Matthew Botos

April 29, 2006 - What better way to spend a sunny spring Saturday than biking and photographing Swarthmore? The trails and park have a changed since last season, and the arboretum section was in full bloom.

View the photos

I took my camera on today’s ride and added a few pictures of Valley Forge Park to the the April album.

For an easy backup of your WordPress blog, get the WP-DB-Backup and WP-Cron plugins. Once activated and configured, WordPress will email you a backup every night. You can even open it up and read the SQL if you have a slow night!

I got a craving for chicken enchiladas last night; photos are in the April album and on the menu page.

Brian tipped me off to the Lenape High School Alumni site, where you can share a bio and contact information with old classmates and see what everyone else has been doing. It’s fascinating to see how far and wide people have traveled and who’s lives have followed or dramatically changed paths.

I had a good yoga session tonight I got enough of a handle on the physics of some new poses to get back to the breathing and mind-soothing benefits of practice. A few weeks ago, I switched from static cold yoga to flowing hot yoga. My body’s been trying to assimilate the new rhythms, and it’s beginning to get there; I even managed to get an interesting new bind tonight.

Several people have commented on how fast I post my photos; it’s nice to know my efficiency is noticed. The feat is only half due to being an obsessive photo geek; the other half is the “lean process” for publishing. (My boss owes me $100 for using that buzzphrase outside of the office.) Here’s how it goes:

1. Get new photos from camera using a shell script wrapper for gphoto, which also uses Canon’s orientation sensor tagging to autorotate and sets some IPTC image headers for creator and copyright.
2. Edit in Picasa, mostly for color and cropping. The best 1/3 or so of the bunch get “starred”, captioned, and keyworded/tagged. Then they’re exported full size as an XML webpage.
3. A big mix of shell and Perl scripts does a whole bunch of conversion to make a text caption file and inputs for album, scales down the images, and copies them to the appropriate HTML directory while prompting me for an introduction and cover photo.
4. Another script pulls the IPTC captions from the image headers and updates the flat file for tag searching.
5. Album makes the pages using my custom theme and a bit of added code for site integration and cover photos.
6. LFTP mirrors my local updates to the server, intelligently transferring only new and updated files.

In all, there are only three commands that need to be typed. Most of the scripts are customized to the above workflow and my own directory layout, but email me for a copy if you’d find them useful.

Phishing schemes have been using replicas of eBay and PayPal emails, complete with the real links and images, for a while. I got one from Korea today with two interesting features:

1. It actually said to click the link or type in the address manually, trying to dupe the victim into thinking the link must be legitimate.
2. The email template they stole included a real link to eBay’s spoof detection page.

As usual, I turned on all the headers and forwarded it to spoof at ebay dot com. If Meg paid a bounty on these, I’d be a rich man!

I reprocessed the logs to exclude the MySpace hotlinks, so the popular photos now more accurately reflect what people looked at locally. Refried beans and Flava Flav are still hot with just the search engines.

Blocking hotlinks from MySpace made me feel a bit like the old codger yelling, “Hey you damn kids, get off my lawn!” Copyright and intellectual property are complex issues on which I have a very strong opinion, so let me expand:

At a basic level, creators and authors decide how their works are used. With technology and the web making everyone a creator, more people get to make the choices that used to be limited to Big Media. You have an implicit copyright on anything you create, and can choose how to distribute, recieve credit, and/or charge for it. If your stated wishes aren’t followed, you have many of the same legal recourses the entertainment industry has abused to prop up their obsolete business model.

Sadly, their delays and resistance to viable legitimite entertainment downloads has led to a public attitude that everything should be free to take and use without limits. While that isn’t what many professional and amatuer authors choose, it does have amazing possibilities when an individual or community chooses to free their creation. Witness Wikipedia, a growing number of full online textbooks, and the increasing content under Creative Commons licenses instead of All Rights Reserved Copyright.

Academia and open source software have known this power for a long time: by building on the credited work of our predecessors and peers, we can achieve more in collaboration than we could in isolation. I believe in that ideal, but value my creations and have chosen to retain the control of full copyright over everything on this site. That said, I’m still happy to share when asked and credited. In other words, you’re welcome to lounge on my lawn if I come out and open the gate for you.