2nd Magazine Cover (Foundation: The Mixtape Magazine)

2nd Magazine Cover (Foundation: The Mixtape Magazine), originally uploaded by marcn.

This is the second magazine to use one of my photos on their cover. They were nice enough to send me a whole box of this issue too.

Here is the first cover:

31,000 page views

John McCain (featured on http://news.yahoo.com/elections), originally uploaded by marcn.

Today my most popular photo on flickr has passed 31,000 views!

Its not my best photo, or even best photo I've taken of John McCain, but thanks to a link on http://news.yahoo.com/elections/ views went through the roof.

Here are the rest of my most popular photos:

MarcN's 3000 to 31,000 views photoset.

Early Morning Rain

Early Morning Rain

Originally uploaded by marcn

5:30am -- Reading in the rain waiting for Griffin's swim team practice to end

Yeah!

Yeah!, originally uploaded by marcn.

4 Nov 2008

Blue Heron after breakfast

Blue Heron after breakfast, originally uploaded by marcn.

My photo and Wendy's article

1017080734.jpg, originally uploaded by marcn.

http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081017/HOME/310179953

Wildcat Falls in Autumn

Wildcat Falls in Autumn, originally uploaded by marcn.

I hate hardware

A couple of weeks ago my linux home server's root disk failed. I replaced it with one I had sitting around and rebuilt the OS.

Now this morning I get this email:

To: root@homeserver.localdomain
Subject: SMART error (Health) detected on host: homeserver
Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2008 03:14:07 -0400

This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on:

host name: homeserver
DNS domain: localdomain
NIS domain: (none)

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

Device: /dev/hda, FAILED SMART self-check. BACK UP DATA NOW!

For details see host's SYSLOG (default: /var/log/syslog).

You can also use the smartctl utility for further investigation.
No additional email messages about this problem will be sent.


Lets see what disk sales Best Buy/Circuit City/etc has today..

NH Primary Night -- Governor Lynch

NH Primary Night -- Governor Lynch, originally uploaded by marcn.

We took the kids up to Manchester to the John Lynch Re-Election post-primary celebration. Spencer talked to a number of NH State reps asking about what it takes to get started in politics. The "Second First Daughter of NH" did a fine job introducing her father.


"Lynch, a Hopkinton resident, won with 35,333, or 90 percent, to 3,783, or 10 percent, for Forry with 78 percent of the vote reported."

With the Merrimack Dam gone, the Souhegan River has changed

souhegan-up-river-20080829-pano.jpg, originally uploaded by marcn.

This morning I walked down to the Souhegan from behind the High School's baseball field and was surprised by just how much lower the river was!

Here is a slide show of some of the photos I took from the section of the river above the former dam to near where it crosses under Route 3.

Souhegan River, post Merrimack Dam (as a Slideshow)

I recommend folks to take the fairly easy walk down and check it out yourself.

Eric Hutchins of NOAA Restoration Center and some other folks from NHDES Dam Bureau as well as some Boston College students taking some location measurements today. Just where the river bed will end up is still unclear until we have a few seasonal floods. The two little islands are no longer islands (see the Google Map of the area) and sit on a 4" high sandy area. Looking down in the water you can see a much of sand moving, so there will be lots of change there. The nice thing is most places are shallow, rocky and calm enough to just walk across the river. The water level up beyond the highway through to Wildcat Falls are unchanged.

Spencer and Griffin get advice from Senator Joe Biden

Spencer and Griffin get advice from Senator Joe Biden, originally uploaded by marcn.

Well, thanks for Obama's 4:30am text message, it is time to drag these 2006 photos out...

Here are some of my other photos of Joe Biden from the run up to the 2008 Presidential Campaign in New Hampshire.


Nozell/Thomas family with Joe Biden at Manchester Democrats Picnic


Senator Joe Biden talking to Addy

Tall Ships in Portsmouth

Tire Damage, originally uploaded by marcn.

Yesterday I took a few of the kids to Portsmouth to see the tall ships Friendship and Roseway. These close shots showing lots of texture came out well.

Slideshow of Tall Ships @ Portsmouth

July 4th Parade in Merrimack

We walked in support of Governor John Lynch's re-election but also said hello to US Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter and hopefully our future US Senator Jeanne Shaheen.

I don't know who thought of it first, but Trevor got his cast signed and Logan his t-shirt signed by all three of them (and NH 1st lady Dr. Susan Lynch)



After the parade we had a picnic with some friends down at Wasserman Park which was nearly empty. The weather held out and it was a great day.



Here are the rest of the photos: July 4th parade, Merrimack, NH

NH Flickr Group Meetups this Summer

First blueberry!, originally uploaded by marcn.

The NH Flickr Group is planning as photo meetup every Saturday this summer at 5am at some picturesque location.

Last week was at Merrimack's Horse Hill Nature Preserve and this week was at Amhert's Ponemah Bog.

Keep an eye on this discussion group for information on future ones -- NH Flickr Discussion Group

Hillary Clinton & Barack Obama Laughing @ Unity, NH

Hillary Clinton & Barack Obama Laughing, originally uploaded by marcn.

Carol Shea-Porter


Paul Hodes


Jeanne Shaheen


NH Governor John Lynch & Dr. Susan Lynch


Barack Obama


Barack Obama

Barack Obama


Unite for Change

All the photos from the event are here: marcn's buddy icon
Obama/Clinton @ Unity, NH

HP has released AdvFS under a GPLv2 license!

It is nice to see that this well tested filesystem technology has been made available under the GPLv2 and may have another life with Linux.

Press Release HP Contributes Source Code to Open Source Community to Advance Adoption of Linux and the AdvFS site on SourceForge.

@ Ribfest last night

RIBS!, originally uploaded by marcn.

Yummy ribs. But I wasn't brave enough to try deep fried sparklers(!)

My MySQL talk at GNHLUG

Last night I gave my much delayed talk about MySQL at the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group.



BTW, next time you are in downtown Nashua, stop by Martha's Exchange and have a Cherry beer with the Jambalaya -- spicy but delicious!

Smilin' John McCain

Smilin' John McCain, originally uploaded by marcn.

I took a late lunch yesterday and saw John McCain at Nashua's Daniel Webster College.

As you can see he does have a natural smile -- compare that to the horrid 'lime green speech' he gave last week.

I'd guess there were about a thousand people there, mostly older with a few people in their 20s-30s. The crowd only applauded once during McCain's speech before the Q&As, and that was after a 'stay in Iraq until the job is done' line. Dead quiet while talking about immigration, social security, etc.

The rest of my photos are here:
John McCain @ Daniel Webster College

hp 2133 update

I was going to use SLED10 for a while on my hp2133 mini-note, but getting updates is problamatic. If you call HP support within 30 days they will send you a SLED10 restore CD at no cost. This CD is one of those boot-and-wipes-the-disk variety, so be aware. This CD is different from the ISO you can download from HP (here).

First up -- installing Ubuntu/Hardy. On the boot prompt, you'll have to add xforcevesa or the video will flake out. Using an external USB CD/DVD drve, the standard Ubuntu CD boots and starts the install, but after resizing the SLED10 partition down to 10G, the install fails with the following message:



Next up -- Fedora 9. Again using an external CD, the install starts up well, but then soon fails when trying to locate the CD containing the install RPMs. I has been a while since I've used Red Hat on the desktop, so I'll give Fedora another try later. (And it will make the Red Hat folks at GNHLUG happy ;-)

Next up -- Ubuntu/Hardy Alternative Install CD. This version uses the tried-and-true debian install process and this time it works great!

With the stock Ubuntu/Hardy it finds and configures the wired network, graphics, audio (except the earphone jack), MMC disk. The Broadcom Wifi does not however and needs to use the ndiswrapper with firmware downloaded from the hp.com support site.

The post-install steps for Ubuntu/Hardy to get the WiFi working can be found on "WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx/Feisty No-Fluff".

For the hp 2133, the steps are:

1. I found on my Ubuntu/Hardy that the bcm43xx module was already on the blacklist so the first line wasn't necessary. See line 32 of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist. You'll still need to install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9 and create a tmp directory to unpack the wireless firmware.
   
   
# NOT NEEDED echo 'blacklist bcm43xx' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9
mkdir ~/bcm43xx; cd ~/bcm43xx

   



2. Since my hp 2133 has a Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11a/b/g (rev 02), use Step 2a which downloads from Hewlett-Packard the Windows firmware for the Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11a/b/g (rev 02)
   
   
sudo apt-get install cabextract
wget ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp34001-34500/sp34152.exe
cabextract sp34152.exe

   
   



3. Step 3 is to install the firmware using ndiswrapper. My /etc/network/interfaces file already had an entry to the 'lo' device, so didn't need to do that. Also ran into problems trying to load the modules on boot, so I don't load ndiswrapper from /etc/modules. Also I didn't bother to edit /etc/default/wpasupplicant because on my home wireless network. I don't use authentication -- wireless access is locked down by MAC address at the wireless router.
   
   
sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
ndiswrapper -l
sudo depmod -a
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

#NOT NEEDED sudo cp /etc/network/interfaces /etc/network/interfaces.orig
#NOT NEEDED echo -e 'auto lo\niface lo inet loopback\n' | sudo tee /etc/network/interfaces

sudo ndiswrapper -m

#NOT NEEDED by me echo 'ndiswrapper' | sudo tee -a /etc/modules
#NOT NEEDED by me echo 'ENABLED=0' | sudo tee -a /etc/default/wpasupplicant

   
   



4. 
   As the wiki page mentions, there is a bug in Ubuntu/Hardy related to the ndiswrapper and ssb loadable modules, so after every boot, I do the following steps which I put in a little script, enable-wifi
   
   
#!/bin/bash
# This is ~/bin/enable-wifi
ndiswrapper -l
sudo depmod -a
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
sudo rmmod ssb
sudo rmmod ndiswrapper
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
sudo modprobe ssb

   
   After a few seconds the NetworkManager applet will start looking for wifi networks and automatically connect.
   
   I've tried following the wiki's instructions on making it permanent, but found that there were nasty kernel messages about the ssb loadable module dying and preventing ndiswrapper from loading.
   
   

The next post install step is to fix the audio driver. The sound card works okay, but doesn't turn off the speakers when a headphone is plugged in. The other great wiki page, https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/HP2133 has the solution. Essentially download and install alsa-driver-1.0.16_linux-headers-2.6.24-17-generic-1_i386.deb.

Why hasn't a fix been pushed into the repositories is unclear.


sudo mv /lib/modules/2.6.24-17-generic/ubuntu/sound/alsa-driver \
/lib/modules/2.6.24-17-generic.ubuntu.sound.alsa-driver.bak
sudo ln -s /lib/modules/2.6.24-17-generic/kernel/sound/ \
/lib/modules/2.6.24-17-generic/ubuntu/sound/alsa-driver


Although it may look like a lot of work, it wasn't that difficult. If you have problems, check back to the source wiki pages.

My new shiny hp 2133 mininote

Last month I ordered an hp 2133 mini-note with pre-installed Linux, specifically Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 and it was back ordered until last week.

Here are the obligatory unboxing photos.




Man it is tiny, but after a few hours of getting use to it, it isn't *too* small for typing. I'm getting to like the button under the space bar that disables the touchpad for when you are doing extended typing.


See the rest of the photos here:
HP 2133 mininote unboxing

I'll be blogging more about this nice hardware as I explore it -- hw specs, restore CDs, installing Ubuntu/Hardy and Fedora 9, and any little hints along the way.

Full Disclosure: While I do work for HP, it is not in any PC/notebook related area, although I do use Linux (RHEL4, OEL) on ProLiant servers on a daily basis. Also this a personal purchase for home use. I didn't even get an employee discount!

New Hampshire

We were in Concord visiting the Museum of NH History and stopped by the NH State House to look around inside. Just walking around looking at old paintings of Governors, checking out the legislator chambers, etc.

We walk by a Men's restroom and Trevor, being a smartass, hits the handicap button that opens the heavy door.

It opens -- and Governor John Lynch is washing his hands! Walking down the hall we get to talking and when he noticed my camera. He had an aid take a group photo in the Governor's Reception room.

I love this little state!

Stalking the Wild Trevor

Stalking the wild Trevor, originally uploaded by marcn.

Beaver Dam Panorama @ Grater Woods

Beaver Dam Panorama @ Grater Woods, originally uploaded by marcn.

Who uses my Creative Commons Flickr Photos?

Over 130 websites are using some of the photos I released under a Creative Commons license and are hosted on Flickr

Sites include:

huffingtonpost.com
wired.com
nerve.com
NHPR
motherjones.com
prospect.org
TheAtlantic
wikipedia.org

As well as a bunch of smaller, mostly political blogs.

The most popular photos are those of Hillary Clinton and John McCain from when there were campaigning for the NH Primary.

I keep a complete list of sites here:
Complete list of Who Uses My Creative Commons Flickr Photos

Trevor's Pbars routine

Trevor's Pbars routine

Originally uploaded by marcn

Now that Flickr has added video support, here is Trevor's parallel bar routine from last weekend's NH Championships, Level 6

See his high bar routine here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcn/2400001976/

How to connect a Samsung Flipshot U900 to Ubuntu/Linux

First purchase a USB cable that works with the Samsung Flipshot U900 -- I ordered one from 3GCables.com for $8.95 (and $6.95 s/h)

The default setting for the phone was to ask how it should present itself when connected via USB. The options are "Ask on Plug", "Copy To/From Card", "Sync Music" or "Modem"
Since I'm always going to use it like a usb-storage device, I changed it to always use "Copy To/From Card".

• 5. Settings & Tools


• 8. USB Auto Detection


• Change to "Copy From/To Card'.

Now you can copy files to /media/disk. My top level directory looks like this:


$ ls /media/disk/
my_files my_flix my_music my_pix my_sounds


Comparing the Samsung Flipshot U900 with a DSLR

This weekend I upgraded my phone to a Samsung Flipshot U900 which has a 3 megapixel camera. Now I have no excuse not to have a camera with me at all times...

Here is a comparison, as you can see the DSLR is much nicer, but the U900 takes a reasonable photo.

Turkey tracks

Turkey tracks

Originally uploaded by marcn

Griffin, Trevor and I were hiking over on the other side of Wildcat Falls and found these turkey tracks down by the Souhegan River.

Lunar Eclipse

Lunar Eclipse

Originally uploaded by marcn

From Merrimack, NH using a Sony A-100 DSLR and a 75-300mm Minolta lens.

Flying Trevor

Flying Trevor

Originally uploaded by marcn

See the rest of the photos from the Interstate Meeting here: Interstate Meet (Methuen, MA)

Trevor admires Ponemah Bog during winter

This morning Trevor and I hiked out to the Ponemah Bog in Amherst, NH.

Compare with these photos of Ponemah Bog

In the NY Times *twice* this week

First I'm mentioned in NY Times' blog The Caucus in Richardson Keeps Up a Cheerful Pace

For his final stop of the night, Mr. Richardson’s S.U.V. convoy — noticeably smaller than those of the other candidates — pulled into the parking lot of the Cinemagic IMAX movie theater in Hooksett where he mingled with a small crowd in the lobby not far from the popcorn and soda machines.

Marc Nozell, 49, who lives in nearby Merrimack brought his three sons to meet Mr. Richardson even though Mr. Nozell has already decided to vote for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. A campaign aide snapped a photo of the four of them with the candidate.

As he walked out of the theater, Mr. Nozell was laughing. The aide had left one of his sons out of the picture, but he was still pleased that Mr. Richardson had time to pose with them. Though, he said, it might not bode well for his campaign.

“If you are a candidate you don’t want to be accessible at this point,” he said. “You want to be a rock star like Obama or Hillary.”

Griffin was standing right next to Richardson's left. Here is the photo:



BTW, he got my age wrong.

And then today a photo in the online version of nytimes.com shows our entire family at the Hillary Primary party at Southern NH University.



All of my photos from last night's Hillary Clinton Primary victory party are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcn/sets/72157603677800683/

From behind the stage on Primary Night at Hillary Clinton Campaign

From behind the stage on Primary Night at Hillary Clinton Campaign

Originally uploaded by marcn

More photos later...

Only in NH, saw Presidential Candidate at lunch

Wendy and I had lunch at the India Palace in Nashua and a few minutes after being seated a Democratic presidential candidate comes in and has lunch. Unaccompanied. Only in NH on primary day!

Anyone want to guess who it was?

I do have a photo of this person in my Flickr photostream.

Hillary Clinton @ Manchester Rally

Hillary Clinton @ Manchester Rally

Originally uploaded by marcn

Last night we took all the kids up to see the last Hillary Clinton rally before the Primary today.



They were all troopers, especially Emma who fell asleep during it.


Wendy was psyched that Hillary signed her homemade sign.


Hillary, Bill and Chelsea Clinton

Check out all the photos from last night: Hillary Clinton Rally, Manchester NH