Monday, July 24, 2006

Some notes from GNHLUG on SELinux

Last Thursday's Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group topic was "SELinux for Dummies" by Red Hat's Dan Walsh. I took some notes but had to leave at 9pm and they were still going strong. See http://nozell.dyndns.org/wiki/index.php/SELinuxForDummies

Friday, July 21, 2006

netnation.com mail down

It has been almost 24 hours that email has been down at the hosting company netnation.com -- the tech support guy said they are using some in-house mail package (CSR?) and it should be fixed by *tomorrow*! Ugh.

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Dragonfly walk in Ponemah Bog



Pitcher Plants

Originally uploaded by marcn.



Yesterday the Audubon Society/NH hosted a Dragonfly walking tour of Amherst's Ponemah Bog. There are a ton of dragonflies (which eat all the pest insects) as well as carnivorous plants like the pitcher and sundew plants.

Local dragonfly expert


Next weekend (22-Jul-2006) they are having another dragonfly walk (10am) and this time I'm going to drag some of the kids along. Be sure to wear shoes you don't mind getting soaked.



Planks into Ponemah Bog

For directions to Ponemah Bog (amazingly close to 101A), see ASNH Ponemah Bog Sanctuary

Here is the complete photoset: Dragonfly Walk @ Ponemah Bog (Amherst, NH)

Sunday, July 2, 2006

Moving photos around behind f-spot's back

I've been using f-spot since it showed up in Ubuntu/Breezy and have been keeping all my photos in a directory structure like this:

/PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.30/
/PHOTOS/Photos/2006.07.01/

But sometimes I've forgotten to unclick the "Copy file to the Photos folder" box in the photos import dialog and end up with photos under ~/Photos/. Recently I checked and found there were almost a gigabytes worth of photos under there.

So this is what I did to move them to under /PHOTOS/Photos/ and keep all the tags and metadata correct.


  • Back up /home and /PHOTOS to an external USB. I love rsnapshot.
    $ rsnapshot daily

  • make an extra backup of the f-spot database
    $ cp ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db photos-backup.db

  • Start poking around the f-spot database and updating it.
    $ sqlite3 ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db
    sqlite> .schema photos
    CREATE TABLE photos ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL,
    time INTEGER NOT NULL,
    directory_path STRING NOT NULL,
    name STRING NOT NULL,
    description TEXT NOT NULL,
    default_version_id INTEGER NOT NULL
    );


  • See how many photos are in ~/Photos...
    sqlite> select count(*) from photos where directory_path like '/home/marc/Photos/%';
    260


  • Take a look at a few of them to see the path names...
    sqlite> select directory_path from photos where directory_path like '/home/marc/Photos/%' limit 0,10;


  • Update the pathname to my prefered one. I've added an 'a' to the end just so I won't overwrite an existing directory.
    sqlite> update photos set directory_path = "/PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a" where directory_path = "/home/marc/Photos/2006/6/22";
    sqlite> .quit


  • Make the directory and move the files to the new location...
    mkdir /PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a
    mv -v /home/marc/Photos/2006/6/22/HPIM117* /PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a


  • Repeat for each directory. I did it all within emacs' shell so cut-n-paste made it a snap.