My flickr pro account has expired. I’m very disgusted by the Yahoo! patent lawsuit against Facebook, so I hesitate to renew my account or give them any money in any way. Additionally, the lawsuit also suggests that Yahoo! is in a death spiral, which means it may well be time to get out before they fold. The alternatives to flickr appear to be SmugMug and 500px.

SmugMug is setup for professional photographers who need gallery space, to sell prints, and work in every browser ever made. The guys who run it are consummate professionals, and the pricing starts at $40/year. For that $40, you get unlimited uploads, galleries, etc. To make money selling prints, or to allow assistants to access the account, you need to step up in their tiers, which run all the way up to $120 a year. It’s a serious site for serious photographers.

On the other hand, 500px seems more geared towards individual images rather than galleries. Printing options are limited. However, their pro account level starts at $29/year or so, and seems to be adding some of these features. 500px was built around a community with a voting/ranking system which is one of the things that Flickr does (albeit poorly), so there’s a lot more ‘social’ in 500px than there is in SmugMug. I’ve got a free account there, and I use it, but not as often as I should.

I’ll update again when I make a decision. I’m not sure what to do, other than the fact that I know I want to pay for a service. If I don’t pay for it, I can’t be sure that I’m not a product being sold, and I help ensure that the product I am using lives on.

Today I discovered the linux set cap functionality which I should have learned about a long time ago. It is a way of setting extended attributes in ext3 and ext4 file systems, allowing a file to have additional privileges without having to give away the farm with something like setuid. Much like using the sudoers file to give specific users root access to specific executables, setcap can be used to give a network utility the ability to use RAW_SOCKETS without also requiring root privileges. System administrators should still be careful setting these flags – there are reasons that RAW_SOCKET are usually reserved for root. However, when you need to run a network utility via Nagios (for example) and don’t want tosetuid root and don’t want to run Nagios as root, setcap is your friend.

For example:

setcap cap_net_raw=ep /usr/sbin/hping3

setcap privileges can be removed with the -r flag.

I attended the ChumpCar World Series event at the Virginia International Raceway a few weeks ago, and had a great time. For those of you who don’t know what the CCWS is, in short, it’s a race for cars valued at $500 or less (other than the roll cage and other mandatory safety equipment). For every $10 you go over $500, you are docked a lap. So you can show up with a $2,000 car and race, but have no chance of winning. It’s also worth pointing out that it’s for cars valued at $500, not that you paid $500 for. They don’t care if you paid $500 for a BMW, they care if you can find at least 10 BMW’s in similar conditions for that price in varied geographic searches. They are serious about keeping the playing field level.

Qais and I went, and though we only spent 4 or 5 hours there, it has whet his appetite for more racing, and it makes me realize how much fun it really is. Of course, the CCWS race I went to was 14 hours, so we watched it start and left when the boy got tired. We still got to see a few cars get sideways on the track in the rain, and saw a number of cars that came into the infield after blowing fuel lines and other important bits. I of course came with my camera in tow, and tried to get good shots of each car that was rounding the track. The best of those shots went up on flickr.

Looking at the ChumpCar event calendar, there is a 24 hour endurance race at VIR on August 11th and 12th. I’m planning on going and camping at the track. Anyone else want to join me?

For everyone who loads the real pages (and not via an RSS reader), I’m playing with new site themes on the Guru College. I want something lightweight and visually clean. If you have suggestions, sound off in the comments.

Progress on my OpenAFS server project halted a few weeks ago. To properly use an OpenAFS cell at home one has to run a Kerberos5 password database. Mistakenly, I thought that this conflicted with the Kerberos5 setup I use to allow me to work from home and access the OpenAFS cells at work.

This is because the commonly used Kerberos command line utilities only allow you to operate on a single ticket-granting ticket at a time. If you get a new TGT from another realm, the TGT from the first realm dies. (In theory, the Kerberos5 protocol and libraries don’t actually enforce this, just the commonly used utilities like kinit). Foolishly, I’d assumed I wouldn’t be able to get tokens for my personal OpenAFS cell while simultaneously working out of the OpenAFS cells at work.

There is nothing that prevents this. Nothing.

bwdezend@godzilla:[/afs/gurucollege.homelan/photography] $ tokens

Tokens held by the Cache Manager:

User's (AFS ID 502) tokens for [email protected] [Expires Apr 11 07:38]
User's (AFS ID ID#) tokens for afs@cell1 [Expires Apr 11 18:50]
User's (AFS ID ID#) tokens for afs@cell2 [Expires Apr 11 18:50]
User's (AFS ID ID#) tokens for afs@cell3 [Expires Apr 11 18:50]
   --End of list--
bwdezend@godzilla:[/afs/gurucollege.homelan/photography] $ klist
Credentials cache: API:502:6
        Principal: [email protected]

  Issued           Expires          Principal
Apr 10 21:38:40  Apr 11 07:38:40  krbtgt/[email protected]
Apr 10 21:39:57  Apr 11 07:38:40  afs/[email protected]

Now, the project can proceed.

Ten years ago a friend of mine told me that an ideal computer desk would only be large enough to rest the base of the monitor on. The keyboard and mouse would similarly go into trays that are sized precisely for their use. His premise was that open desk space attracts clutter and quickly makes the space unusable. If there’s no extra space for stuff to collect on there is no clutter, and this particular problem is solved.

I can personally attest to this. The desk I built to house my computers and photography stuff has shelves that are largely filled with stuff that sits and doesn’t get used on anything approaching a frequent basis, although it does get used, and it’s too valuable to simply re-aquire when it is needed next. The surface of the desk slowly fills with stuff, until I start to purge again, and throw away or reorganize stuff yet again.

However, the physical clutter on my desk and shelves is smaller than my digital clutter problem. I have no problem throwing away physical things – that’s pretty easy for me, and always has been. Unfortunatley, I have a mental block about throwing out digital things. I’m a hoarder of files, and I think it’s finally starting to represent a significant cost. This comes from both organizational and performance perspectives:

I have well over 140,000 images in my Aperture library – and I’ve only started in the last few months deleting photos that are totally out of focus, or are black frames due to poor exposure or shooting with the lens cap on. A large percentage of the photos in my library were viewed when I imported them, and have never been accessed again. (Not that I would know, as I have atime disabled on my fileservers for performance reasons). I’m up to 1.6TB of image files. They are nested down in a shared filesystem, and I allow Aperture to manage this as best as I can, but it’s still pretty insane. I have almost no hope finding a single specific image without Aperture, and the Aperture Library is getting big enough to have a performance impact on my system (again). To keep the speed up for Aperture, I really need to move the 125GB library to an SSD. Let me tell you, those are cheap.

It’s also getting costly to keep adding more and more larger hard drives to the fileserver. The last time I did an upgrade, I replaced 4 of the 8 750GB drives in the pool with 1.5TB drives – and a year later I have less than 700GB free. It’s time to upgrade again, but my next purchase has to be a new desktop, which puts more drives off even further.

In reality, I need to buckle down and start deleting things that I can either re-create, dont need, or that I’m caching in the Cloud. I need to start reviewing images, deleting stuff I honestly don’t need, and putting the rest of it into cold storage. Further, anything on iTunes Match needs to get off the fileserver, as do the software package installers I’ve saved over the years.

It’s time to buckle down and clean.

There is a mentality that with the modern workplace, a person’s physical location doesn’t matter, especially when talking about IT positions. All we IT folks need, apparently, is a computer with a webcam and a network connection – we can log into to do our work, and teleconference in for meetings. We can use jabber instead of talking to someone in person. The next time you think about saying something like this, please stop and think a little bit. Yes, this works in a pinch, and will get the job done. However, it’s really not a good solution long term.

I posit that no matter how good the technology has gotten, nobody has thought up a good-enough replacement for being able to walk into someone’s office and ask them to bounce some ideas off the wall. Or to walk into your supervisor’s office, close the door, and ask questions that you don’t want to have go on the record. Or really get into a technical discussion with a group of people that don’t agree with each other, and try to diagram stuff on the whiteboard. Yes – there’s ways to handle all of these, but they come with a lot of friction that needs to be overcome. It’s a lot less difficult to have the conversation face to face many times than it is to have it electronically.