Carl Hutzler’s Blog

My Conservatory Ballet client wanted to sell tickets online to some upcoming performances of the Nutcracker Ballet. I guess doing it all by hand as they have done in the past (phone calls, running a credit card, recording who paid, etc) is a pain in the you know. So with just 4 days notice :-) they asked if I could whip something up.

I took a quick look around and was overwhelmed by the number of shopping cart programs available. Everything from a service to software to freeware. I tried to ensure the package I was going to use had inventory management and could take paypal payments. You need inventory control to sell tickets of course. And Paypal is just easy to set-up on such short notice.

I went with Zen Cart and have been reasonably pleased. The software seems robust and the shopping experience is very professional and amazingly full featured. And the price was $0!

My only complaint about the program is that the admin interface is very poorly organized. Trying to find a setting for this or that is a 10-15 minute exploration. There are just zillions of options and its not clear what category the option you need is located under. I usually had more success Googling it and seeing someone elses frustration trying to do the same thing along with a reply from someone who happened to know how.

Not sure I would want to run a store with 1000’s of items for sale using Zen Cart, but for something small like we are doing, it worked out just fine. Take a peek if you like…and if you are in the Washington DC area, you should consider buying a ticket. The show is held at the amazing Madeira School overlooking the Potomac in Great Falls, Virginia. The view is worth the price alone….but the show (the 35th production) will be amazing too!

http://conservatoryballet.com/tickets/

Added @11:30am 11/30: Found out that we also need to allow for a 10% discount for purchases of >10 tickets. Zen Cart can discount a single product but did not have the ability to discount an entire shopping cart. Since we wanted the discount to apply for any mix of adult/child and show time tickets, I thought we were stuck. But then I found a free module called Quantity Discounts. After installing the code and activating it under modules, I applied a 10% discount to the cart for >10 items and viola!

My hiking buddy Davy Crockett is running the Grand Canyon again this weekend. This time he is carrying a Satellite Phone and a Satellite/GPS location device. The location device reports his position periodically so we can track his progress on Google Maps. As you can see from the map, his latest position is on the return trip across the Colorado. He just crossed the bridge and is making his way up to Phantom Ranch. Next is the long 5000+ foot climb to the North Rim and the end of his 80+ mile journey which started at 2am yesterday!

He is being sponsored on this run by SKYCALL satellite phones and the SPOT GPS/SAT location device company. So to help with sponsorship, he called into the KSL radio station on their morning outdoor show today. I caught it on the internet from my location at 38.969ºN / 77.341ºW. Here is the recording (7.5MB mp3) if you want to hear what it sounded like live via satellite phone to the radio to the internet to my laptop :-) Not bad!

Update 11/28/2007: Davy just posted his write-up. Fun read.

This week I shot three days of portraits at the ballet studio in Fairfax, Virginia in the Washington DC area. It was a lot of work but very rewarding. The lighting set-up was simple and flattering to the students: two big silver umbrellas at 45° each in front and two bare flashes behind the students also at 45° which added some separation from the black backdrop and some hair highlights as well. The lighting is not “dramatic” but it does the job and provides a lot of space for the students to do all types of positions and jumps. With other set-ups, the photographer has to move lights around a lot and we simply did not have time in the 30 minute slots to do that. Perhaps we will do some more creative work early next year with longer sessions for the older kids. They may want that for their portfolios as well. Lighting diagram

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I heard this explanation a while back and got the text again from this Space Shuttle Page. I can’t say I know for sure if it is true, but I bet it is fairly accurate.

The US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That’s an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that’s the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English expatriates. Why did the English people build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used. Why did they use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay!

Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that’s the spacing of the old wheel ruts. So who built these old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts?

The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made by, or for, Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Thus we have the answer to the original questions:

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. Specs and Bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse’s ass came up with it, you may be exactly right! - because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of two war horses.

But there’s more to this story…

When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line to the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses’ behinds. So a major design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a horse’s ass.

As a follow-up to my Jamestown post, one of the things we learned was where the sailing term “Knot” came from. I have always known that a knot is 15% smaller than the same speed in miles/hour. But where did that term come from?

Below is what the sailing term “a Knot” is based off of. The sailor used a spool of rope like the one shown below. They put the end of the rope with the wooden “paddle” in the water and allowed it to un-spool with the speed of the ship. They timed the process with a sand timer (about 30 seconds) and then counted the number of actual knots that had been spooled into the water (the knots are on the rope and you can see one of them on the right side of the spool). They used this in the 1700’s to get from England to the “New World”.

Today I use a wrist watch which receives microwave signals from a constellation of 30+ satellites which can tell me within 15 feet where I am anywhere on earth.

Oh, and this marvel of technology can still tell me how fast I am going in Knots!!!

My son’s fourth grade class went on an all day trip to Jamestown yesterday. We had a great time learning about the history and importance of the first settlers of our country…great timing since Thanksgiving is just around the corner. I am not sure if I had ever been to Jamestown before. I recommend it as a great day trip from Washington DC. There are a ton of neat things to do and learn in a small area…everything from how the settlers, Indians, and African slaves lived to how the boats navigated the Atlantic to get there in the first place.

We also went to Yorktown which is just 30 minutes up the road and learned about the Revolutionary war which ended at the Battle of Yorktown. We walked on some pretty hallowed grounds where George Washington, Lord Cornwallis and others stood!

More pix after the jump. Read more

I am starting to work with the Conservatory Ballet in Reston, a town in Fairfax, Virginia in the Washington DC area, in a new capacity, as a professional photographer. Having done some computer networking and technical assistance work for them over the last year or so, I proposed helping them shoot their performances/events and portrait sessions. This past weekend I shot my first performance in an “official” capacity and I think the images came out well. We’ll see if anyone agrees and decides to buy them :-)

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I read Ken’s site regularly and list him on my blogroll. His site has an interesting collection of camera equipment reviews and tips along with his own exquisite style of very saturated, colorful images like this one he recently took in Yosemite. Click to see a larger version on his page.

What I like most about his site is that he regularly gives tips on how he made various images. He has taught me several tricks with my Nikon DSLRs and flash attachments. And in this shot below, he showed how useful a graduated neutral density filter can be (wish I had one along with an 77mm –> 82mm step-up ring).

For those who don’t know what I am talking about, this is a glass filter that attaches to the front of the lens and has a grey area which fades into a clear area. For this shot Ken likely put the grey area on top where the sky was very bright and was able to preserve some detail in the shady stream area at the bottom. Otherwise he would have had to exposure for either the sky or the stream and the other one would have been completely dark or way over exposed.

Another way Ken could have done this was to bring a tripod along and do both of the exposures - one for the sky and one for the stream - on two separate frames and then combined them in Photoshop using the HDR (High Dynamic Range) feature. But Ken even said in another gallery that he hates carrying tripods. I agree.

Check out his other recent work from California’s Eastern Sierra.

Email Submission Operations: Access and Accountability Requirements :-)

Network Working Group                                         C. Hutzler
Request for Comments: 5068
BCP: 134                                                      D. Crocker
Category: Best Current Practice              Brandenburg InternetWorking
                                                              P. Resnick
                                                   QUALCOMM Incorporated
                                                               E. Allman
                                                          Sendmail, Inc.
                                                                T. Finch
                               University of Cambridge Computing Service
                                                           November 2007

  Email Submission Operations: Access and Accountability Requirements

Status of This Memo

   This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the
   Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
   improvements.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Abstract

   Email has become a popular distribution service for a variety of
   socially unacceptable, mass-effect purposes.  The most obvious ones
   include spam and worms.  This note recommends conventions for the
   operation of email submission and transport services between
   independent operators, such as enterprises and Internet Service
   Providers.  Its goal is to improve lines of accountability for
   controlling abusive uses of the Internet mail service.  To this end,
   this document offers recommendations for constructive operational
   policies between independent operators of email submission and
   transmission services.

   Email authentication technologies are aimed at providing assurances
   and traceability between internetworked networks.  In many email
   services, the weakest link in the chain of assurances is initial
   submission of a message.  This document offers recommendations for
   constructive operational policies for this first step of email
   sending, the submission (or posting) of email into the transmission
   network.  Relaying and delivery entail policies that occur subsequent
   to submission and are outside the scope of this document.

Animator vs. Animation by *alanbecker on deviantART