Category Archives: Rants

As I’ve written about before, some of my images get hotlinked from Myspace.com and other sites. Mostly from Kids that think I took a cool photo, but it is annoying. Going thru my log to find the offenders is simple enough (Need for future reference):

$ egrep -i “jpg” /var/log/httpd/access_lo* |
egrep -v “//images.google|search.yahoo|www.epyon-1.com| “-“” |
awk ‘{print $11}’ | cut -d”/” -f3 |sort | uniq | less

Which gives me a list of hosts hotlinking my images. It’s flattering that people find my photos interesting, but it’s still annoying. To make life more fun, I’m being hotlinked from some really Odd Message Forums too. I’ve taken some interesting and amusing steps to deal with it, so we’ll see how long it continues.

Music I’m listening to right Now:
Hate Me by Blue October from the “Foiled” Album.

An Odd title, but the best way to describe it, IMO.

Fairly recently Derek Powazek and Heather Powazek Champ association with JPG Magazine came to an end (read response here, here , and here).

I'm not going into details about what happened because, among other things, I wasn't there. If I had to take a Really Wild Assed Guess: People made assumptions and/or were really unhappy with one thing or another.

I do think that Paul Cloutier (the CEO, publisher and now editor) really screwed up how he handled the aftermath. When the founder of a company is no longer with said company, at the
least, some announcement needs to be put out. Other than pulling ALL
reference of Derek and maintaining that this is a "New" JPG Magazine (I disagree, I thought it was a growing endeavor),
there was no information other than what Derek and Heather put out. Some of the staff of JPG have expressed their consternation at Derek and Heather going public with what they consider an internal problem. I think that's wrong as JPG Magazine is a community based business. IMO, that means the community are like shareholders that need to know what's going on. 

Paul's
initial lack of any damage control was a big mistake. To make life more entertaining, when he finally did say something, it was, IMO, lacking to say the least.

As of this writing, I don't think I have answers to questions I posed:

• Did Paul force Derek out? If so, Why??
• Did Paul invent a new story about how JPG came to be that was all about 8020?
• Did Paul tell people not to speak of that walk in Buena Vista, Heather, or anything that came before 8020?

I'm not the only one that wants to know. Part of the appeal of JPG Magazine was this it is a startup by two interesting people. I was pleased to see it grow and evolve into a mature company with a great submission system and a great staff of people working there. Knowing that the creator of such an endeavor was forced out without any explanation put forth by Paul leaves a bad taste in my mouth. That's why I deleted my JPG account.

As I said on a flickr discussion, Regardless of whatever happened that led to Derek's departure, JPG was originally Derek's and Heather's creation. I may be naive, but I'm still really hoping for a resolution that include Paul and Derek working it out.

I'm not marginalizing the Staff. As a programmer, I can say the site is a great work, as an amateur photographer, I certainly appreciate the behind the scenes work of all the staff.

I just think they (Paul and Derek both) need to work it out where Derek can have a role in JPG Magazine especially since Derek owns a part of it.

Update: I will say this: I'm very close to re-creating my JPG Magazine account. Rather than deleting them, I've struck out the questions above (IMO, It's part of the record and I think it would be wrong to just delete them). I don't have them directly answered, but I feel they are no longer relevant to the issue. 

Music I'm listening to right Now:
"New Thing" by Fuel from "Sunburn"

Naturally, after I painlessly finish an upgrade of Movable Type, I wake up this morning to my server making a horrible noise from it's power supply. I could replace it, but the power supply probably cost more than I paid for the server in the first place. I'm thinking of using an old PC, but frankly, I like that the disk is a RAID array and the PC isn't equipped for RAID.

With any luck I'll price out the power supply to something acceptable or, open the Power supply and replace the Fan. As it has high voltage capacitors in it, I'm not looking forward to that option. With any luck, I'll find an old Proliant 5000 chassis on Ebay. Another idea I'm bouncing around is to make a Drive array from the PC, put in a copper Gigabit card into the PC and server for a Home made NAS device.

This might actually be an oportunity as I've been meaning to move it out of my office and into my basement. In the mean time, I'm backing up everything to GZiped TAR files and using SCP to get it onto my PC.

As a reference to myself, the TAR command in question is:
$ tar -gzip -v -c -f webserver.tgz ./*

I seem to forget that every time I need it. After I post this, I'll backup the DB again.

 

Music I'm listening to right Now:
"Into The Ocean" by Blue October from the "Foiled" Album.

It rained last night. What powers of observation did I apply to figure that out? Simple, for the 3rd time since September 16th , my home phone is dead since It goes out every time it rains. I first called for service at about 8:40am, at 7:15pm, it's still dead. I'm told that they are working on it.

To make life perfect, the DSL line is spotty AND I'm attempting to  work from home today…  

Cable Modem is looking better and better…

Music I'm listening to right Now:
"Here It Goes Again " by OK go from the "Oh No " Album.