Blog Flower Gadget

Part of the reason I started this blog was to motivate myself to finish projects. In fact, at one time, a project of mine was to program a blog from scratch as a way to learn ASP.NET. Unfortunately that project didn't get too far. I think that part of my problem with finishing these side projects is that I have always chosen projects with too large of a scope, and I just don't have the extra time. I have many of these projects left unfinished.

However, I am proud to be able to post an actual completed project. I decided to create a Blogger Gadget and the result is the 'Blog Flower'. The gadget is pretty simple, I was able to complete it in about half a day or so. Most of the work was actually creating the graphics. As you might guess the gadget adds a flower to a blog, and it will start to wilt and die if a new post isn't added frequently enough. It can be thought of as a motivator to post regularly, because who wants to see a dead flower on their blog?

To add this to your own blog simply enter in your blog name and click the add to blogger link.

http://.blogspot.com

Netgear WNR834Bv2 Wireless Router

This post is a follow up on my previous post on setting up the Netgear FVS336G VPN. In this "part two" of the series on the trials and tribulations of the setup and administration of Netgear products I am going to describe a bug I found in the Netgear WNR834Bv2 Wireless Router.

Let me begin by recapping that I am the official Wireless Administrator at the company I work for. I decided that for security reasons it would be best to use MAC Address Filtering. Ever since the iPhone and iPod Touch came out I have been busy adding those MAC Addresses.

One morning I came to work and was met with a bit of panic because the wireless network went down. The usual solution to this problem is to simply reboot the router, but in this case it didn't work. I racked my brain trying to figure out what was going on. I updated the firmware, I reset the router to factory defaults and restored a backup of our settings, and I scoured the internet for any clues about what might be wrong. Finally I remembered that the night before I had added a new Mac Address, it had completely escaped my memory.

I deleted that last added Mac Address and suddenly everything magically started working. I thought to myself, how could a particular Mac Address kill the router? It didn't make any sense so I decided to count the number of devices in the address table. My jaw dropped when I finished the tally. The number was precisely 32, one of those magic numbers in computer science. Earlier, when it wasn't working the count was 33. The router has a bug where if the table has more than 32 entries the router stops functioning.

I admit that this particular router is consumer grade and no home user would probably have 32 devices. However, if a product is going to have a limit, please enforce that limit with the user interface! If the Netgear configuration website had done a simple range check I would have hours of my life back!

Netgear FVS336G Gigabit VPN

The company I work at is small, so we all have to wear different hats from time to time. Even though I am a software engineer, I find myself helping out with IT issues every once in a while. In fact, I am the official Wireless Administrator! We have made some infrastructure changes recently and I feel compelled to write about the obstacles that we encountered. This post will be the first of a two part series on the trials and tribulations of the setup and administration of Netgear products.

We recently moved offices and we took it as an opportunity to upgrade our VPN. We spent a fair amount of time comparing specifications and reading reviews. Eventually we settled on the Netgear FVS336G Gigabit VPN. It is the only unit in its class that had a built in Gigabit switch, which is nice. It claims to not need any special client software, it is an order of magnitude faster than our previous VPN and it had decent reviews on Newegg.

Once I began setting it up I immediately encountered obstacle number one. The statement that it does not need any client software is only partially true. The SSL VPN mode does not require any special software, but the IPsec VPN requires the Netgear ProSafe VPN Client. Because we require using the IPsec VPN I reluctantly went down the path of purchasing the VPN Client software.

From the buynetgear.com website it wasn't clear if the software was going to be shipped, or if it was available as a download. We really wanted to be able to buy the software and download it immediately because we needed that VPN up and running ASAP. I called Netgear to verify that I could download it. The support agent assured me that I could download it, and then she rushed me off the phone.

Well, as I quickly found out, she was wrong, you can't download it. I had to wait for it to arrive via the mail system. After many days I finally had the clients in hand and within minutes obstacle number two was discovered. Even though the Website claims that the VPN Client is Windows Vista compatible, it would not install on Vista. Through some research on the forums I discovered that the software in the box was really old, and that a much newer version exists. There is no information that I could find on the internet about how to acquire the new version, so I called Netgear a second time.

I had to get transferred several times before I finally reached a technical support person who could help me. But before he would help me I had to prove to him that I purchased the software. I actually had to forward him a receipt from my e-mail, he had no way of looking up my information. Once he was satisfied that I had purchased the software he e-mailed me a special link through a 3rd party download service so that I could acquire the latest version of the software.

The whole process was completely asinine. I don't understand why the client software isn't included with the VPN hardware! The technical support agent actually told me that the software is difficult to acquire on purpose! The reasoning is that there is no software protection built into the software so they are worried about piracy. The client software has no way of informing the user if an update is available, nor will they publish any information on the website about new updates. The only way to make sure I stay current with the software is to call Netgear every few months and ask! This was the agent's advice! Unbelievable.

Now that I was able to install the client I encountered the final obstacle. The Reference Manual is no longer in sync with the current version of the firmware. In the latest documentation it describes this crazy scheme where the users' ID should be of the 'Domain Name' form and should be constructed like "[name][XY].fvg_remote.com" where XY is a unique two digit number. Well, this functionality no longer appears to work in the latest firmware. I finally realized that the right way to configure the VPN is to use Extended Authentication where each user has a username/password managed by the hardware, which is much better. I understand why they moved away from that crazy scheme, it is completely unmanageable, the administrator would have to keep a separate spreadsheet to manage those unique two digit numbers.

Even though it was such a bear to get up and running, it has been working well. It is much much faster than our previous Symantec unit. If they made it easier to acquire the client software, had more accurate documentation, and was a little more honest in the marketing materials then I would definitely recommend the product.

Blogger Image Bug

There is a very frustrating "bug" with Blogger and Picassa. Some images when uploaded get rotated by 90 degrees and cannot be fixed. This only happens with images wider than they are tall. It also only happens with images that contain digital camera metadata. Furthermore it only happens with images that have oval like characteristics. From my previous post the Man o' war and Stone Crab images came in rotated incorrectly. My theory is that Google has a "feature" where it attempts to identify images of a face taken with a digital camera on its side and auto correct the rotation. I am sure that this is a great feature for some users, but it is an absolute hindrance for others. The Picassa Web Album allows users to rotate images once uploaded, and furthermore Blogger images now show up as a hidden album in Picassa, but for whatever reason you can't rotate images in the Blogger album! There is absolutely no way to fix the image once uploaded! When uploading an image from Blogger there is a confirmation screen with a preview of the image, they really need to add some rotate buttons to this screen. For now my workaround is to first open the picture in Paint and then save it as a .png which strips the metadata.

Update
I discovered the source of the problem. My camera is storing camera orientation information in the EXIF data of the jpeg files. Right clicking a jpeg in Windows Vista doesn't show the orientation field, which is why I didn't discover this earlier. Picasa is rotating the image when uploaded based on the stored orientation. This doesn't seem like the correct behavior, especially because the behavior is not consistent across browsers. I am hoping Google fixes this, or at least provides a way to change the rotation once uploaded.

Update #2
I have been involved in a discussion about this issue in the Blogger help groups. A Blogger employee just followed up on that discussion hinting that they are hopefully going resolve this issue!

Peter Noyes,

Thanks a lot for investigating; it looks like you have stumbled into a solution for some of the photo issues that have arisen in the past here. I'll pass your feedback along to the rest of the team and we'll see if we can make this better.

And thanks to Mishka for the heads up!

Gatsby
The Blogger Team

Florida 2008 - 2009

My Mother-in-law lives in Florida, and it has become a family tradition to spend the time between Christmas and New Years visiting. They live in an active adult residential community in West Palm Beach. It is a great place to relax. The water table in Florida is very high, so to build the community they build up mounds of earth to construct the houses on, and in the process they create a series of lagoons that are all connected. Their house is build right next to one of these lagoons so fishing is possible from the backyard. This year I did very well fishing, I caught a total of 7 fish. However, even though my wife only caught 1 fish, she caught the biggest by far, so I guess she wins.



There is a lot of wildlife the exists in these lagoons. The fish are large mouth bass for the most part, but there are also sunfish. The lagoons are also full of turtles. There area all sorts of birds too. The coolset bird by far is the osprey, too bad they are hard to find. But the place is full of horrible looking ducks. Everyone seemed to call them "Turkey Ducks", but they are really Muscovy Ducks, they do not fear humans, hence the close up picture.



The Mother-in-law also lives close to Okeeheelee Park which is another great place to relax. We ended up taking our niece there several times. There is kayaking, fishing, trails and even a bmx course. Unfortunately the only activity my wife and I were able to do this year was take a nice walk, we really wanted to go kayaking but it didn't happen.

Another big part of our vacation is eating. Back east the bagels and lox are so much better. We ended up having breakfast from Strathmore bagels many times. We even brought back a dozen bagels. I also had some great ribs while we were out there, and I had Stone Crab for the first time!

Usually we stay in West Palm Beach but this year we were able to say a little longer than usual so we were able to take a day trip down to Miami Beach. The drive wasn't too bad because we took a toll road, the Florida Turnpike. Miami Beach is an island just east of Miami and it is connected via several causeways. We parked near Lincoln Road which is the north end of Miami Beach and it is where the high end shopping is. We then walked along the beach all the way to the southern end up Miami Beach. On our walk we saw a Man o' war (a poisonous sea creature) washed up on the beach.





At the end of our walk we went to Joe's Stone Crab for lunch. Joe's Stone Crab is located at almost the most southern tip of Miami beach, it is probably the first restaurant in the area, opening in 1913. My Grandmother gave me $100 for Christmas and we used it here. It was by far our nicest meal of the trip, the Stone Crab was awesome.



On our way back we did some shopping, and then we grabbed some Starbucks coffee for the ride home. At the Starbucks I was surprised to see a Clover! The Clover is a super high end coffee breweing system where you can very accurately specify temperatures, amount of grounds to use, breweing time, etc... I had heard that Starbucks had purchased the company a while back in Wired, but this is the first time I have seen one of these in a Starbucks. However, my wife and I were lucky enough to experience the Clover at Trabant Coffee in Seattle before Starbucks bought the company. This time we didn't go for it, 7$ for a cup of coffee is too steep, no matter how good it is.





Another first for our trip was visiting a Wetlands Reserve. We went to the Green Cay Nature Center where we saw even more wildilfe, including an alligator. We also disovered that there is a species of turtle named the "Florida Cooter" which we thought was hysterical. This place was gorgeous. There is a giant wooden boardwalk built on top of the wetlands that is at least a mile to walk all the way around. There is also a nature center where they have an exhibit with turtles, frogs, and baby alligators. I have never been to Florida in the summer, but apparently it is absolutely covered with these frogs.









In total we ended up spending 10 days in Florida. It was a great trip. Work is about to pick up because we are going to be releasing the next version of our software pretty soon so it was nice to have a chance to relax and recharge.

Steak

On the plane ride home from Florida I watched a steak cooking competition on the food network and it inspired me to cook up a rib-eye. I decided to pan fry this particular steak because the broiler ends up being too messy and I am not really set up to barbecue. I first marinated the steak in butter, beer, worchestire sauce, fresh garlic, kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper for about 10 minutes on each side. I then pan friend the steak for 3 or so minutes per side in some oil. Although probably not the healthiest way to prepare a steak it sure was good!

Bonus Digital Copy

I recently returned from vacationing in Florida. I need to settle in a bit before I get to writing a nice long post about Florida, but for now I feel like I need to describe the trials and tribulations of getting the Bonus Digital Copy of the Dark Knight to work that I received as a Christmas present.

First of all, there is an information card inside the DVD case that has an authorization code. This card says to visit www.wbdigitalcopy.com/thedarknight in order to download the movie. After visiting the site I was appalled to see that they are charging 1.99$ for the download. After scouring the internet I learned that the digital copy is actually on Disc 2 and that it is possible to import the movie using iTunes. I wonder how many people they dupe into coughing up an additional 1.99$.

I inserted Disc 2 into my computer and iTunes presented me with a special page branded for the Dark Knight that prompted me for the authorization code. I tried and tried to enter the code and it kept saying 'The code you entered is not recognized as a valid code.' After I finally convinced myself that I was typing it in correctly and that the problem must be with iTunes I went down the path of contacting both Warner Brothers technical support and Apple technical support. (Keep in mind that by now I am approaching an hour into this process and using Handbrake I would have been done at this point).

To Warner Brother's credit I received a response within a matter of hours. They provided me with a new magical code that didn't even have the same number of characters as my original code, and thankfully it did the trick. iTunes succesfully imported a 1.6 GB version of the Dark Knight and I now have it on my Apple TV and my iPod.

I am concerned in that if I ever own another movie with this Bonus Digital Copy will I have to go through the same rigmarole or did I encounter a fluke with the one movie. Overall though I am impressed with the quality of the movie on my iPod now that it is working.