My first RC helicopter; a Syma 108g From RC Flight

At the Greensburg Train show in York last weekend a vendor was flying these RC Helicopters around his booth. Impressed by his precision and the low price, I purchased this one. About the length of my hand, it's designed for indoor use only.

I have been interested in RC aircraft for a while and was considering getting into the hobby this year. Although I was thinking airplanes, flying these around the house is surprisingly fun and not tied to good weather conditions. Helicopters I have looked at in the past were either ridiculously expensive, hard to fly, or both, but modern gyro technology now common in cell phones has made these quite reasonable in price and very stable to fly.

Now to land one of these on a train flatcar . . .

From Motorcycle Adventures

On Thanksgiving Day this year I rode over 300 miles to Cleveland on my VStar motorcycle to visit my sister. The picture at the left was taken upon my arrival at Crocker Park in the evening.

Heading out at 10:30 in the morning it was about 50 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny, a beautiful day for a ride. I decided not to put the windshield on the bike as it reduces my ability to control airflow with layers of clothing and is too hot with my winter gear on at those temperatures.
Continue reading "Thanksgiving Ride to Ohio"

Today was my last day of full time employment at the PA Capitol Preservation Committee. Thanks to everyone who made me feel welcome over the years. To commemorate my many commutes, enjoy this motorcycle video including part of a favorite route to work on my 2008 Honda Rebel.

My Rebel Parked at Work on a Considerably Warmer Day, From Motorcycle Adventures

Headed to work today, it was 32.7 degrees F with fog. I was convinced, seeing the sun starting to poke out, all would be fine once I got to the top of the mountain and out of our valley of perpetual fog.

I started up the Rebel and after warming up a while, I lurched out the lane (still wasn't warm yet, had to increase choke and putter along; pretty common below 50F). Even though visibility was less than ideal, the roads were clean and dry. After puttering along across the valley, half opening my visor as needed to clear it and at times so I could see at all, I made it to the top of the mountain, but alas, the fog continued in the next valley.

Continue reading "First Motorcycle Commute in Fall Fog"

In Liferay 6.0 GA4 Community Edition there is an error in the CKEditor configuration; different configuration files are used to define the editing toolbar for the web content and other areas depending on the browsing path. This results in an issue where the toolbar changes seemingly at random. This is fixed in the Enterprise Edition and for future versions, but for those of us using the current Community Edition, the following workaround is useful.

The most problematic disappearing item for my use case is the spell checker; the same method can be used to restore other buttons as necessary. Back up, then apply this ckconfig.jsp patch to the Liferay root web app. For the tomcat download this is located in the liferay-portal-6.0.6/tomcat-6.0.29/webapps/ROOT/html/js/editor/ckeditor/ directory. Shut down Liferay, remove the tomcat work directory to clear the cache, then restart Liferay.

From Cooking

Items we had on hand at the time and Karen's suggestion of using instant pudding as icing resulted in this delicious combination.

Continue reading "Lemon Blueberry Cake"

For a few weeks now Google Maps has a bug where 22/322 at Clark's Ferry is impassible via through route directions. This is not the first time I have found bugs in Google Maps, but it is the first one I have seen involving a major highway.
Continue reading "Google Maps Clark's Ferry Bug"

Loyalsock Valley Antique Machinery Association Show

Although rain from the previous day resulted in the cancellation of the tractor parade and poor attendance, there were still many tractors on display at the 2011 Loyalsock Valley Antique Machinery Association Show. One advantage to going on Sunday is hearing and seeing them pull out, which was a reasonable substitute for the parade.

An operating steam-powered sawmill was at the event, along with a selection of other operating pre-gasoline tractor motors.

Other features of the event include food vendors and a flea market with a wide variety of interesting items from wooden tool handles to fine china.

From Motorcycle Adventures

Attended Carlisle Bike Fest 2011 this year. Enjoyed looking at the rides people came in on; much of the show is the bikes people bring which they park in the middle of the show in wide enough aisles to easily wander up and down.

Other enjoyable attractions included the demo rides (which I didn't qualify for this year due to only having a permit, but watching and listening to new bikes was still cool), Biker Billy's cooking show (watch out if you're in the audience at one of these, he actively seeks victims to roast), and the Disc Connected K9's.

I drove in via a cage this year, scared off by the threat of rain which never materialized. By next year I hope to be more adventuresome.

Although Apple uses standard protocols for Airprint, the service is very picky about the exact broadcast settings before the printer will show up on iOS devices. The easiest way I've found to Airprint to an office workgroup printer:

• Configure the printer to be printable via a Linux / CUPS server. On Debian install the cups and cups-pdf packages then log in via port 631 and configure the workgroup printer, making sure a test page prints.


• Add ServerAlias * in /etc/cups.conf; this prevents "Request from x using invalid Host: field" errors.


• Install avahi, on Debian use the avahi-daemon package.


• Run this handy airprint-generate script. Copy the resulting file to /etc/avahi/services/ and restart avahi and cups.

Airprint should now be working for your iOS devices on the local network.

From Miscellaneous

This Eastern Garter Snake was waiting for me on my shop workbench this morning. As soon as I saw him I ran to get my camera, fortunately he was still there for a portrait.

At the motorcycle store this week a kiosk for the GoPro HD video camera caught my attention. I had been looking to pick up a helmet mounted camera for on-motorcycle recording and this one fits the bill nicely.


This first video is a short one headed out the lane.


Then this longer video shows the helmet mounted camera in use on a longer ride.

Next time I will likely try to point downward more as the front of the motorcycle is not visible and I like that effect on other YouTube videos, but I am not disappointed with this 'flying through the air' look either focusing more on the scenery.

Out on the shooting range with my sister and brother in law, I recorded this fun video of them alternating shots:



As my sister says it best in the video, "that's awesome!"

When using Spring annotation based controllers, @RequestMapping must be applied to a method as well as the class or it will not work. For example:

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/blah.html")
public MyController {
 @ModelAttribute("session")
 public InventorySession getSession() {
  return session;
 }
}

Will result in No mapping found for HTTP request with URI [/[contextpath]/blah.html] errors. Request methods (or sub-pages) must be mapped to controller methods, i.e.:

. . .
 @RequestMapping(method={RequestMethod.GET})
 public String getForm() {
  return "formView.jsp";
 }
. . .

This mistake is particularly easy to make when migrating older code to the newer annotation based model, where mappings on legacy code may make it (erroneously) appear such linking is done in the xml file already.

Spring, my favorite Java application framework, doesn't provide an easy way to bind Spring-managed session beans to JSP pages. I have had success doing this by binding the bean to the request at creation time. When doing it this way, be sure to call the session bean somewhere in your dispatch servlet configuration or it will never be initialized when individual requests are created.

Note that for most applications, session beans are better left as plain objects managed independently of Spring for less overhead and to keep them as simple as possible. Each of these is going to take up space for each user. However, I have found some cases where accessing Spring objects from within a session bean is desirable; if you have as well or curiosity prevails, details are below.
Continue reading "Spring Session Bind to JSP"

After upgrading to Debian squeeze, snmp output will change; the descriptions are missing.

Before squeeze (i.e. in lenny):
$ snmpget -v1 -On -c public printer.example.com 1.3.6.1.2.1.25.3.5.1.1.1
.1.3.6.1.2.1.25.3.5.1.1.1 = INTEGER: idle(3)
After squeeze upgrade:
$ snmpget -v1 -On -c public printer.example.com 1.3.6.1.2.1.25.3.5.1.1.1
.1.3.6.1.2.1.25.3.5.1.1.1 = INTEGER: 3

This is because the MIB files were stripped from squeeze due to licensing reasons. Install the snmp-mibs-downloader package and comment out the line in /etc/snmp/snmp.conf as described in that config file. Non-free will need to be enabled in apt sources if you are not finding the package. See the Debian wiki section on snmp for added information.

Debian 6 Squeeze release is imminent. This will be the first release where I'm the maintainer for a Debian package.

After trying out some HO slot cars in the store at English's Model Railroad Supply, I decided to try out a set. I set up an AFX 24 Hour Champions set I acquired at Kranzels Hobbies in the basement.

Finding this to be a nice diversion from my usual digital pursuits and a complement to my model train hobby, I acquired a few more cars. After racing for a while, I found the floor was too dirty and was gumming up my cars, so I returned to English's and picked up a Life-Like Stock Car Thunder set as I remembered it having a reasonable sized footprint for a table top. This set is the one shown in my current slot car gallery photos along with some cars I've acquired along the way.

With Thunderjets, XTraction, Mega-G, Tracker T, and other types available all having varying magnets, tire, frame, chassis, and guide pin designs, racing them for best lap times is more complicated than it appears with the deceptive 'all you have is a trigger' technology. They're also surprisingly inexpensive (especially when compared to my computer and train hobbies). A friend had told me a few months ago that I should get into cars; this may not be what he meant but I'm certainly finding it fits the bill for me.

I've been looking at the various e-reader/tablet options for a while without finding anything compellingly more interesting than my netbook. Android tablets until now have been too slow to be fun to use and are riddled with technical problems, the iPad is too large for easy portability, is nearly as heavy as a netbook, and has a low ppi screen I find insufficient for reading, and the various e-readers didn't have color screens and/or had poor support for DRM-free formats.

Enter the Barnes and Noble nook color; this device has the better portability I am looking for, something I can slip into my coat pocket when I head to the coffee shop, a reasonably high ppi screen I find comfortable to read, and supports DRM-free ePub, PDF, and plain text formats. As shown on the screen, it's great for reading comic books in PDF form like Marvel's Complete Iron Man Collection. Gutenberg project ePub books work great on the device, as do other DRM-free ePub books available online directly from publishers. There are also various magazines online in PDF form including Model Railroad Hobbyist.

It has a shop as well, but until such shops are DRM-free I strongly recommend avoiding buying anything from them. Read EFF's The Right to Read before being tempted to purchase DRM materials of any kind, especially with so many other freedom preserving options available online.

If receiving e-mails like this from Zimbra after upgrading to 6.0.9:

/etc/cron.daily/logrotate:
error: zimbra:5 unknown user 'USER'
run-parts: /etc/cron.daily/logrotate exited with return code 1

See this forum post on a 6.0.9 logrotate issue. In a nutshell, edit /etc/logrotate.d/zimbra and replace USER GROUP with zimbra zimbra.

“weirdly sexy giant mutant Smurfs battle futuristic human intruders on an ethereal planet, covered with giant trees and huge, snarling creatures”

• Luke Holland at Den of Geek

A wonderfully succinct summary of Avatar.

I was recently asked how to do custom date parsing in Perl, specifically for a date in the format mmddyyyy. I work with dates frequently in Java, so I am familiar with using SimpleDateFormat objects to parse dates in this manner. The Perl equivalent is Date::Manip::Date.
Continue reading "Perl Custom Date Parsing"

In August I attended Debconf 10. My primary goals were to learn more about the current status of the Debian community, particularly in the face of Ubuntu's rise to popularity, and to fix the package xtrkcad for Debian, which used an outdated library.
Continue reading "Debconf 10"