’ve been helping out providing bandwidth to one of my favorite Linux distros, Sabayon Linux.
I provide a ftp mirror for Sabayon and also a bunch of other smaller [...]

During last week I managed to make some time to play around with Apple’s new iMovie 08, it’s not a bad package at all, lots of options and capabilities. Not having used iMovie previously it didn’t take me long to get the hang of it.
I managed to waste an hour or so and make a [...]

Have you ever wished that Gmail had IMAP capability? Well the wait is nearly over it seems!
I noticed today under the settings area for one of my Gmail accounts “Forwarding & POP” has been expanded to be Forwarding & POP/IMAP” and there is the appropriate section to to enable/disable IMAP.

So now there is another option [...]

Less than a week after helping one of my brothers move 500mb of email to a shiny new gmail account he gave me a frantic call.
At login he was getting an error stating “Your account has been disabled”, new email to his gmail account was just bouncing with a user unknown error.
When you have done [...]

Don’t you just love free stuff? It’s awesome that people are happy to create and give away stuff on the Internet for free, like Wordpress themes.
You just have to be aware that spammers are also in the free Wordpress theme game!

I recently tried a theme call Blue Glow. It all looked nice enough on the [...]

I look after a number of servers in my spare time One of the guys who I help out contacted me recently with a weird Joomla issue when trying to install a particular component.
* JInstaller::install: SQL Error. DB function failed with error
number 2006
MySQL server has gone away SQL=CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS
`jos_comprofiler` ( [...]

If you ever see this in your Apache logs:
Permission denied: /path/to/web/data/html/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable
Think permissions, permissions, permissions. If you have chmod’ed your .htaccess 644 or even 777 and it’s still not working, start traversing up your directory tree and make sure apache can access everything at each level.
Permissions [...]

IPv6 on a Cisco 877w doesn’t work… well it does… providing you don’t want to use the wireless bit.
rtr1(config)#int dot11radio0
rtr1(config-if)#ipv6 ?
% Unrecognized command
rtr1(config-if)#
Despite what you might read on the interwebs, you can’t actually apply an IPv6 address to either the dot11radio interface or sub interfaces.

In my current config I use a single vlan for ethernet [...]

So last week my Dell Mini9 arrived, thanks Michael!! It took long enough to arrive, we ordered 3 of them a day before they were removed from the Dell website. They’ve returned now, a hundred dollars more expensive though… and in white, gah!
Anyway mine arrived safely about 3 weeks after the original order, and it’s [...]

I notice recently that coments on some photos appear to be timewarping into the future. Looks weird

Here’s the ASCII art logo you get when you SSH to a Chumby.

Have been playing with some CGI scripts, to make it a more useful alarm clock

TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that allows you to interact with Twitter from within the browser. Get your tweets, replies and messages without having to go to the Twitter website or have another application running.
My free tip of the week

I made a small video tonight, it’s a few combined clips that I took using Ben’s camera back in May 2005. I was out with Ben & Scott for a weekend travelling around in the “Mid North” of South Australia.

This compilation was taken around Mongolatta, east of Hallett and Mount Bryan, 2 or 3 hours [...]

Made another short video, it is from video clips and pics I took when I spent a few days on Kangaroo Island with Ben back in October 2004.

This compilation was from Emu Bay near Kingscote, the beach is around 5 miles long and is just a fantastic place. Usually it’s fairly busy as a [...]

Well he finally arrived!
Luca Burford was born at 10:22pm last night.
I’ve uploaded some photos of him to my photo gallery.
I’ve also made a little video using some of the clips I took on Caterina’s digital camera.

This is about 1 hour after he was born
7mb Quicktime file.

I brought Caterina & Luca home from the hospital on Monday morning. We had bit of a sleepless night but thankfully he has now settled in a bit and is sleeping better, which means we sleep better too!!
Last night I uploaded some more photos of Luca from the week that he was in hospital. He’s [...]

Am I resting and relaxing on my week off?
mmm not really, have been helping Caterina with Luca a lot

This is from this morning, Luca waking up for another day!

While driving home tonight we saw what looked like a spaceship!
On closer inspection it was the Holden balloon flying fairly low and slow over the Adelaide suburbs.
I took a little video which came out ok.

I found some interesting stats while trawling the web for more information, the screen on the side is reported to be [...]

So you want to create an online video from various video clips or pictures that you have? Want to add some music to the background and also have some basic effects to spruce it all up?
Sounds like you are looking for Eyespot
A while back I was looking for an easy way to put [...]

During last week I managed to make some time to play around with Apple’s new iMovie 08, it’s not a bad package at all, lots of options and capabilities. Not having used iMovie previously it didn’t take me long to get the hang of it.
I managed to waste an hour or so and make a [...]

Spent most of the day looking after Luca, we kept ourselves busy doing all sorts of things

A short clip with a random selection of my pics of Luca & Leah from August 2008, they grow up fast.

Taking a few weeks off from work which is the longest break for quite sometime for this workaholic
So on my first day off we did some walking around our local suburbs and spent some time having fun at one of the local parks. Photos here.
Found an auto setting (Aperture Priority) on [...]

A couple of the photos I took in November of the kids.

Video: Panasonic LX3
Photos: Canon 50D
Some video and pics of lightning last night up near my mum’s place. In some of the footage you can hear the 50D shutter when I was taking pics
In the first few clips the lightning is towards the left hand side, later on it’s towards the middle. Don’t blink, [...]

Luca had his first try at cricket yesterday. It was a hot Boxing Day and while the real cricket on TV was at lunch, we setup in the hallway with a plastic cricket set

Got a few hours away from the kids last night thanks to the inlaws!
Had dinner in Rundle Street with Michael & Pris and then went for a walk shopping in Rundle Mall afterwards. We were window shopping, the girls were actual shopping, our poor credit cards
I had the LX3 with me and managed [...]

I look after a couple of servers for a friend who I met earlier this year, as a token of thanks for helping out a new Yaesu 857D arrived today. Thanks Michael
Unfortunately as we drove up the street tonight the power went out So I opened the box and had a [...]

Living in suburbia doesn’t give you a huge number of options for antennas on HF. When I was at my parents earlier in the week I collected a bunch of wire dipoles that I used to have hanging in the sky.
I’ve hung up what was a 15m dipole in a little V behind the garage, [...]

Bought a 40m to 10m G5RV on Ebay for $50, should be a bit better to hang in the yard than my dodgy wires at the moment.

This afternoon I managed to put my newly acquired G5RV up. It’s on a wooden pole at 8ft in the centre and about 6 feet at the ends. Just fits inside the backyard
It’s not ideal, will have to get it up permanently somehow in a better position but I can hear tons more [...]

Because I’m not using an optimal antenna (actually far from it) I recently purchased an antenna tuner. I ended up getting an LDG Z-100 which is a nice small compact unit that goes well with my Yaesu FT 857D.
After reading reviews I ended up ordering direct from the US and saved myself about $80 compared [...]

Today I ordered some APRS gear from Scott at Argent Data, looks like some of it is on backorder
Should be fun to get back into APRS, I used to enjoy it a lot and it looks like a number of cool things are now available since I last used APRS about 8 years [...]

APRS tracker I ordered has shipped, now tracking via USPS

My APRS parcel of bits arrived today. We were out this morning when the postie came past so this afternoon I went for a drive with Luca to the local post office.
Now to see what damage we can do!

Some time back John NA3J told me he would be in AU some time around the beginning of April, I hadn’t heard a lot back about it and had forgotten about it.
This morning on the way to Office Works to get a printer cartridge I turned on the rig in my car and who do [...]

After a bit of mucking about I got the OT+ from Argent Data going in my car.
Here’s a track from one day this week.

Home to my parent’s in law, where I catch the bus, then from there back home again.
Nothing exciting but you get the idea Will probably do some more driving over [...]

Last Saturday I took a Luca for a drive up to the NERC buy & sell. Caught up with a few guys I haven’t seen for years.
Anyway the APRS track worked pretty well, so that was cool, looks like I’ve finally got the settings in my OpenTracker+ all sorted.

Topology map, showing tracking box.

Standard street map [...]