My plan is to take an original photo (and post it) each day of 2011.  The tools at my disposal are my Canon EOS Rebel T2i, my Canon Powershot SD630, and my iPhone 4. As much as I’d love to use my T2i every day, I suspect a large majority of my daily shots will end up being with the camera I always have strapped on my hip, the iPhone.

If you’d like to follow along on the journey, I’ll be posting all the photos here under the Photo of the Day category so they’ll be easy to follow via RSS or ATOM.  I’ll also probably be consistent in my titles, at least the prefix of them anyway. When I post the photo, I’ll share what camera I used and if there’s a story to go with the photo, I’ll also share that.

I can’t promise they’ll always be good nor can I promise they’ll always be interesting, but I do promise that I’ll try to mix them up so its not shots of the kids every day or something easily cheesy.  Except the first one some time later today.

I ended up picking Hurrican Reef Raspberry Wheat Ale form the Florida Beer Company.  Its pretty good, I’d drink more of it especially in warmer weather.  It reminded me a bit of Sam Adam’s Cherry Wheat, but less sweet and Raspberry and not Cherry of course.  I think it had to do with the finish pronouncing the flavor of the fruit.

I don’t think i’ll bang out long posts this way, but you might see lots of smallish stuff since it’ll be so easy to add. Especially some on the fly photo blogging. Heck, it might replace my use of Twitter for some thoughts. Especially those thoughts over 140 characters.

As and added bonus, here’s Vik’s cat, Inky.

[non iPhone Update: Looks like Declan had the same idea on his blog.]

Subject: I know what ladies do on a farm. DO NOT leave them there unattended!

Do not leave your spouse on a farm unattended. She may replace you with animals and you will be way out of the competition for the rest of your relationship. I learned it the hard way

In any case, being in Nashville this weekend has allowed me to go to a Waffle House sober for the first time. Since I am a big fan of greasy food, I loved it. And it was very much like I remembered, but I don’t know if I remember ever eating the food there. I’m sure I did, but I just don’t remember. Alcohol could be helping there too.

Here’s a picture of the grill in action, for no reason at all.

1. smothered with onions
2. covered with cheese

"Open source means that your software can continue even after you’re arrested for murder!" — MARK

Subject: employment crotch

A metasyntactic variable is either a placeholder name (a kind of alias term, commonly used to denote the subject matter under discussion), or a random member of a class of things under discussion. The term originates from computer programming and other technical contexts, and is commonly used in examples by hackers and programmers. The use of a metasyntactic variable is helpful in freeing a programmer from creating a logically named variable, although the invented term may also become sufficiently popular and enter the language as a neologism. The word foo is the canonical example.

My coworker was asking me what this foo I keep using in discussion is. So I turned to Wikipedia to give me a clear definition and background. It was listed in the Examples section of the metasyntactic variable entry under Nonesense Words.

Foo is the first metasyntactic variable, commonly used to represent an as-yet-unspecified term, value, process, function, destination or event but seldom a person.
Bar, the canonical second metasyntactic variable, typically follows foo.
Baz, the canonical third metasyntactic variable, is commonly used after foo and bar.

The article also has examples via english words, people, and places. Its an entertaining read.

Andrew Ho is today’s Real Man of Genius for his blog comment follow-up smackdown titled Real Woman of Genius. Which appeared on this blog attached to this post.

In any case, I think I’m finding the phrase rude, but I’m not sure if that’s why it fully bugs me.

up or down vote

This has to be one of the dumbest redundant phrases I’ve heard in awhile. There has to be a better way to communicate what people are trying to communicate when they use this phrase. Its sounds like something a 3rd grader would say.

In any case, this phrase must DIE. Thank you.

I introduced myself and said what a fan I was. She remembered me from some comments from the two blogs. Hopefully, I didn’t come off as too much of a dork.

The debate of the day is if pornocracy is a real word or not.

James Coates wrote about Scrapbook in his column last weekend. Its the only useful bit of information I’ve ever gotten from the column. As my friend said when I brought this up to him, “Coates’ column is like a car wreck, you can’t help but stare at it even though you don’t really want to.”

Anyway, it looks like if you’re trying to compile things on Windows XP SP2 using Visual C++ with pre-compiled headers turned on and your code is hosted on a network drive hosted by samba, you’ll cause:

fatal error C1001: INTERNAL COMPILER ERROR
(compiler file ‘f:\vs70builds\3077\vc\Compiler\Utc\src\P2\p2symtab.c’, line 1609)

http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2005-January/099421.html

This is probably one of those bugs that is half samba’s fault and half VC++’s fault. That being said, I also found a report that looked similar, but with win2k and offline files.

Today’s Real Man of Genius is the guy who figured out how to make frozen microwavable White Castle sliders (with cheese) and sell that at my local grocer. Its a great dinner when its just me and Dinah at home and she only allows me enough time to nuke something.

In the comment section of my blog, complete this sentence:

“If my feet had balls….”

If somebody gave you a brand new Lamborghini, absolutely free on the condition that you must always have a license-plate reading “SHEMALE” – would you take it?

But the reality is, this case is about a contract dispute. Linux got dragged into it as hostage. SCO is holding Linux by the neck, pointing a gun at its head, and telling IBM, “Do what I tell you, or I’ll shoot your little friend.”

Subject: Not a dating service, a SHAGGING service!

Groovey, baby!

I started looking into how java finds the default information via java.util.TimeZone. It tries to use System.getProperty("user.timezone"), if that fails then it then calls a native method passing along user.country and user.home. So, that dead-ended me.

Seva found the only place that “America/Chicago” was being used was in /etc/sysconfig/clock which only appeared to be used in startup and shutdown routines when calling hwclock. He changed it so the correct value was being put in ZONE, and Java acted how it should.

I ran strings on $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/i386/libjava.so and found references to /etc/sysconfig/clock as well as ZONE=". So, it appears, at least on Linux systems, Java will read /etc/sysconfig/clock and if that’s succesful, not even bother checking with /etc/localtime.

This, I feel, is totally incorrect behaviour and against what one would expect from a UNIX system. This should probably be changed, but most likely won’t be. I figured I’d drop a note about it here in the blog to help others in the future as we couldn’t easily find the defined behaviour on the web.

Seva complained that he would have found this much faster using strace, but on the RHEL3 box he was using, strace segfaulted when he run against java. Works fine on my FC1 box, and I could recreate it and see it. So I guess this is also Linux dumbness of the day.

“Don’t mess with Texas” was an anti-littering slogan created by Texas’s Transportation Dept. Its now in our common lexicon and plastered everywhere, but until today, I had no idea it had such a non-macho beginning.

From the openssl man page:

       s_client  This implements a generic SSL/TLS client which can establish
                 a transparent connection to a remote server speaking SSL/TLS.
                 It's intended for testing purposes only and provides only
                 rudimentary interface functionality but internally uses
                 mostly all functionality of the OpenSSL ssl library.

Here’s an example:

Port 465 is reserved for SMTP over SSL. I have that turned on for my mail server as that’s a useful port to have open for mail clients that can’t do a STARTTLS for port 25 (and/or for 587/submission.) How do I make sure that my smtps is configured property and sharing the right services? I would do something like this (my command line is in bold):

# openssl s_client -host my.mailhost.example -port 465
CONNECTED(00000003)
depth=0 /C=US/ST=IL/L=Boogietown/O=mailhost.example/OU=mail/CN=my.mailhost.example/emailAddress=admin@mailhost.example
verify error:num=18:self signed certificate
verify return:1
depth=0 /C=US/ST=IL/L=Boogietown/O=mailhost.example/OU=mail/CN=my.mailhost.example/emailAddress=admin@mailhost.example
verify return:1
---
Certificate chain
 0 s:/C=US/ST=IL/L=Boogietown/O=mailhost.example/OU=mail/CN=my.mailhost.example/emailAddress=admin@mailhost.example
   i:/C=US/ST=IL/L=Boogietown/O=mailhost.example/OU=mail/CN=my.mailhost.example/emailAddress=admin@mailhost.example
---
Server certificate
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
<certificate spew snipped>
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
subject=/C=US/ST=IL/L=Boogietown/O=mailhost.example/OU=mail/CN=my.mailhost.example/emailAddress=admin@mailhost.example
issuer=/C=US/ST=IL/L=Boogietown/O=mailhost.example/OU=mail/CN=my.mailhost.example/emailAddress=admin@mailhost.example
---
No client certificate CA names sent
---
SSL handshake has read 1247 bytes and written 332 bytes
---
New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA
Server public key is 1024 bit
SSL-Session:
    Protocol  : TLSv1
    Cipher    : EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA
    Session-ID: <snipped>
    Session-ID-ctx:
    Master-Key: <snipped>
    Key-Arg   : None
    Krb5 Principal: None
    Start Time: 1086191863
    Timeout   : 300 (sec)
    Verify return code: 18 (self signed certificate)
---
220 my.mailhost.example ESMTP Postfix
EHLO mailhost.example
250-my.mailhost.example
250-PIPELINING
250-SIZE 10240000
250-VRFY
250-ETRN
250-AUTH PLAIN LOGIN
250-AUTH=PLAIN LOGIN
250 8BITMIME
quit
221 Bye
read:errno=0