All posts by David

photography, YouTube

Camera Hood experiment

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After having so many foggy photos (see blog entry) I decided to fab a quick hood out of cardboard to see if it would help in any way. It’s not pretty. I didn’t want to invest a bunch of time in something nice if this wasn’t going to work. It’s an MVP if you will… with quality to match! LOL

cheapo hood experiment
cheapo hood experiment

This is what the current camera orientation looks like during daylight hours:
PTDC0353

Checking the camera the next morning, it seemed to have helped out quite a bit. We had some deer drop by for about an hour or so. Instead of the normally fuzzy images, these came our a lot better.

PTDC0303

PTDC0309

My plan is to move the camera again, maybe to a higher point and aim it downward, using the camera body to provide more cover for the lens. So far this is my most favored location, but I’m not done experimenting quite yet.

photography, YouTube

Having challenges with dew on camera lens

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Each morning that I get up and check the camera, there is a lot of dew upon it, including the lens. It has a small built in cover but it’s not enough to keep it from getting clouded.

Last night around 2:00 AM we had what looks like you coyote visitor again… but.. as you can see, the blur is from the water collected on the face of the lens housing.

PTDC0287

PTDC0289

Video is the same story. Little 10 second clip shows the animal strolling off. Definitely some sort of canine.

I think the next step is to look for a small birdhouse, and use that to possibly house the camera and keep the dew from forming on the lens. When it was positioned under an overhang, the dew didn’t seem to be an issue. That is my though process regardless.

Uncategorized

Night Vision wildlife camera testing.

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Well, with the move to a new mountain community, out of the city and the criminal element.. we now have something more interesting (and less dangerous) to watch. 🙂

I recently purchased an IR wildlife camera and have been testing out various locations around the yard for it.

One the first night testing, it captured this coyote visiting us around 9:00 PM.

coyote at night seen with night vision wildlife camera
coyote at night seen with night vision wildlife camera

coyote at night seen with night vision wildlife camera
coyote at night seen with night vision wildlife camera
coyote at night seen with night vision wildlife camera
coyote at night seen with night vision wildlife camera

The next time, at almost at the same time, another was captured. Could be the same one, but we know there are several in the area:

coyote at night seen with night vision wildlife camera
coyote at night seen with night vision wildlife camera

coyote at night seen with night vision wildlife camera
coyote at night seen with night vision wildlife camera

Earlier that same night, we heard what sounded like 5-10 coyotes attacking/eating something just up the hill from us. It was very loud, and the dog was quite distressed by it all, staying very agitated and on alert for hours afterwards.

The camera just happened to trip about 20 min. into the “event”, and it caught this audio. I had to punch it up a bit to hear much of anything, but it’s there.

Last night was a much calmer evening. We we woke up in the morning we noticed that some reflective posts were knocked over near the car (they were just leaning against the car port posts). The camera tripped around 2:00 AM, but nothing was seen in the still photos, and most of the video until the last 5 seconds, this little thing was captured. We know there are a number of rabbits, and it looks like maybe this was one hopping around on the driveway. Or a ghost!!! (lol). You can call it whatever you want.

I’m not sure I’m going to leave the camera there.. it doesn’t seem to work as well with just the blacktop in view. More testing is needed.

photography, YouTube

GoPro TimeLapse Test

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After moving into the new compound, I’ve started testing out time lapse photography again. Using a GoPro 3, and moving to various locations around the house, I will eventually find the sweet spot I like.

Here is the first short (5 second) test video from these efforts:

Software Development, Technology

Installing CasperJS the compiled way

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Installing CaspeJS from source is always fun, so I’m going to tell you how.

Step 1 – Get the source code

Getting the source code from CasperJS website. As of 16-OCT-2015 when I write this, the following command worked. When a new version is released.. this link might go away.. so.. a little hunting might be needed on your part.

The CaseperJS website is located HERE ( http://casperjs.org/ ).

wget https://github.com/n1k0/casperjs/zipball/1.1-beta3/n1k0-casperjs-1.1-beta3-0-g4f105a9.zip

Step 2 – unpack the files

Unpack the files and prepare for compiling:

unzip n1k0-casperjs-1.1-beta3-0-g4f105a9.zip

Step 2 – build it

Software Development, Technology

Installing PhantomJS 2 on Ubuntu

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phantomjs-logoIt’s a gamble to do this, and according to the build script it’s going to take a long time to complete the compile / install of Phantom 2.0.

Step 1 — locate the source, download and unzip:

wget https://bitbucket.org/ariya/phantomjs/downloads/phantomjs-2.0.0-source.zip
Length: 110092872 (105M) [application/zip]
Saving to: ‘phantomjs-2.0.0-source.zip’

unzip phantomjs-2.0.0-source.zip
Archive: phantomjs-2.0.0-source.zip
a2912c216d06df4d8b51f12ad4082a48c5fc7ba6
creating: phantomjs-2.0.0/
inflating: phantomjs-2.0.0/.gitignore
[…]
inflating: phantomjs-2.0.0/tools/preconfig.sh
inflating: phantomjs-2.0.0/tools/qscriptengine.h
inflating: phantomjs-2.0.0/tools/src.pro

Step 2 — install required dependencies

You may or may not have most of these on your Ubuntu system. I found that most of these were required to start the PhantomJS build.Here are the ones that I’ve confirmed I needed:

  • autoconf2.13
  • ruby
  • pkg-config
  • libicu-dev
  • gperf
  • bison
  • libjpeg-dev
  • g++
  • openssl
  • libtool
  • libssl-dev
  • libpng-dev
  • libpng12-dev
  • libjpeg-dev
  • fontconfig
  • sqlite
  • fontconfig
  • libsqlite0
  • qt5-qmake
  • xorg
  • xorg-dev
  • xutils-dev
  • xcb-proto
  • libxcb-xkb-dev
  • x11proto-core-dev
  • libxcb-render-util0
  • libqt5webkit5-dev

Installing the packages went smoothly:

apt-get install autoconf2.13 ruby pkg-config libicu-dev gperf bison libjpeg-dev g++ openssl libtool libssl-dev libpng-dev libpng12-dev libjpeg-dev fontconfig sqlite fontconfig libsqlite0 qt5-qmake xorg xorg-dev xutils-dev xcb-proto libxcb-xkb-dev x11proto-core-dev libxcb-render-util0 libqt5webkit5-dev

Step 3 — Build Freetype from source and link

Following this I grabbed the source code to install freetype2. Although freetype successfully installed, the required header files where not found. I decided it was bet to grab it and build from source:

wget http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.6.tar.gz
gunzip freetype-2.6.tar.gz
tar xvf freetype-2.6.tar
./configure
[…]
configure: creating ./config.status
config.status: creating unix-cc.mk
config.status: creating unix-def.mk
config.status: creating ftconfig.h
config.status: executing libtool commands
configure:
make & make install
[…]
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 ./builds/unix/ftconfig.h \
/usr/local/include/freetype2/config/ftconfig.h
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 /usr/local/freetype-2.6/objs/ftmodule.h \
/usr/local/include/freetype2/config/ftmodule.h
/usr/bin/install -c -m 755 ./builds/unix/freetype-config \
/usr/local/bin/freetype-config
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 ./builds/unix/freetype2.m4 \
/usr/local/share/aclocal/freetype2.m4
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 ./builds/unix/freetype2.pc \
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/freetype2.pc
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 /usr/local/freetype-2.6/docs/freetype-config.1 \
/usr/local/share/man/man1/freetype-config.1

Now following that build, due to some inexplicable continuous oversight on the part of freetype’s maintainers.. OR.. phantom.. a link has to be make so that the build process can find the actual libraries required:

ln -s /usr/include/freetype2/freetype /usr/include/freetype

Step 4 — Install an updated version of libxkbcommon

Get the latest version.. and build it:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/primary/+files/libxkbcommon_0.5.0.orig.tar.gz
gunzip libxkbcommon_0.5.0.orig.tar.gz
tar xvf libxkbcommon_0.5.0.orig.tar
cd libxkbcommon-0.5.0
./autogen.sh
./configure

Step 5 — hack QtBase

After many times running thorough the process and resolving errors.. I decided to manually build QTBase. To do this I moved to the source directory for it under PhantomJS, and used this configuration command to get past a libxcb error:

cd src/qt/qtbase
./configure -developer-build -opensource -nomake examples -nomake tests -qt-xcb
./configure -opensource
make
make install

Step 6 — build

Now bulid.sh script. NOTE: if you are executing the compile on a VM (or in this case AWS), it’s recommended that the build process Does Not try to run parallel build jobs on the virtual cores. The PhantomJS website was not clear (to me) why.. but it did recommend using the –jobs 1 flag on the build.. which I am doing. You may omit that if you’d like to experiment.

cd phantomjs-2.0.0

./build.sh –jobs 1
—————————————-
WARNING
—————————————-

Building PhantomJS from source takes a very long time, anywhere from 30
minutes to several hours (depending on the machine configuration).
We recommend you use the premade binary packages on supported operating
systems.

For details, please go the the web site: http://phantomjs.org/download.html.

Do you want to continue (y/n)?
y
[…]

NOTE: If you want to suppress the warning regarding perils of the long compile, you an use the –confirm flag to bypass the question. This is really helpful if you want to background the process and write it to a log. Where I find this most beneficial is when I want to/need to close the terminal window before the compile completes.

Here is an optional method of running that will background the process, auto-reply to the warning and write to a log file:

nohup ./build.sh –confirm –jobs 1 > build.log &

You might carp about not being able to monitor progress now! Well sure you can.. just do a following tail on the file. Exact command varies with system, I’ll provide the one for typical LINUX and for typical OSX:

For typical LINUX:
tailf build.log

For typical OSX:
tail -f build.log

Step 7 — check the binary

Once the build has completed, you will find the binary to be built in the local directory bin/

ls -l bin/phantomjs
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 56587060 Sep 30 17:16 bin/phantomjs

To complete the installation, you’ll need to replace the current phantomjs binary with the new one. To find the location if your current binary (if you have one), this should work:

whereis phantomjs
phantomjs: /usr/bin/phantomjs

Copy the new binary to that location and verify version:

cp bin/phantomjs /usr/bin/phantomjs
cp: overwrite ‘/usr/bin/phantomjs’? y

phantomjs -v
2.0.0

YOU ARE DONE!! It was just that easy

Software Development, Technology

PHP’s cURL and how to use CURLPROXY_SOCKS5_HOSTNAME

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So, you’re running a proxy (say, something like TOR) on your locallopback.. but you keep getting this error (must have VERBOSE set to true to catch it):

* Hostname was NOT found in DNS cache
* Can’t complete SOCKS5 connection to 0.0.0.0:0. (2)
* Closing connection 0

Your code looks simple enough.. but it doesn’t work:

A little research later you find that the PROPER SOCKS5 protocol is SOCKS5H (hostname), so you use the proper flag..

[…]
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE, CURLPROXY_SOCKS5_HOSTNAME);
[…]

only to get told that TOR doesn’t want to be used as an HTTP proxy (what’s the deal)?

…
It appears you have configured your web browser to use Tor as an HTTP proxy.
This is not correct: Tor is a SOCKS proxy, not an HTTP proxy.
Please configure your client accordingly.
…

Have not fear script-kiddies.. even though PHP as of 5.5.x does not seem to include this CRITICAL cURL FLAG, you can reference it directly with the integer value of 7. So… if you change your code to this… you’re as golden as the proverbial goose!

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE, 7); // 7 = CURLPROXY_SOCKS5_HOSTNAME

So… now you know!

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Software Development, Technology

AWS EC2 Sendmail Configuration (with .procmail)

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Sendmail.. how you frustrate people; but the power makes it difficult to turn away. I’ll now detail the steps required for me to setup a simple e-mail auto-processing service on an AWS EC2 instance without a dedicated hostname.

Setting up the Procmail Recepie

.procmail — you can do a lot of things with .procmail. The online resources are many, but for this example I’m going to keep it VERY simple.

First, create a procmail file in your local account. My AWS instances are CentOS based, and use the ‘ec2-user’ as the default account. I’m going to keep it simple here and stick with that paradigm.

-bash-4.1$ vi .procmailrc

I’m going to setup my .procmailrc file to look like this:

SHELL=/usr/bin/php
MAILDIR=$HOME/mail
LOGFILE=$HOME/logs/procmail.log

:0 # catch errors
* ^Subject: Returned mail:.*
logs/procmail.error.log

# — auto-catches
:0
|”$HOME/prod/MailIntake/process.mail.php” $1

Now that I have a .procmail setup… time to get down to making sendmail work.

Sendmail — allowing server to accept messages

To configure the sendmail files, I assume super user powers. If you are unable to assume superuser powers or run sudo.. I doubt you’ll be able to complete these configurations. Hopefully your responsible IT person is going to handle all this for you instead.

Main Sendmail File — sendmail.mc

Setting up the main Sendmail file. This file is fairly large, so I’m only going to highlight the sections I felt needed to be updated.

vi sendmail.mc

To allow use of the AWS mail relay, defined in this section:

define(`SMART_HOST’, `email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com’)dnl

Setup local hostname / domain identity

dnl # Also accept email sent to “localhost.localdomain” as local email.
dnl #LOCAL_DOMAIN(`localhost.localdomain’)dnl
LOCAL_DOMAIN(`ec2-52-6-000-000.compute-1.amazonaws.com’)dnl

Setting up the masquerade

MASQUERADE_DOMAIN(`ec2-52-6-000-000.compute-1.amazonaws.com’)dnl
MASQUERADE_AS(`ec2-52-6-000-000.compute-1.amazonaws.com’)dnl

access db configuration

Editing the access file to setup the local host relay, so messages can be sent from the various network interfaces on the machine. Obviously. one of those IP addresses was obscured. Where you see #private ip# substitute your AWS private IP (such as 172.123.321.1)

## By default we allow relaying from localhost…
localhost RELAY
127.0.0.1 RELAY
#private ip# RELAY
email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com RELAY

## Allowed Connections
Connect:127.0.0.1 OK
Connect:#private ip# OK
Connect:email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com OK

Defining Local Hostnames — local-host-names

For my configuration, I wanted to make sure the system understood it’s local non-FQDN identitiy, so I edited the local-host-names file to include three different ways to reference the system. The AWS DSN, public IP and private IP:

vi local-host-names

Contents of my file looks like this (my file contains real IPs and hostname)

# local-host-names – include all aliases for your machine here.
ec2-52-6-000-000.compute-1.amazonaws.com
52.6.000.000
172.30.000.000

The Mailer Table — mailertable

At this point I didn’t see a need to implement functions of the mailertable

Setting up trusted user file — trusted-users

Modified the trusted users file to allow my primary user, root and one alias to send mail without warnings:

vi /etc/mail/trusted-users

File contents:

# trusted-users – users that can send mail as others without a warning
# apache, mailman, majordomo, uucp, are good candidates
ec2-user, apps, proxy, root

Aliases — virtusertable

Entering user aliases to capture mail sent to various users, and route them to the local ‘ec2-user’.

vi /etc/mail/virtusertable

Contents of my file with aliases:

# A domain-specific form of aliasing, allowing multiple virtual domains to be
# hosted on one machine.
#
ec2-user@ec2-52-6-000-000.compute-1.amazonaws.com ec2-user@localhost
stuff@ec2-52-6-000-000.compute-1.amazonaws.com ec2-user@localhost
things@ec2-52-6-000-000.compute-1.amazonaws.com ec2-user@localhost

Rebuild Settings

Run a make on the directory to rebuild the sendmail db files

make -C /etc/mail
make: Entering directory `/etc/mail’
make: Leaving directory `/etc/mail’

Restart Sendmail!

Restart sendmail… watch for majik!

/etc/init.d/sendmail restart
Shutting down sm-client: [ OK ]
Shutting down sendmail: [ OK ]
Starting sendmail: [ OK ]
Starting sm-client: [ OK ]

photography, racing

Rennsport Reunion V – Monterey California 2015 (photo gallery)

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What an AMAZING event. A non-stop stream of Porsche Racing history!!

For this gallery I’m going to simply upload anything that looked suitable to post. Most of these are in chronological order from the event on 27-SEP-2015.

I hope you enjoy looking at these; they were a joy to experience first hand.

Software Development

Helping CasperJS 1.1.0-beta3 play nice with PhantomJS 2.0.0

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As of today, 30-SEP-2015, the latest build for CasperJS 1.1.0-beta3. Not exactly comforting for production use, but it is the most recent and decently capable version available outside of a pull request. So.. let’s get started:

First, I checked the current version of

[root@ip-10-153-205-78 ~]# casperjs –version
1.1.0-beta3
Unsafe JavaScript attempt to access frame with URL about:blank from frame with URL file:///usr/local/lib/node_modules/casperjs/bin/bootstrap.js. Domains, protocols and ports must match.

NOTE:You may notice that simply running casper causes PhantomJS to hurl out worthless warning messages. This is the very reason I’m undergoing this exercise.

Next, I dropped the new binary on target server and verified that I am dealing with pJS 2.0, and it’s functioning:

[root@ip-10-153-205-78 ~]# phantomjs -v
2.0.0

Next step is to get to the meat of the errors.

The first I encountered was this:

[root@ip-10-153-205-78 ~]# casperjs –version
CasperJS needs PhantomJS v1.x

/usr/local/lib/node_modules/casperjs/bin/bootstrap.js:91 in __die

Opening this file, around line 91 the following is found:

function __die(message) {
if (message) {
console.error(message);
}
phantom.exit(1);

Tracing back to the caller, the test is performed here:

(function(version) {
// required version check
if (version.major !== 1) {
return __die(‘CasperJS needs PhantomJS v1.x’);
} if (version.minor < 8) { return __die('CasperJS needs at least PhantomJS v1.8 or later.'); } if (version.minor === 8 && version.patch < 1) { return __die('CasperJS needs at least PhantomJS v1.8.1 or later.'); } })(phantom.version);

Next I tried to make it accept version 2, by changing that block to this:

(function(version) {
if (version.major == 1) {
if (version.minor < 8) { return __die('CasperJS needs at least PhantomJS v1.8 or later.'); } if (version.minor === 8 && version.patch < 1) { return __die('CasperJS needs at least PhantomJS v1.8.1 or later.'); } } if (version.major < 2) { return __die('CasperJS needs PhantomJS v1.x or v2.x'); } })(phantom.version);

Next error message was this:

[root@ip-10-153-205-78 ~]# casperjs –version
Couldn’t find nor compute phantom.casperPath, exiting.

/usr/local/lib/node_modules/casperjs/bin/bootstrap.js:91 in __die

It’s origin was in this block:

// CasperJS root path
if (!phantom.casperPath) {
try {
phantom.casperPath = phantom.args.map(function _map(arg) {
var match = arg.match(/^–casper-path=(.*)/);
if (match) {
return fs.absolute(match[1]);
}
}).filter(function _filter(path) {
return fs.isDirectory(path);
}).pop();
} catch (e) {
return __die(“Couldn’t find nor compute phantom.casperPath, exiting.”);
}
}

Based upon information found in this post.. Latest pull of casperjs not working with latest pull of phantomjs2 I made the following modifications:

Paste this section of code in above the first non-comment section in bootstrap file:

// Mods to get Casper and PhantomJS playing nice
var system = require(‘system’);
var argsdeprecated = system.args;
argsdeprecated.shift();
phantom.args = argsdeprecated;

Once you have done that, you should be able to use Casper 1.1.0-beta3 with PhantomJS 2.0 (and look.. NO MORE LAME WARNINGS!!!)

[root@ip-10-153-205-78 ~]# casperjs –version
1.1.0-beta3