The event took place on a track that snaked between trees, down drops, over jumps and generally challenged the riders - though given the speed they travelled at I’m not sure they really noticed the trees!

We arrived in time to walk up a fair bit of the course and were just about in position as the first riders appeared. The only real indication of their arrival was the stewards whistles and given their speed vigilence was the order of the day.

Their speed also meant that the autofocus systems couldn’t keep up - even the 3D matrix focussing - so it was back to the old school manual prefocus and press the button at the right time. Having done this before it only took me a few attempts to get close. I tried to keep the aperture around f8 or higher to give myself a more tolerant depth of field, but given that I also needed a fast shutter speed of 1/250th this wasn’t always possible.

It didn’t take long for me to realise that the conditions would need a higher ISO than the D300 can really use without noise/grain becoming an issue, so I started using one of the SB800’s I’d brought to provide some extra light. This limited me to a shutter speed of 1/250th but the pocket wizards provided me with the range and meant I could forget about line of sight.

The initial results were OK, but I felt that I could improve by moving out from under the trees, so I started down the hill.

The problem when using flashes is that they need to be setup. Spending a little time and thought on the setup is generally a good idea, so while trying to find I carried on taking pictures without the flash.

As I moved further down the course I found a sharp corner where I could get close to the riders without distracting them. The sun was high and to my right so I set the flash to my left for a little fill light. Sadly I had no lighting stands and this was a rocky bend without anything to rest the flash on, so the flash was just on the ground.

While the pictures were OK, they lacked drama and didn’t really convey the speed and daring of the riders, so I moved on looking for a jump. This time I had my back to the sun and the flash was attached to a tree to provide the fill as the riders went airborne over the jump.

After shooting there for a while, I decided to move along to a point where I could see the riders head on. This meant moving the flash, which almost cost me an SB800 when it fell onto the track as a rider approached. His landing missed it by less than 2″, so I’ll count myself lucky

The setup I was using for my final location allowed me some flexibility to move around, which I used once the gaps between riders grew and it was safer to move along the course.

Overall I had a good day. It felt good to be out and about with the camera and tackling a subject that isn’t really my usual added a nice extra twist.

Thanks to the marshalls for being so patient and understanding with my moving around so much.

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        <friendly_name>Friendly Server Name Here</friendly_name>
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Finding a uPnP server to install wasn’t hard, but finding one that worked with the various clients and devices proved harder.

uShare
This installed easily and was very lightweight. It provided easy access, but quite a few clients didn’t work with it. Coupled with the fact that the project seems dead I decided it wasn’t worth too much effort.

MediaTomb
This seemed more promising and seemed to work better at first, but once again several clients had issues with it. After using it for a while I decided that it wasn’t for me.

fuppes
I looked at fuppes quite early on in my serach, but it appeared to be a dead project. Then I stumbled across this thread which gave me pause and encouraged me to try it. Following the instructions and some extra details on the original wiki it didn’t take long to build and install and once configured worked straight away.

The project is similar to a lot of open source projects, but the directions that the current active developers intend to take it seem like good ones and as it already works I’m using it for serving the media at home.

For more on the new development there’s a blog

Like every puppy owner we wanted to make sure we got started on the correct route with her, so we found a local dog training club that had a puppy class and also promoted dog agility (which we hoped to do with her as she got older). Our initial contacts with them were positive and we learned a lot. After 8 weeks she was deemed to have graduated and we moved “up” to a different class in late January.
Given her age (6 months) and her breed (Border Collie) she soaked up the lessons like a sponge and progressed well in the various tasks set by the classes. We were told we were working towards the “Bronze Good Citizen” as managed by the Kennel Club. Tess continued to improve but all was no longer as positive as it had been.
Our initial positive experiences were replaced by a growing sense of unease at the lack of progress. If we were indeed working toward a test, then surely there should have been a date for it? The class kept changing members and would “reset” back to the start at regular intervals - hardly ideal. The instructors would sometimes change from week to week, with the quality varying from excellent to poor. Months passed and the class was still practising exactly the same things.
As anyone who has done any instruction or teaching will tell you, constant repetition of the same thing has it’s uses and place, but eventually leads to boredom and inattention. So it was for Tess. The class held less and less interest for her and she got bored.
At the start of July we were told the date for the test was to be yesterday, the 31st July. By this point we had decided that the club offered us nothing more, so we wrestled with whether to add Tess to the list. I argued that we may as well given all the effort we had expended to get to the test, and so we added her to the list.
The evening of the test saw 12 dogs appear and it soon became apparent that the club’s usual lack of organisation and incompetence were going to prevail. What should have been a relatively simple series of exercises turned into a long drawn out evening. Tess performed well enough up until the penultimate exercise, but the combination of boredom (we had been there for over 90 minutes by this point) and lack of interest showed through and she couldn’t stay for the required 60 seconds - something 3 months ago she had no problem with!
We’re never going back to the club, and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone As our discomfort with the club grew we started looking around and have found another group that offers us a far better experience - friendlier, less condescending and with an excellent instructor!

So, if you’re in Perth, Scotland and are looking for somewhere to train your dog, I’d recommend that you don’t go to the Fair City Dog Training Club.

• The clubs facilities are in need of a deep clean (all those dogs passing through every week mean accidents do happen!), are noisy all year round and very cold in winter.
• The instructors are volunteers and while we’re obviously grateful for them giving up their time the club really should ensure that they are of a suitable standard and temperament before allowing them to take a class.
• Organisation isn’t their strong point and the lack of a structure to the classes means that things were seemingly arranged “on the fly” each Wednesday evening.
• As with many small clubs, personalities often play a larger role than would be ideal and there is always a split between the “in” people and everyone else.

The BBS2 arrived in around 7 days (I was actually away when it was delivered) and was exactly as expected. The drive slots work well and it was very easy to install the initial drive. Being a simple person I decided to use the 2 drive bays with the same colours as a raid pair, which left me with the extra bay for the operating system disk. I installed the OS with just the first disk and then added the first 2 disks as a RAID array purely for storage. After installing the 2nd and 3rd disks I did need to change the boot order in the BIOS due to the numbering, but that wasn’t a huge problem.

I installed Ubuntu Server 9.04 as the OS as it’s what I have Ubuntu of some flavour on the majority of my other servers and the desktop 9.04 on my laptop. This policy has already paid off and has allowed things to progress smoothly. The install was done via a USB memory stick and went without any problems.

The fan on the server is constant speed and takes it’s power directly from the HDD backplate. Given this limit on the amount of cooling I’m keen to get the CPU (an Atom 330) running with CPU scaling so it generates as little heat as possible. The server shouldn’t ever see a huge load (it’s mainly being used as a NAS and media server) so I’m hopeful that once the CPU scaling is working it should spend much of it’s life at less than 100% performance.

One slight annoyance was that the BIOS version was 103 when delivered, even though there have been several updates and the latest version was released earlier this month (rev 171). Installing the update took a little while as I needed to create a bootable USB DOS stick and copy on the correct files. It took 3 attempts to get the update completed, but once done it fixed an issue with the server sitting at 100% CPU.

mt-daapd doesn’t run on Ubuntu 9.04 due to an issue with how it uses avahi, so I built a custom package using the instructions from the patch author (here). Once installed Rosies iTunes was able to see the library and play from it with no problems.

Presently the storage RAID is using 2 old 200Gb hard drives, but they’re not especially cool or quiet, so I’m going to upgrade to using newer and larger drives at some point soon. I’m not yet sure which drives I’ll buy, so if anyone has any suggestions for 1Tb+ drives, let me know! The cooler and quieter the better.

UPDATE: I’ve had some network issues when using Windows for large file transfers, so have swapped to using the realtek 8168 driver. Instructions are here.

As usual with the Landmark Trust the accommodation was excellent. The crockery and cutlery was showing it’s age a little, but was still more than functional. At night it was incredibly quiet, though we didn’t see any of the ghosts talked about in the log book!

The weather really helped the weekend as there was barely a cloud in the sky for our 4 days. The sun really had some strength in it (as my head attested to) and t-shirts were the order of the day for the first time this year.

Continuing in the tradition of “deckchair pictures” we were once again joined by Tess for this one (taken on self timer by Rosie):-)

We’re already looking for our next landmark to visit

Our accommodation came courtesy of the Landmark Trust, an organisation I can recommend without reservation for anyone in the UK. We stayed in Saddell Lodge, which as it allows dogs meant we didn’t need to find anyone to dogsit Tess. I suspect she enjoyed it as much as we did, or even more given how muddy she ended up

More pictures will follow over the next few days.

We returned home today after a thoroughly relaxing weekend.

Django stores the passwords in a different format than mod_authn_dbd expects. It also uses salts for it’s SHA1 generation, which further complicates the simple password matching that APR does (and is the checking implemented in mod_authn_dbd). I tried a few different ways round it using mysql queries, but all to avail.

The eventual solution I came up with was to adapt mod_authn_dbd into mod_authn_django, with a password checking routine that understands how django stores the passwords and can do the correct things to compare them.

Not sure if it’ll help anyone else, but if there’s any interest I can make it available

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Edmund Burke

The US PTO really does make some dramatically poor decisions.

Of course, the patents have to be filed in the first place, so some of the blame must lie with the companies or individuals that make the applications. Surely an organisation like Apple has done a lot of work on the possible ramifications of being granted the patent - otherwise why would they have taken the time and effort to file it?

This patent screams of protectionism and a desire to make money while placing obstacles in their competitors way.

I believe the quote from Edmund Burke sums up my feelings nicely. If you’re contemplating buying anything from Apple, which side of that equation do you see yourself on?