Why am I still using 1and1? No, really, why?

from   [email protected]
to  [email protected]
date    Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 1:15 AM
subject [REDACTED] - 1&1 Internet Support Re: Customer ID, [REDACTED] - websites down

Dear Breandan Dezendorf,

Thank you for contacting us.

Regarding your concern, we would like to inform you that the
web server where your websites are being hosted is up and running.
Could you please check if your sites are still down, because when we
check it here in our end it is already up and running.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

--
Sincerely,
Giovanni Cometa
Technical Support
1&1 Internet

> gurucollege.net is down, and has been for more than 20 minutes.
> nakalaka.com is down, and has been for more than 20 minutes.
> carolinagreenworks is down, and has been for more than 20 minutes.
> Last traffic in the log is:
>
> 208.115.111.70 - - [20/Feb/2011:21:04:45 -0500] "GET /robots.txt
> HTTP/1.1" 200 176 gurucollege.net "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;
> Ezooms/1.0; [email protected])" "-"
>
> It's now 9:27 PM.  I've been on hold with your customer service line
> listening to late 90's rock for 5 minutes.
>
> --
> Breandan Dezendorf
> [email protected]
> [email protected]

I was really hoping to be posting pictures of the moon, taken through an 800mm lens over the last few days, and it’s obvious from a quick look at my photo stream that didn’t happen. It clouded up, every night. As if there was a conspiracy. And the day after I returned the lens, it’s supposed to be clear and crisp, and the moon is really nice. Damnit.

One of the problems of using ZFS, even when taking the data security claims seriously, is that it makes you distrust everything else in the storage space. ZFS isn’t perfect, by any means, but it’s the best thing I can currently use, and I’m going to stick with it until <a href="https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page">btrfs</a> is ready for prime time. The other problem with being paranoid about data is that it makes you paranoid about who can access said data. The other end of the rabbit hole comes up in password and account security, which I’ve blogged about before.

In short, it’s not good enough anymore to generate a good password and use it on your accounts. Even if you change it every 6-12 months, for every site you have a login to, you still suffer from the common weakness that most userid’s these days are actually email addresses, and once an attacker has your password in one place, it’s easy to get into everything else you do. And, chances are, you’re not actually going back into every site and changing the password – so you’ll have multiple generations of old, bad passwords out there somewhere. As HBGary Federal proved recently, even the security folks can get it totally wrong.

My suggestion? Use something like LastPass.com. Generate a new, secure password for every site you visit, and save the login info with LastPass. Make sure you tick the boxes to keep everything as secure as possible – the master database key should only exist on your computer. This way, LastPass is just holding the encrypted information, which is useless without both your password and your private encryption keys. Then (I know this is bad) write down the master password somewhere. If you have a safe deposit box, that’s a good place to keep it. The idea is to use the password every day, but if Something Bad happens, you’ll want to have it recorded somewhere. Now, you can generate good passwords which are unique for every site, and they will auto-fill with browser plugins. If you are on a friend’s computer, and need access to a site you’ve secured this way, simply head over to lastpass.com, log in, and get the login and password you need. (And, once you’re back home, change the password. You don’t know where on the internet your friend’s computer has been.)

The other thing to do is enable the Google Two-Factor Authentication system. It’s a pain to setup, but it’s worth it. This will really help secure your Google Account (which gets into your calendar, mail, reader, shopping, youtube, picassa, and anything with OpenID…) by making your authentication consist of something you know (your password) and something you have on you (your smartphone). After logging into a strange computer, Google will make you check the application on your phone and enter the security code listed there. It changes every 30 seconds, and it’s unique to the device in your pocket. This makes it almost impossible for a hacker to steal your account info and use it somewhere else. (Now, if you’ve saved all of your logins in your browser, and have set LastPass to login automatically, and your laptop gets nicked… you’re boned.)

I fully expect none of my readers to actually do this. Which makes me a sad panda.

I know that as a 2 year old, you’re not going to really read this, but, Happy Birthday!

I’m getting frustrated with my lack of reach for taking pictures of the moon and other things in the night sky. Moving from the D200 to the D7000 gives me a larger image of the moon, simply because it has a higher resolution sensor, but it’s not really that big a difference. How does a budding astrophotographer get more reach without buying a telescope or breaking the bank?

Easy: get a telescope that’s masquerading as an SLR lens.

They are often called mirror lenses, and they are surprisingly cheap. They are essentially small Maksutov–Cassegrain telescopes with an SLR mount instead of an eye piece. The cheapest telescope with a mount that I can find costs about $350, while these lenses start at $50 for a nice used one. Because all of their imaging work is done with mirrors folding the light path up and down the length of the lens, they suffer from almost no chromatic aberration, which usually shows up as color fringing in cheaper SLR zoom and telephoto lenses. However, because of their design, they are also fixed aperture lenses (usually f/8 or f/11) and are almost always manual focus.

The one that I’m looking at is a Sigma 600mm f/8. Of course, it’s not autofocus and lacks things I’d really like, like hard focus stops at infinity. However, they get as cheap as $200 on the used market – mostly because people try to buy them to use as a replacement for a professional 600mm fixed lens, and find out that the professional lenses cost $4000+ for a reason. They are slow to focus by hand, they weigh a lot, they have very peculiar bokeh, they are hard to clean when cleaning is needed, and the contrast and color clarity is not what they want for wildlife photography. But for astrophotography? Perfect. When focused to infinity, there are no out-of-focus backgrounds to throw off an image, and contrast is as much determined by the lens as it is by relative humidity or cloud cover. So, it’s a cheap telescope that comes with a camera mount.

The other thing I’m looking at is getting a Sigma 2.0x APO teleconverter. It’s listed to work with my 70-200mm f/2.8 zoom, and would make it a 140-400mm f/5.6 lens. That isn’t as much of an issue with me, as the ISO performance of the D7000 is still rocking my world. Further, it would give me ²⁄₃ of the reach of the mirror lens while still being useful walking around, as autofocus would still work, and it would take much better day-to-day photographs. I think this is the smarter way to spend $200 on camera gear for photography, but the mirror lens would be smarter in terms of astrophotography.

I could also do both. Get the teleconverter used for $150 and one of the cheapest mirror lenses for $50. I’ll have to then do all metering manually, but as I’m not looking at the mirror lens for anything other than astrophotography, the minor annoyances can be dealt with. (I’ll be spending enough time in setup to justify chimping a few shots to get the metering right). I would then have both options – a 400mm lens with autofocus and a 600mm lens for strict night-time work. As I don’t have the cash for either laying around right now, it’s still just a thought experiment, but someday soon, it will materialize.

If you look at my flickr photostream, you may notice that more and more shots of the night sky are appearing. I’m trying my hand at astrophotography, and I’ve learned a lot since December 2010 when I started. The first is how to use Photoshop “Open Files into Stack” to get a number of source images loaded into a single Photoshop document and automatically aligned. Next is ticking the box for “Automatically create Smart Object from layers”. This allows you to change the stack blend mode at will. Using the median setting helps reduce noise much better than other products, and deals nicely with hot pixels.

Now that I know how to stack, I want to tackle star trail photography. I think I can use the built in intervalometer on the D7000 to do this for me (do lots of 30 second exposures 1 second apart) – I need to try this next time I’m free at night and the sky is clear. Part of the trouble is even a basic image takes 30 or 40 minutes to capture, and at least that again to process and see if you did it right.

The past few days it’s been all I can do to get up in the morning and keep going throughout the day. I’ve become host to a virus that infects the lungs called RSV. What’s worse is that my soon-to-be two year old son got it first. It’s not as bad as it was when he got the same infection last year, and we were worried about his ability to breathe, but it’s still pretty bad. He feels crummy pretty much all of the time, both awake and asleep, and has been very trying for us as parents to deal with. Coupled with the fact that I’m also sick, and moving through a fog at all times, yeah… family life is a little strained right now.

We’ve been doing all the usual things – drink lots of water, try to cut down on known allergens (dairy springs to mind), early bedtimes, all that. It’s just that the boy wakes up in the middle of the night, and he wakes up angry. This morning, he woke up at 3:00 AM, and wanted to get up and watch TV, eat food, drink water, read books, play with trains, and most of all – for mommy to hold him. He really wanted none of those things: he just wanted to do things that he likes, I assume in hope that it would make him feel better. (If you get him a glass of water, he throws it at you. If you get food, he throws it at you. If you turn on the TV, he screams at you until you turn it off. Etc.)

He’s also cutting his two year molars now. We’re on the edge of sanity these days. Advice?