A Day Late

This was a busy week of house hunting. We have gone through so many houses, some nice and some not so nice. The problem is going to be choosing one. We have found about four or five that we really like, so now we have to put some offers on them and see what happens. We are concentrating our search in an area called Highlands Ranch, which we both really like. Denver is really cold, similar to Utah. We are supposed to be out of our hotel by Tuesday and we are looking at an Extended Stay type place but haven’t found one yet. Jeff also found some furnished apartments that we could do on a month to month basis, so we will see.

GO NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS!!!

Ok, so my new years resolution is to be more faithful at updating this blog. For those few of you who still check this, I will try to do better. 2007 was a year of changes for us. Jeff finally got his dream job (I think most of you know what it is!) and has been in training in Virginia since last August. He just got done this week and it is good to have him home. Being apart for so long was hard, but we got through it. He had a graduation which was really cool, and he is now official. We spent Christmas in Boston with my family and had a fun time. We now head to our first assignment in Denver Colorado, and we are both really excited. I spent some time house hunting there last month and found a few that I liked, but there are a few other areas that we want to look at as well. We will be staying in temporary housing until we decide on a house. Luckily for us, the housing market is poor so we should have no trouble buying a house. We hope that everyone had a good holiday and has a great 2008!!!

For all 2 (if not less) of you who check this web site here’s a little update. Ciara’s busy with work and school and I’ve been keeping myself busy with work, the gym and trying to finish our basement. The basement has been a fun little project and was an excellent excuse to buy some great power tools (Christmas came early this year, at least for me).

I’ve been busy with work this past month but things might slow down just a little in October. When I’m not at work, it seems like I’m either at the gym, or working on the basement. Over the past year I’ve been able to improve my fitness level quite a bit. I’ve even become one of those people that I thought I’d never become…one who likes running. I’m now to the point where I actually miss running on the days I don’t have time to do it. Now, if I would start eating healthier I might be in really great shape :).

As for our future plans, we’re still waiting to hear on a few things. Well…one major thing in particular. Hopefully we’ll hear something in the near future (next month?) but it seems like I’ve been saying that for 6 months now. In the meantime we have plenty of things to keep us busy. When we hear something, I’ll be sure to let everyone know.

I updated our photo gallery software and also uploaded a few new photos. I also locked down the gallery a little and to see most of the photos, you’ll need a login. For those who’d like to see all the photos, go ahead and register a username. It’s not very hard and I’ll give you access to the rest of the photo gallery.

That’s it for now. I’ll try and be a little more diligent about updating the site and uploading photos. I created a login for Ciara to update the site, so maybe we’ll see a post from her in the near future.

I spent the last hour or so trying to figure out why my Subversion server wasn’t handling diff requests properly. I first noticed it when I was examining a piece of source code and noticed a piece of code I added a while back was missing. Fortunately I’ve been moving all our source code over to a Subversion repository so I pulled up my subversion client and examined the log for the source code file. I noticed a recent revision committed to the repository and suspected that’s where the code was removed. When I tried to display the differences committed in that revision the following error was returned: “GET of ‘/svn/repository/!svn/bc/284/trunk/temp/application.cfm’: 301 Moved Permanently (http://localhost)“.

A quick google search for subversion and “Moved Permanently” returned a link to the Subversion FAQ’s but the answer didn’t seem to help much. First, the question dealt with a commit action which uses PROPFIND as opposed to a diff action which uses a GET request. I still read through the response and verified that the server was in compliance with the suggested configuration. After trying a few different searches I came across this which basically says if your Location tag in your Apache config file maps to /svn then you can’t have a .svn working directory in your document root. Sure enough renaming the .svn directory in the document root allowed me to successfully perform the diff statement but that wasn’t an exceptable solution. Since I want the code for the entire website in the repository, the document root must have a working directory named .svn and renaming it everytime I want to compare differences in a file didn’t seem like a good work around. I was debating changing the Location from /svn to /subvn or something like that but now that we’ve been using the repository for quite a while a URL change wouldn’t be fun.

I spent the next half hour searching the Subversion documentation and website trying to discover where it says you can’t have a .svn working directory if your repository location starts with /svn. I came up empty handed so I tried working the problem a different way. Clearly Apache was handling the GET request for /svn different than it was handling a PROPFIND request for /svn (since commits were working fine). To figure out why it was returning the .svn directory I created a directory in the document root called ‘.test’ and placed a basic index.html file inside of it. I opened my browser and pointed it to ‘http://localhost/test/’ and the index file popped up. However, I noticed the URL had been slightly modified to http://localhost/.test/. It took about 2 seconds for the answer to pop into my head…mod_speling. Mod Speling is an Apache module I installed a while back to help with a case sensitivity problem we were having. We’re moving our site from a windows machine (case insensitive) to a linux machine (case sensitive). To avoid breaking any links that weren’t using the proper case I installed mod_speling which tries to determine what an invalid request is looking for. For example, if a file was named index.html and a request came in for Index.html the Apache server would return a file not found error. With mod_speling the module looks at the invalid requests, sees there is a file called index.html and redirects the request to that file.

So, for my situation mod_speling was intercepting the GET request for /svn/… and was trying to redirect it to /.svn/… To fix the problem I turned off mod_speling on the Apache virtual server handling the subversion repository and the diff worked fine. Fortunately this virtual server is a test server and didn’t really need mod_speling. I was able to keep mod_speling running on the production server where it was really needed. If I ran into the situation where I absolutely needed mod_speling running the same virtual server as Subversion, I’m not sure what the solution would be. I suspect you’d have to turn mod_speling off on the first level of the document root folder entirely. I don’t see any way where you could exclude only the svn directory. I believe it’s a problem with the mod_speling module. Shouldn’t it check the Location tags to see if it’s a valid location before trying to redirect the request? That seems logical to me. If anyone comes up with a better solution, let me know.

As a little disclaimer, I know I’m going to get some complaints about my first post in 5 months being about something technical. I’m sure the complaints will come from the same friends that have complained about lack of updates over the past few months. I’m sorry, I’ll try and post something more interesting soon, but since there was no reference to this problem on the web, and I’m sure someone else will come across it sooner or later, I thought I’d better post it.

Some people have been asking me when/where are the wedding pictures. Well…unfortunately the photographer didn’t give us digital copies of the pictures. We only have one set of little 3 x 4 prints. Apparently we’re supposed to choose the ones we like and “order” the sizes we want. Is it just me or does this sounds like an out dated way to do things? Wouldn’t it be better to charge a flat fee for all the negatives or digital images? Or at least let us purchase the rights and abilities to reproduce the select photos we do like?

Ordering reprints of the ones we like now is fine, but what’s going to happen in ten years when we’d like copies and the photographer is dead, moved or who knows what? A wedding day is easily one of the most important days in someones life, shouldn’t they have the right to reproduce the memories of that day if they need or want to? I’ve taken many pictures over the last few years. Vacations, interesting things I’ve seen, all sorts of pictures. All of which I have the ability to have printed anytime I like. But my wedding pictures? Nope…I’ve got to track some guy down, who lives on the other side of the continent (to make things worse) and order my pictures from him. If this is the price of “professional” photography I don’t think I have much use for it. If I had it to do over again, I think I would have had a bunch of people snapping pictures with digital cameras. Out of all the results I’m sure we could extract a few good ones to remember the day. Sure they might not be as high a quality but at least we’d have the ability to save and reproduce them if our prints get damaged or destroyed.

Enough complaining…if I can get access to a scanner in the near future, maybe I’ll try and scan a few of the 4 x 3 prints in.

Here’s an interesting article about security vulnerabilities that allow the X-Box to be “hacked”.

I’ve had an X-Box for a little over a year now but honestly I don’t use it much. Multiplayer Halo is about all it is used for( Ciara is quite good by the way). I know someone that added a modchip and larger hard drive to their X-Box and turned it into an entertainment machine. He has all sorts of games saved directly to the hard drive and transferred his DVD’s and other recordings to it. It’s an impressive setup. Something I’d like to duplicate if I had the time and/or ambition to do so.

Here’s a handy firefox tip that enables handling urls with line breaks in them. This is particularly useful for those of us still using Outlook, which seems to improperly wrap URL’s quite often.

Here’s another Mozilla/Firefox tip: if you copy a URL wrapped over multiple lines from somewhere and try to paste it into the address bar, you will end up only with the first line of it. To fix it, go to about:config and change editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines setting to 3 or add:

user_pref(”editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines”, 3);

to your user.js file. Now all the line breaks will be removed upon pasting.

The past few days I’ve been following an interesting story about a software engineer named, Mike Lynn, who gave a presentation at the recent Black Hat conference. The presentation contained information about a vulnerability in the Cisco operating system (Cisco routers power most computer networks and the majority of the internet). Lynn didn’t disclose how to exploit the vulnerability; his purpose it seems was to make people aware of the vulnerability and its seriousness.

As a result he was forced to quit his job and is now facing legal action from Cisco. There’s an interview with Lynn posted HERE. It’s interesting and I’d recommend it to everyone, not just techies. I’m having a hard time figuring out why Cisco and ISS (Lynn’s former employer) had a problem with his presentation. If he had included information on how to exploit the vulnerability and take over the routers then I could understand their motivation to keep him quiet. But going after him just for making everyone aware that there was a vulnerability? Come on!

I came across the story HERE as I was browsing Bruce Schneier’s, Schneier on Security weblog. His entry includes several more links about the story and information about a legal defense fund setup for Lynn. Schneier comments:

…Hackers are working overtime to reconstruct Lynn’s attack and write an exploit. This, of course, means that we’re in much more danger of there being a worm that makes use of this vulnerability.

The sad thing is that we could have avoided this. If Cisco and ISS had simply let Lynn present his work, it would have been just another obscure presentation amongst the sea of obscure presentations that is BlackHat. By attempting to muzzle Lynn, the two companies ensured that 1) the vulnerability was the biggest story of the conference, and 2) some group of hackers would turn the vulnerability into exploit code just to get back at them.

I agree.