It has been a while since I last blogged – things have been crazy – I have been taking a lot of pictures in my image blog. Lots of work, lots of travel, and a new scooter for my son Brent.

I come up with things I want to write about but the 500 message inbox beckons.

Success is not about avoiding chaos. Sometimes the only path to a goal leads through chaos. Success is about understanding and embracing the chaos. With enough chaos and enough time, any problem can be solved. For a good example of this look at the scientific explanation regarding the formation of life.

In the pursuit of success, it is better to be lucky than good. But having both a bit of skill and luck is a good insurance policy.

The overall best combination for success include liberal portions of luck, skill, time, and chaos.

What a week this has been.

My Motorola camera phone has a bug that I finally figured out.

I had noticed that when I took a picture and it goes to the Store / Discard the picture looks good, but after you select send the picture looks funky. I knew it was motion related, but could not tell when the problem occured.

I nailed the problem while taking a picture at IU Fort Wayne (above). I was taking a picture of the campus sign when a car drive through the frame. In the preview (Store/Discard) screen the car was on the right side of the frame. It was well framed – the car was on the right and the campus sign was on the left – it was lucky – so I wanted to save it.

However when I stored it, the car was on the left side of the frame – resulting in a crappy picture because the car obscures the sign.

But – I found the bug. Apparently some how two frames are grabbed about 1/4 second apart. The first frame is used for the preview and the second is stored. There are several possible explanantions for this – the first might be the last frame in the preview frame buffer at a lower resolution (say 160×120) while the second is the fuull 640×480 picture.

But overall this is very cool! I am *not* insane.

OK, authentication guru Jim Basney explained it to me and I have
solved the issue.

The reason control channel authentication was succeeding and data
channel authentication was failing was because of where Globus looks
for trusted certificates for users.

the client is running in OGSA, so trusted certs are determined in
cog.properties.

in.ftpd runs as root, and it finds trusted certificates in
/etc/grid-security/certificates. (if I had had a
/root/.globus/certificates directory, it would have used that).

then for the data channel in.ftpd does a setuid to futrelle (who I
map to in the gridmap file). in that case, it found a
~futrelle/.globus/certificates directory, which I thought wouldn’t
matter but it did, and I didn’t happen to have the alliance CA cert
in that directory. so data channel authentication failed.

If you have a patch that is created with:
sh$ diff -Nur [old-src-dir] [new-src-dir] > my-patch
you apply that patch by typing:
sh$ ls my-patch
my-patch
sh$ cd [src-dir]/
sh$ patch -p1 < ../my-patch
--- Short and sweet

Don’t use cvs update when what you want to use is cvs diff – you get the same information, but if you do it the wrong way you end up all sticky.

Explanation:

I learned this the hard way – I kept checking information out, modifying it, and using cvs update to check where I had mods and then when I wanted to check things back in I had to use cvs update -A to get rid of the sticky bit – cursing CVS the whole time…

Q: What is the difference between open-source and commercial software?

A: If you have a problem with commercial software you can call a phone
number and they will tell you it might be solved in a future version.
For open-source sofware there isn’t a phone number to call, but you
get the solution within a day.