It’s time to take the plunge and switch hosting providers. 1and1 sucks, and I’ve been thinking of moving for a long time, but it takes a non-zero amount of time and effort to do this, and I’ve not had any to spare for awhile.

However, I found out recently that a friend of my wife works for a small, local-ish hosting provider called A Small Orange. THe prices are right, the packages are right (cPanel, which I’ve administered at work) and the price is good as well, starting at $25/year. Considering that I’m spending about $10/month with 1and1 for the hosting… yeah, this isn’t a hard decision. I’m going to pull yet another DNS registration, pull out the credit card, and start this.

Now that it’s been a week, and we’ve had some time for the RDF to dissipate, I think it’s time to take a look at some of the products that Apple announced during the keynote at WWDC. Chief among them for me is iTunes Match. A lot of people have dismissed it, saying it’s not a serious competitor to Goole or Amazon, or that it won’t have a lot of takers, and others have said it’s going to be The End Of The World.

The doom-and-gloom people are idiots. iTunes Match doesn’t get you free music. It doesn’t get you tracks you don’t already have. What it does is let you get a clean copy, with correct ID3 tags and album art, and pull that down to all your devices instead of syncing it manually. If anything, it makes us more aware of the artist, as we’ll actually see the cover art and know which artist actually performed the song. (If I hear one more person refer to The Gourd’s cover of Gin and Juice as a Phish song… I’ll… sit here and write about it).

The other thing iTunes Match doesn’t do is replace the music on your computer automatically. It’s simply available in the cloud, and you can download it whenever you need to, as long as your yearly iTunes Match account is active. I’m sure there will be some people who go and load 25,000 songs into iTunes Match, and then wipe their dirty, ill-gotten collection and replace all the files with legitimate ones. So, you now have better copies of the music you already had. Great. Now, you go and share those files, and you discover that Apple embeds your AppleID in the file, even when there’s no DRM. You also gave Apple your name and home address along with your credit card information. Which means the labels know EXACTLY where to send the lawsuits.

To those who say Google or Amazon’s service is “better”… have you used all three yet? No. We’ll see what shakes out this Fall.

DIYPhotography is running a contest: build a softbox, take pictures of and with it, and post it online, and you may just win a speedlight and a softbox. I’ve been meaning to enter for some time, but with life the way it is, I’ve not had as much time to myself as I need for a project like this. This evening, I finally got what I needed in terms of time, and started to build.

I had four rules for myself:

1. I had to be able to build it myself (without extra help)
2. I had only use things I already owned
3. It had to be easy to setup and take down.
4. It had to be something I’d keep on using even if I didn’t win

Also, as I already have a LumiQuest III, building a small, portable softbox was out – I’ve got that covered in spades. I decided to go big. So, I dug through our recycling pile and found the biggest box I could, and cut a large window in the box with a handy box cutter. I covered the inside of the box with typing paper, taped a old ratty T-Shirt across the window, put my SB-800 in the box, and tested a few shots:

At this point, I was more or less in business. The box is big enough that it will stand upright without any support, which is really handy, and with the power of an SB-800, you can really dump a lot of light into the softbox. Sadly, my SB-600 suffered battery acid damage, so it’s down for the count until I get it cleaned. So, the following shots were all done with one light – the SB-800, with the lens cranked down to kill the ambient (a horrid mix of tungsten, CFL and standard fluorescent).

There’s been a lot of talk since Apple’s rare pre-announcement of iCloud about what exactly it is. MacRumors linked to this video from a WWDC of ages past, where Steve was talking about Networked Home Folders and the magic it enables.

The funny thing is I spent a large part of 2002 and 2003 setting up exactly what he describes – a networked home folder environment in OSX, using Mac OS X server and client. Worked for me anywhere on the AUS campus – I logged in with the same home folder in my apartment as I did with in any of the offices or labs I sat down in. Mail, bookmarks, iChat history, etc. There is still a modified version of it in use today, I think, with the primary change being NetApp-based storage instead of OSX Server based storage.

In everything I’ve seen, it’s my gold standard for how computing should work.

The only thing close in the consumer space is DropBox. It’s easy to use, it’s seamless, and they have built up a huge customer base willing and able to pay for use of the service. It’s also cross-platform and provides file-by-file, save-by-save revision history. However, it only syncs one folder, and that folder isn’t your home folder. Which means that mail, bookmarks, preferences, and the contents of your desktop don’t follow you around. It’s effectively impossible to manage in a sizable deployment of administrator-controlled environment.

What I want to see is a Hybrid Cloud. One where the contents of the drives attached to your Airport Extreme and/or Mac OS X Lion Server in your house sync up with iCloud, and back down to you wherever you go. Let’s call the hardware the iCloud Device. Make the service Mac-only. Triple DES/AES-256 the hell out of all of it, and store the private key where the user chooses. Charge $0.10/month/GB for storage, synced up to your laptop, iPhone and iPad wherever you are, and charge it as you use it. Let us pay for it out of iTunes. Also, don’t count iTunes-purchased media against the end-user’s quota, as that should already be de-dup’ed in the iTMS, and enable seamless streaming media from it.

Taking it even further, make the iCloud Device a Software Update Server for your home. Use mDNS to auto-discover the update servers, and allow media cachine, iTunes rentals and everything else to sync there in the background. Allow parents to easily manage preferences for user accounts, which apply across the whole personal iCloud. Finally, allow machines to NetBoot from the iCloud Device, and allow delivery of new OS images and TimeMachine restores to happen over the network.

But that’s just my pipe dream. We’ll see what Apple actually releases on Tuesday.

A while ago, I mentioned that I attended the Flash Bus tour, and had gotten excited about off camera flash again. I’m writing today to say that money I spent was not in vain. As a direct result of attending the workshop, I purchased a number of pieces of lighting equipment, including a LumiQuest Softbox III. I got mine from Adorama, but they are available pretty much anywhere. Regardless, it’s making my lighting more interesting when I remember that it’s in my bag waiting to be used.

I usually stick it on my SB-800, which I’m firing via CLS. I hold the flash in my left hand, close to the subject, and hold the camera in my right (with the camera strap as insurance against tripping). The results are pretty good, if I do say so myself.

Yesterday was very frustrating at work. I’ve finally gotten my proof-of-concept Nagios/Merlin install up to the point where I can turn on real service checks and test with a small subset of the production monitoring load. While doing this, I went back to check one of the last things on the “just make sure it works list”, which was notification handling. In the current setup, there are a pair of front-end nodes that handle the reporting, graphing and alerting functions, while a separate set of servers do the bulk of the checks. The check results are passed back via NSCA, and Everything Just Works.

The trouble is that in the Nagios/Merlin world, the checks are not passed back and forth. A state database and a NEB make sure every node knows the state of all services, but the actual notification is done on the host that runs the checks. This means the SMS gateways installed on the front end boxes won’t see most of the notifications destined for them, until some glue is written. And the whole point of using Merlin was to get away from these edge cases.

It also means I need to go back and look at perfdata processing. I’d assumed it was done everywhere as the perfdata is also shared, but looks like I can’t assume that either.

I’m almost done with an initial feature set that extends cthulhu-manip fully to Snow Leopard. You need DBD::mysql and Parse::Syslog. If you install Parse::Syslog via CPAN, you’ll likely get a lot of warning messages about the way syslog reports multiple events. To silence them:

sudo find /Library/Perl -type f -name "Syslog.pm" \
-exec sed -i e 's@warn \"WARNING: line@#warn \"WARNING: line@g'

The other significant difference between RHEL and OSX for this project is that RHEL uses iptables while OSX uses ipfw, and instead of having a stable crontab to use OSX uses launchd. Neither are better or worse than the other, but they are different, and makes coding things up a little interesting. The script in bin/installer does it’s best at the moment to set things up properly.

I’m still planning on merging the block_ipfw and block_iptables commands in cthulhu.pm, as the detection code also runs inside the perl module, and there’s no reason to make the end user have to figure it out and code up separate blocks when we already know what we have to do.