Carl Hutzler's Blog

Before I bought my first digital camera around 2003, I had a Nikon FE2 and a bunch of prime lenses. I bought the camera with a 50mm lens from Service Photo in Baltimore, used, for about $500 in 1988. I used the camera for 15 years mostly shooting black and white negative film and then slides.

I have a lot of B/W prints from my darkroom. But the slide collection was always hard to view. The projector, screen and inability to simply pull out an image and show someone were always a drag. For years I have been looking for a way to scan the slides cheaply, but the cost to scan 4,500 slides is not even close to approachable. I did not need the highest quality…just something fairly good…good enough for the web. If I really wanted to make a print/enlargement, I always had the original slide and could pay for a drum scan if I wanted.

The idea of putting the slides into a Kodak projector and somehow taking pictures of them with a digital camera was always a thought I had. I even briefly tried to make it work, but quickly ran into a number of issues which stumped me. The slide projector bulb was WAY to bright. Focus was an issue. And even getting decent color balance and contrast was problematic.

Luckily, my father (and mother) have a huge slide collection. My dad was also interested in the same thing – digitizing the slides. He did most of the work but I helped supply equipment, software and some know how on things.

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How you ask?

Answer: Get rid of your cable TV.

But how will you survive without TV and Movies?

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I started using Skype last year because I found it very convenient for technical support and other 1-800 type calls where you might be on hold for a long time. Skype also was nice as on a Mac Laptop it performs VERY well as a full duplex speakerphone without any additional things to buy/plugin. This allows me to do stuff while I talk to a tech support person.

Anyway, I quickly realized that it would be great to be able to call any number. So I subscribed to SKYPE OUT and found it was great and I used it more and more.

But the only issue I found was that sometimes when I called someone using SKYPE they would not answer. Why? Because the called id would come across as “not available” or some weird number like (123) 456-7890.

Today I had a similar experience and decided to look into it. I found that you can assign a caller ID to your SKYPE out calls by typing in the number you would like to use (like your cell phone #) and then confirming you own that number via an SMS confirmation code process.

I just did it and the process worked perfectly. They said my caller id would be activated within 24 hours and they would send me a confirmation when it was complete. Nice!

Don’t know about the rest of you, but my blog seemed to load very slowly of late. I tried a bunch of things but could not figure it out and started to suspect my hosting company (1and1.com). Being Christmas Eve and all, I decided today would be a good time to find out.

I went with Dreamhost and signed up for their yearly plan ($10 a month…same as 1and1 business hosting). I heard they were a good provider and I was hoping that the speed issue was indeed 1and1.com and not my blog set-up itself.

My blog was hosted as a directory off of my main site (carlhutzler.com/blog). I wanted to be able to move the main site (my photo business) and the blog as close to seemlessly as possible. I was a little nervous as I had not moved a Wordpress blog before. My website was simple…just a bunch of html files, but the blog had a MySQL database with all kinds of data in it along with my configuration settings and even a little .htaccess rewrite rules for the pretty URL stuff.

I read up a little on the subject and decided to go with the steps after the break… Read more

I set-up Time Machine successfully to backup to a network attach storage device (ReadyNAS 1100) twice now and have had great reliability. But for some reason, I have been trying to do it a third time at a client site and it will not work. I have been getting errors like:

Backup failed with error: 19
Network mountpoint not owned by backupd… remounting

I looked all over the ReadyNas.com site and followed their instructions perfectly. And I searched all over the blogs and other folks are having the same issue. Some think it is permission problems and I have no doubt some people have a lack of write access to their network share. But this was not the case for me.

What I found worked was after choosing the Time Machine volume in Time Machine preferences, you have to EJECT the time machine afp share (and sparse disk image if you had it mounted) BEFORE time machine will be happy and start backing up. I think it is because initially you had the share mounted as “you”, a normal user. And when time machine runs it wants to mount the share AS THE OWNER (backupd) in some way. If the share is already mounted as “you the user”, time machine can’t mount it as itself.

So when you choose the time machine volume for backups and the time machine preference says “backup starting in 120 seconds…119 seconds…118 seconds”, just eject the time machine AFP share and it just might work for you.

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!

Yeah, right.

Needed to install Microsoft Office 2007 on a machine today (upgrade from 2003). The installer would not execute. Just failed with a non-desript error like “error can not continue”.

From Google, figured out that the issue was likely an older version of Office and the installer could not uninstall the older version to make way for the new one. So I tried uninstalling it manually and even that failed!

Cleaned the registry. Did not help.

Googled all over for more info. Finally found a Microsoft Knowledge Base entry that took me over an hour of pain staking work to finally clear out the mess. Read it here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928218/en-us

What a load of bullshit. Anyone still using Windows should just shoot themselves. Mac OS X has absolutely nothing even close to an issue like this. And Apple would never publish something like this to “help” their users. Apple would never let a condition like that happen.

Apple is not perfect, but they are so many miles ahead of Microsoft.

Windows is the lamest piece of crud operating system ever cobbled together and forced on the public. Get smart, folks, get a Mac.

Yeesh!

I have an Infrant ReadyNAS 1100 unit and I can’t say enough great things about it. But yesterday I had a very strange issue. After having it running for quite some time, I upgraded all the drives to 1TB drives. I first backed-up all the data and then went with 4 new 1TB drives. I went through the whole process of formatting the drives, setting up shares and permissions, and copying the data back to the system. All was great!

Then after a reboot yesterday (installed an add-on), I found that I could only mount some shares on the device via AFP. I could mount everything via SMB…but AFP mounting two of my 6 shares would hang my OS X machine for a long time….10’s of minutes. I thought the issue might have been the add-on I just installed. But Infrant does not allow you to uninstall add-ons (bad bad bad).

So I was sort of stuck. I tried a few things but nothing seemed to help. The console logs on the Mac were full of some strange messages but even that did not tell me the issue even after Google searching the errors.

I eventually stumbled on what I think was the issue. There seemed to be some sort of KeyChain password issue. I can’t say for sure that I even understand what it was that made me think of it, but I decided to clear out all KeyChain entries for my NAS unit…both IP address and DNS entries. Everything.

Once I did that, everything was happy again.

Why’d it happen after that reboot when I had many other reboots along the way? Who knows. I think this was an obscure Mac OS X bug myself. But if this helps someone out there solve this issue, great.

One of my clients forgot their password a few days ago for their email address which is hosted on Google Apps. It just so happens that this account was also the admin account for the entire domain!

On top of this issue, for some reason the “I forgot my password” link was just telling us to “check with your domain admin” for assistance. While I was pretty sure I had checked the box allowing us to reset the admin password by sending an email to a secondary email address, this was not showing up.

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1. You can FTP files to/from your website almost as fast as you can copy them from one folder to another on your laptop’s hard drive.
2. Your upload bandwidth is faster than your good friend Phil’s download bandwidth.

   ….and the final way you know your Internet connection is too freakin’ fast…..

3. The CPU in your Linksys WRT54GL router is not able to fully utilize the entire pipe as it is CPU bound!

Verizon FIOS 20Mbps/20Mbps all on a piece of glass about the size of a thick human hair. Yeah, baby.