Archive March 2010
My first attempt on photographing the moon
Last night we had a very clear sky over Frankfurt, Germany so I tried to take a picture of the moon for the first time just to notice that it needs a really long lens. I took this shot with the Nikon 70-300 VR ranked out to 300mm and still this is a 1:1 crop. Beacause the 70-300 VR tends to get a bit soft at the higher end I sharpened the image quite heavily. Maybe too much?
Blogging about this Blog – The sixth
Wow this march was the busiest month ever at this blog 
I think that was it with the technical topics for the next time. I’ll be on the road for at least the entire April, but I’ll post some of my travel photos and other stories as often as possible to keep ya’ll up-to-date. And I’ve already drafted some photography related posts.
So stay tuned. Subscribe to the new enhanced rss-feed and please click on my Ads! Chris out.
My Mac OS X tweaks
Ohhh nooo! Not another one! However… I’ll make it short:
- Use TinkerTool to tweak some hidden preferences
- iTerm is a better alternative to Terminal.app
- NTFS-3G if you have usb-sticks or external HDDs you want to share with Windows or Linux
- MacVim is my favorite editor for anything
- The Unarchiver is great for compressed stuff you downloaded
- VLC… forget QuickTime X, VLC does more things better
- Evernote takes your notes and synchronizes them
- Dropbox (link gives my account additional 250Mb) synchronizes your documents with multiple computers
I also enable SSH (System Preferences/Sharing), change the default icon size to 48×48 and install Xcode and MacPorts to get mtr (an interactive traceroute) and unrar (for things ‘The Unarchiver’ doesn’t take).
Blogging about this Blog – The Fifth
There finally is a full rss-feed. If you subscribe in a feed-reader like Google Reader, you will now see the entire post which is great for offline reading. You might also notice that feeds are now being redirected to FeedBurner.
Judge Joe Brown – Cheap Wedding Photographer
A friend of me just sent me this video of an American comedy show. Pretty entertaining
Switched my Hoster… again!
After a full year with OVH and it’s shared hosting I switched my hoster once more.
During the last two hours I moved every single of my domains from OVH to Hetzner.
It feels like the entire site loads much faster. Nice
Take care.
Dell Crappiness
I heavily shortened this article… it just happened way too much between Dell and me to tell everything.
In Summer 2008 I bought myself a Dell XPS M1530. An actually pretty nice and very fast laptop. I mean… the first one I received was damaged, the touchpad wasn’t in place. But they managed to sent me a new one after a month or so and I was happy again.
Six months later I even wrote an almost totally positive article about the laptop, though they already had to change the fan once on-location.
Now, another 14 months later I have a totally different opinion about Dell. Since Summer 2008 I had 6 repairs. Not that that isn’t enough, but their pick-up service usually doesn’t show up in schedule and even if they do… all they tell you is “be there between 8am and 6pm”. Once they didn’t even show up, and another time they came two days earlier then scheduled so I haven’t had any chance to erase my data. Surprisingly exactly that time they changed the HDD, which actually worked fine. (More about that soon) Ah and did I mention that it takes two weeks until you get your laptop back?
But I’m not even at the worst point. The last two service requests were only needed because the technician damaged my laptop. The first time they bent the alu-cover, the second time the display cover and the HDD was damaged (Yes, they changed my HDD, kept my data and installed a damaged one!).
Now let’s come to the strangest point: Because I insisted on some kind of compensation for the damage on my laptop they generously offered me a one-time on-location repair which I should pay for!!!!!! Wait? I shall pay to get your mistakes fixed?I Errr… no! I then told them I contacted my lawyer and all of a sudden their so called “head of department” wrote me a mail that they would do a favor and do a one-time on-location repair for free to get things finally fixed.
I accepted… the technician showed up with about 12 boxes of spares. And changed everything except the screws and the DVD drive. Lol!
It now works well again, but decided to sell it. It’s caused too much stress.
Ah and here’s a short list of all the repairs they had to make in the past 20 months:
- Replace Fan (on-location)
- Replace Fan
- Replace Mainboard
- Replace HDD (came back with damaged Alu-cover)
- Replace Alu-cover (replaced Display, HDD and Alu-cover – now Display-Cover and HDD are damaged)
- Replaced Alu-Cover, Display-Covers, the entire case, Motherboard, Fan and HDD – on-location
Their eMail support is also pretty much a joke. You write with people somewhere in Bratislava, which don’t have any power to decide anything. All they do is clicking together platitudes. It took me 5 mails until they finally understood that I want them to forward my mails to their principal.
I now sold it. No more Dell.
How to Fast VNC alternativ to Remote Desktop to a Mac using NoMachine
I am a very happy Mac OS user with a Mac mini and a MacBook Pro coming soon, but one things I really miss about Mac OS X is the lack of a fast and standards based remote desktop solution. The VNC server built into Mac OS X isn’t really compatible with all clients, and I still haven’t figured out if it’s possible to run it with a different resolution and color depth than the real screen!!!
But, I recently re-discovered a solution I got to know in my Linux time on a desktop: NoMachine. You’ll need a server running a recent Linux distribution or OpenSolaris which will act as a kind of a proxy and the setup is a bit complex, but it does work well. I’ll show you how to do it running Ubuntu Lucid.
First go to http://www.nomachine.com/select-package.php?os=linux&id=1 select your architecture and download all three files: client, node and server.
Then install them in the following order, fix the missing dependecies and install a vnclient plus vncpassword:
sudo dpkg -i nxclient_3.4.0-7_x86_64.deb sudo dpkg -i nxnode_3.4.0-11_x86_64.deb sudo dpkg -i nxserver_3.4.0-12_x86_64.deb sudo aptitude -f install sudo aptitude install xvnc4viewer vnc4-common
Since it’s really advisable I hope you already have PasswordAuthentication no in your sshd_config to disable Password authentication and to only allow key-based authentication. You’ll need to tweak nxserver a bit to get it working with key-based auth. Edit /usr/NX/etc/server.cfg to…
EnablePasswordDB = "1"
…edit the following line in /usr/NX/etc/node.cfg to enable VNC…
CommandStartRFB = "/usr/bin/vncviewer -fullscreen"
…create a key for your key-based authentication and restart nxserver.
sudo /usr/NX/bin/nxserver --keygen sudo service nxserver restart
Your new key is placed at /usr/NX/share/keys/default.id_dsa.key. Copy it the device you want to connect from using scp or similar tools. Now all you need to do is enable the users you wan’t in nxserver:
sudo /usr/NX/bin/nxserver --useradd <user>
This enables the user in NX’s database and copies the previously generated key to the user’s authorized_keys file.
Now just enable VNC on your Mac. Go to “System Preferences”, select “Sharing” and enable “Screen Sharing”:
Now you’ll need to configure your client. Read more…
Nginx or Apache?
I recently discovered nginx when I was thinking about replacing apache2 as a reverse-proxy that adds ssl and authentication to my internal webserver. I finally chose nginx and it’s now running on my freshly installed OpenBSD 4.7 gateway. I chose nginx because of it’s straight-forward configuration syntax and because it has a much smaller codebase, which means it should run faster and has less security flaws. The documentation also is great. Plus nginx seems to be the rising star on the horizon of webservers Many large sites are already running it as their reverse-proxies/loadbalancers according to this article.
For me nginx runs much faster than apache2. Where apache2 gave about 14MBps for a single download session, nginx gives me 23MBps (It’s a slow Intel Atom machine). Here’s my configuration. But since the nginx docs are that good, you don’t need any how-tos! Just rtfm
user _nginx;
worker_processes 1;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
sendfile on;
keepalive_timeout 65;
gzip on;
access_log off;
error_log off;
server {
listen 443 ;
ssl on;
server_name ext.example.org;
ssl_certificate ext.example.org.crt;
ssl_certificate_key ext.example.org.key;
ssl_session_timeout 5m;
ssl_protocols SSLv3 TLSv1;
location / {
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_pass http://int.example.org;
auth_basic "int.example.org";
auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/htpasswd;
}
}
}
I just love this thing. Maybe I’ll replace apache2 on my internal webserver, too.
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Hi, my name is Chris. I am a wannabe photog, traveler & geek that lives in Hesse, Germany. more about me...
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