Merry Christmas!!

I just put our new card up on our flickr album.  Merry Christmas to you all!!  This has been an eventful year, but as always, the changes and challenges have been for the better.   I continue to be so grateful for my wonderful family and extended family!  Heavenly Father has always been so kind to us!  

Hope you all have a very merry Christmas and a wonderful new year!

Lessons learned about ssh key authentication

So, we just replaced our test box with a virtual Solaris 10 box running on VMWare and Intel.  We moved over everything from our old test box including our subversion (svn) repository.  I had no trouble putting my public key on the box and getting ssh to work without any password required, so I was able to use svn+ssh with no trouble.  I am using Mac OS X which made it VERY slick!

My boss using Windows, Putty, and Pagent could not get the password prompt to go away no matter what he or I did even though it worked just fine on the old test box.  Our Unix admin that set up the box was also at a loss.  After reading everything we could on the internet and copying and transmitting and changing keys so many times we wanted to barf I sat down to find out what was different about his account.  

I switched his public keys in authorized_keys to mine and tried to connect.... no dice!  So it was something about the remote system.  I checked the passwd file and the group file...he was set up just like me.  Everyone said to check the permissions of the .ssh folder and the files in it, but they were all OK.  Then I actually copied my home directory into his home directories place and changed the owner of the files.  Then I could log right in.

It turned out that the difference was that his home directory had somehow become world readable and that prevented it from working!  

So, here are the things to check if you can't get it to work:

1. Make sure your home directory's permissions are drwxr-xr-x (chmod 755)
2. Make sure your .ssh directory's permissions are drwx------ (chmod 700)
3. Make sure your authorized_keys file permissions are -rw------- (chmod 600)
4. Make sure the 3 files above are owned by your user.
5. Make sure the public key in your authorized_keys file is one long line with no breaks.
6. Check your sshd_config file (/etc/ssh/sshd_config on Solaris 10) is set up with
   
   PubkeyAuthentication yes
   
   This is the default, so just don't set it to no.

Also, it doesn't matter where you make the key (client or server) just as long as you put the public key on the server and the private key on the client.  The otherwise very nice post at 

http://www.andremolnar.com/how_to_set_up_ssh_keys_with_putty_and_not_get_server_refused_our_key

is incorrect on this (It might help you avoid the issue in #5 above though).

Bates Haunt 2008 Is Done!

You can now watch Bates Haunt 2008 on youtube.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvA2pBinSqM

I kept trying to improve the quality, but my 10 year old video camera is on its last leg, and this is the best I could do.  Make sure to look at my flickr album to see stills of what things really look like.   Also check out the haunts section of batesbunch.com for a new page on this year's haunt with more info. (coming soon)

Now I'm moving on to working on our deck and basement.  They need to be done by mid next month so that our city doesn't get after me about my building permit. 

Thanks to all the support of Heidi and the gang while I spend all my time on this yearly craziness!

Tired But Happy

Well, I survived another Halloween.  I stayed up and skipped work for the last 3 days to finish the two new songs and Mac Adobe Premiere switchover.   I am now very tired!  

This was the tightest year yet..  I finally finished arranging and recording my new songs about 4pm on Thursday.  Then I spent from 7 till 11 in that horrible makeup with my teeth itching something fierce!  I figured it was time for the all nighter, so I worked until 5 in the morning laying out the rest of the new song effects (including the all important faces).  It looked ok, I hadn't tested it or anything, but I was exhausted after a week of 3am nights.  

I crashed while it rendered.  My wife is great, and my kids had school off, I got up at about 9 helped my wife for a minute.  She took them away to the children's museum so I could work and they could enjoy the Halloween activities there.  I had messaged my boss to tell him I was still going to try to work a half day, but after crashing until 11 when the render was to complete, and finding that I had too many problems to try to use the render.  I worked feverishly to fix the bugs and get the render started.  During this time my boss said I shouldn't try to come in.  Thanks Mike!  I was still adding effects to the movie at 1pm on Halloween.  Then I had a 6 hour render ahead of me (I was hoping it would be a bit faster).  

Premiere kept crashing the whole time because my movie is getting too hard for it I guess.  However it was rock solid in the renders (thank goodness!)  In the old days of Premiere 2.0 all the way to 7.0  they had problems where I would get half way through the render and then have a crash.  Or worse there was one bug where the whole render would complete, but it would not finish "blessing" the movie file to make it work!  I am very happy now but I need to start doing some simplification of the movie (pre-render more parts) to bring it back to safety. 

I spent the afternoon doing the rest of the physical setup that I hadn't done last week, and at 6:45 I carried out two laptops which were copying the movie between each other over to my projector.  By 7 we were on our way!

The two new songs were a hit.  Everyone especially loves the Kiss face makeup for the Pumpkin Rot song.  I am so glad they are fairly recognizable.  Everyone came by.  Old friends and many family members.  Gordon had his awesome new costume for the year, as well as Madeline and Josh.  I was so nice to see everyone, and have a chance to watch the show together.   What a fun time, pigging out on candy and talking.  All in all we probably had about 5-6 hundred visitors that got treats.  Then by about 10:30 everyone had left.  I spent about another hour and a half taking pictures etc.  Then cleanup, and bed by 3 again.  

Anyway, that was the crazy day, and the end of the crazy week at the Bates Haunt.  

Halloween is a great holiday.  I realized the other day that Halloween is a holiday that is more about neighbors than it is about family...  An unusual thing, and very nice.  I think we should make it a paid holiday since I know I will never work on it at my day job.  

Thanks to everyone that supports me this time of year, and gives me nice compliments.!  I'm so glad we can give everyone a good time, and give me an outlet for my creative juices.

Tribune article about my haunter's group

http://www.sltrib.com/athome/ci_10707188 I'm surprised he likes the hand enough to comment on it. I love that the one time in my life I get quoted in the paper, I'm saying something as witty and improper as "There's lots of fun things I can do". =D Such eloquence... How did that get by the editors...

So much for my 15 minutes of fame.... ;-)

Steve my brother-in-law commented:

Awww... c'mon, Dave - don't be too hard on yourself.  You said several intelligent things... like "hey thieves... I leave a very expensive laptop and video projector outside every year!"  =)  just kidding.  Good for you my friend.  -Steve

Why Snot!!

Dang.  It happens this time every year.  I've got that pesky change of seasons cold.  They keep taking all the good stuff out of all the drugs leaving us with sugar and some to acetaminophen make us think it is doing something.  Does acetaminophen work on anyone anymore.  I have never had any luck.  

Anyway, I've always wondered why we can't just put in a little switch on our noses to turn off the running and the sneezing.  It seems that it never has really worked as God intended.  All it does is cause worse infections than not having mucus at all.  Just think how many diseases would be basically cured with a little aspirin if snot was a thing of the past.  Plus I wouldn't have to keep wiping my kids noses, and telling them not to pick them (and not to eat it!!).

I think we should get to work on the snot shut off valve right away.  I'd have the installation surgery in a minute.   They could just leave it in the off position permanently as far as I'm concerned.   I'll use some nice nose spray if things ever got too dry.

October Again...

Always seems like October sneaks up on me.  I am never ready for my haunt.  I have one new song written called "Pumpkin Rot!".  I am hoping for another about the house itself.   We'll see if they happen.  I wanted to do a new projector, but it seems that it may not happen.  I haven't sold enough of my DVDs to cover the hefty price of my favorite projector.  Hopefully it will go crazy as people slip into the spirit of the season.   Anyway, I'll let you know how it is going...

The new Batesbunch.com

It's finished.  Now if my haunts page looked anywhere near as good.  Most of my visitors are headed there anyway.  Oh well, I can say that I did it!!  It now has dynamic blogs feeds as well as the flickr stuff.  Hopefully my cool little css tricks are making it look nice and slick on your computer.  If they aren't, then you should get a better browser.  

Speaking of browsers.  Firefox's problem with negative css z-index values was causing me all sorts of problems with my semi-transparent backgrounds.  I think I found a solution though.  Once I explicitly set the z-index of the containing divs to 3 the problem went away.  My guess is that Firefox doesn't mind if 3-1 is greater than 0.

Dynamic BatesBunch

I put in quite a bit of time this weekend into an upgrade to batesbunch.com.  My goal was to turn my old fashioned home page into a dynamic RSS aggregator of all of our stuff.  I started by finding pageflakes and google widgets, but no one made the widgets I wanted.  They didn't work, or they weren't configurable enough.  So I ended up deciding to write my own. 

I am a jquery fan (at least a fan of the library's power, if not the chain writing style), and I started to look into JSON so that I could eliminate the need for backend processing of my feeds.  It has worked out great!  I now have a nice dynamic flickr slideshow (which took forever to get firefox to do right), as well as a list of my photosets.  Flickr's api rocks!

I am now working on my blogger stuff (which does not rock as much...lots of garbage in the interface).   I expected more from google...but.  Then add some layout work and voilla!  

I want it to be an easily lifted template for others, so everyone can leverage my work.  Still working on it, then I'll stuff it in a library for others to use.

Flickr rama

Ok, after much investigation I have decided to start using flickr for my online photos and videos. I chose flicker because of their nice slideshow interface, and better price compared to smugmug (which has a slightly better interface).  Also because of the nice plugin for iPhoto I found to make it soooo easy.

I will slowly be uploading my whole huge iPhoto library.  I am not sure if I will leave it all public or not.  Now my sister-in-law can start commenting on my photos like she always wanted, and you can see nice slide shows.  I am using ffexport for iPhoto.  A very nice free plugin that just lets me ship off my photos and videos in a few clicks.  Maybe batesbunch.com is just going to become a landing site without much real meat.  We'll see.   

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dhbatesbunch

Too bad someone already stole batesbunch... Oh well, I'll always have batesbunch.com.

10 Days and No Sign of Lice

I like that stuff.  Also my wife did a wonderful job of getting rid of the nits by working on it for many hours in the full sun.  At least it worked!

Head Lice treatment LiceMD

Last Monday my daughter came home from school with a full on attack of head lice.  Very exciting.  Well anyway after searching on the internet looking for the right "cure", I came across a post about LiceMD which is available at WalMart.  All natural (so they say) and non-toxic to humans.  Too good to be true?  Well, all I can say is that after 10 minutes I combed out tons of bugs, and they were all dead as a doornail.  The stuff didn't seem scary at all.  Seems like it is kinda like a premixed blend of all the other stuff they say takes care of the bugs, eggs, etc.  It's kinda like bug killing mayo with some solvent for the egg glue and some tea leaf and other oils to keep them away.  Really cool, and it left my daughters hair really nice.   

Everyone said how badly the Rid stuff stinks, and I believe them.  I tried some of it too, and it has horrible chemicals and is dangerous in about every way possible.  Made my daughter start to have an allergic reaction.  Didn't do anything to help their hair be smooth and uninviting to the bugs.   Seemed like it was designed to burn them out, taking your hair with it.

I'll let you know how it goes in a few days.  We of course worked tirelessly to pick every last non hair out of her hair too with one of the metal combs.  Hopefully we won the first time, and we won't have any more trouble.

Pay Pal Buttons

Pay Pal makes it really easy for you to add "shopping" to your website.  I was surprised about the little button creator that have on their site.  It was very slick.  Now people can click and buy stuff from me.  Of course, now I am stuck with a Premiere account, and the constant fees.  They offer a great service though, so I'm not complaining.

Maybe I should put something here

Well, I guess i'm gonna start putting something in here.  This blog should end up being a pile of junk that I figure out every day.  I hope it can help others, and I can look back at it and say "hey, I actually did something."