Daniel E. Markle's Blog

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.

From Motorcycle Adventures

After Michael let me ride his Honda Shadow and thoroughly enjoying riding every second I was upright, it was clear to me it was time to take the plunge and buy one.

Needing a smaller cycle I could handle more easily starting out, I found this used 2008 Honda Rebel 250 on Craig's List.

Oh, and I owe Michael a left rear tail light.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Mifflin County Model Railroad Club set up the new O gauge layout at the Reedsville Christmas Craft Show this year:



Also included in the video is an in-progress N gauge layout, a tabletop Z gauge, and the O gauge layout being raffled off this year as a fundraiser.

I also took these Photos of MCMRRC at the 2010 Reedsville Christmas Craft Show.

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.

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.