Carl Hutzler’s Blog

Rylan has always wanted a screened in porch. We have terrible tiger mosquitos in the back yard from about June 30th until mid October every year. They are just relentless in attacking you. No work I have done to ensure good drainage on the property has helped that much. So this year we decided to do it.

We are almost finished building a very large 22×18 screened in porch where our old deck used to be. And we added a smaller 20×16 open deck area for grilling, etc. The open part of the deck has an added cool feature in that instead of having four large windows which look out on the yard from the den/TV room, we are going to have one giant 16 foot double sliding door. So we still get the view, but it will open to the non-screened portion of the deck. Should be a fun change.

Denny Contracting is our contracting firm. They designed the deck with Rylan (and even I had some input). The owner, Jason Denny, put a lot of thought into the layout of the structure both in terms of engineering and aesthetics. Jason added in a number of very nice features like skylights, fans, specific door replacement styles, surface material (TimberTek) and so much more - without adding a lot of unnecessary cost. Jason really understands the products available in the market and the benefits and drawbacks to each choice. And he knows how to take fairly inexpensive materials and install them in a way that is really sharp and beautiful (more on that soon). He worked the project like it was his own house (which, by the way, is a beautiful remodel he did in Herndon, VA).

I will have more to say and show when it is complete in the next couple of weeks, but Rylan and I have been extremely pleased with the quality of work, excellent staff, and project timeline thus far.

I am doing more backups for clients these days. One issue I ran into was that the ReadyNAS’s web user interface does not provide many options for how an rsync job runs. For example, while you can control whether or not files are deleted on the remote machine, you can not control most other standard options. I needed to specify two options:

1) I needed rsync to run on an alternate port so that I could map that port to the right backup readynas machine at my home office (I have more than one now). Without the ability to specify ports I had no way to target the correct readynas machine behind my office firewall. Well, there are ways, but VPN and SSH solutions were not exactly what I wanted. I just wanted to specify –port=XXXX

2) I needed to constrict how much bandwidth the rsync backups could use. This was mostly because my clients have slower internet connections than I do and if I let rsync just run, it would eat up all the upload bandwidth at my client’s location (if the job ran late). While there are some controls for this in the QOS settings in the router at my client’s location (running DD-WRT), I thought the rsync option would work just fine. I just needed to be able to specify –bwlimit=50

I looked around a lot for a solution but could not find one. I even called Netgear and their support team did a great job understanding the issue and thinking about solutions with me. But in the end they admited they had no Web UI solution and that getting access to the unix shell and setting up a job in CRON was the only solution. So I set up a job in CRON and it has been running for several weeks without issue. Basically it is just a small shell script with a bunch of rsync jobs that run daily.

But my shell script was just adequate. I am not a unix programmer so some of the more complex things I wanted from my backup job were not in my dinky script. I did have it email me when it was complete, but I never new if it completed properly unless I manually looked at the logs each day (which I didn’t). And I had nothing in my script to prevent another backup from starting even if the previous day’s backup was still running…a real possibility. From looking at the backup jobs built into the readynas, I could see how they provided these and other options, but I did not fully understand how to add them to my script so I didn’t.

Then today I happened to stumble upon Ian Macdonald’s post about how he added a little PERL code to the ReadyNAS’s backup script generator (it generates the shell script that actually performs the backup). This addition let’s you use the ReadyNAS web UI to create jobs as you normally would. But when the jobs are executed, his perl script additions do a lookup in an external file to see what options to apply! Bingo!!

http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=19857&p=118320&hilit=readynasexclude+rsync#p118320

His code was fairly simple. It looked for a config file called /frontview/conf/rsync.conf. In that file his perl code would look for a matching source or destination for the job in question and apply options. Simple enough. The only downside (minor) is that the TEST CONNECTION button in the web UI does not use these options. So for me, connecting on a different port, I could not use the test button. No biggee….this is just a small inconvenience.

Now I can create jobs in the web UI and be assured that jobs will only run one at a time and also provide emails with the logs when they complete. And I have full control over what rsync options I want the jobs to run with. Cool!

I took three of my Webelos II scouts out to the National Weather Service’s Sterling Virginia office for a tour of the facility. They are having a public open house tomorrow and Sunday and today they invited a few scouts out to get a look at the facility. In addition, they had the local Fox 5 weather man, Tony Perkins, out on location doing his reports for the morning news live every 15 minutes.

During one of the reports, he let my son Jacob and his fellow scouts, Paul Sesay and Josi Echeverria, present the weather during his report. It was a real thrill for them and something they will remember for a long time. I remember my first time on TV in Baltimore in some sort of Romper Room show. Anyway, here is the video.

I shoot a lot of performance photography (ballet/dance). At the end of a week of shows, I might have several thousand images to go through and upload to my SmugMug.com site for parents/dancers to purchase. I can’t possibly edit every image to prepare them for printing as most images never get purchased and it would simply take way too long.

So what I began doing is uplaoding the raw from camera images to SmugMug and then setting the gallery to have a “7 Day Proof” period. So when a customer comes along and orders, their order is held for 7 days to allow me a chance to fully edit/color corrected, etc the image from their specific order.

This worked just fine except the SmugMug “ Delayed for proofing & touch-up” page was not very easy nor quick for me to use. What I needed was to be able to replace each image with the color corrected image. While there is a “REPLACE PHOTO” button for each image, the process was very manual. Click the button, BROWSE to the color corrected file on my local machine, upload the image (10 seconds), wait until SmugMug was finished processing the new image (maybe 45 seconds), then rinse and repeat.

Even though I usually could edit 20 images in Photoshop for an order fairly quickly, the longest and most tedious part was just getting them re-uploaded to SmugMug. While the original image upload after the shoot is easy (using the MacDaddy uploader), smugmug provides no way to simply REPLACE images in bulk. (I did send them a request for the enhancement)

In my struggles, I did find one cheat which was that you don’t have to wait the extra 45 seconds for SmugMug to finish processing the image. You can use the browser back button to go back to the full list of images and hit REPLACE PHOTO and start on the next one. This did save some time, but it was still fairly manual on my side.

Today I found a fairly good solution to all of this. There is a firefox add-on called FireUploader which allows you to do the equivalent of an FTP upload to a website which may only support HTTP protocols. Some websites work with FireUploader and some do not. But many popular sites like FlickR and SmugMug do.

Once installed, you just activate FireUploader by clicking on the symbol down in the lower right of your FF window. Then you navigate to your smugmug site and into the folder where the images you want to replace are located. If you then upload a new file/image with the exact same name as one that is on the site, it will ask if you want to overwrite the file on smugmug. Click yes (and apply to all) and the process is automatic from there.

The only issue I notice is that the FTP is fairly slow. The file transfer is very quick, but then it sits for that same 45 seconds while it “waits to complete the transfer”. This may be a smugmug protocol thing where it accepts the file but does not answer back with a “completed” until after smugmug has finished processing the new image for thumbnails, etc.

But regardless of the time penalty, this saves me a lot of time as it is completely automated! Yeah :-)