Noah's Randomness

I was looking to find an iPhone app that would allow me to upload pictures automatically from my iPhone to my gallery on this site. So, with that said, I googled for a few to see what apps I could find that would allow me to do this. I came up with two (that interact/upload to Gallery2, the photo gallery software I use on this site). They are PixelPipe and Eye-Fi, both available in the Apple App Store for “free” (notice the free in quotes — I’ll get to that in just a few).

PixelPipe

Eye-Fi

So after finding the two, I downloaded them and installed both of them to my iPhone. Up first — Eye-Fi. I went to open it and it asked me for my username and password. Not having one, I returned to the Eye-Fi Website assuming I could register for one. Once there I found that in order to get an account, one must own one of Eye-Fi’s Secure Digital card products. So, in essence, this “free” application actually costs $49.99 (which is the cost of Eye-Fi’s lowest cost product). Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE/Fix Information: I found out that this was all related to the previous solution of disabling the postgresql instance on the machine. I had (mistakenly) thought that by doing /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 stop that BackTrack’s posgresql instance would stop. Unfortunately I was wrong, and a “ps aux | grep -i sql” showed me this. After I did a “kill <PID>” I removed all NeXpose files/folders and reinstalled it. However it still wouldnt run correctly/gave me the same error. After some discussion in #rapid7 on irc.freenode.net, I was informed that NeXpose requires 1GB of RAM. So I edited my VMWare config to provide 1GB of RAM to my BackTrack guest.

However, then I had another issue — the NeXpose server kept crashing after starting. So, again I turned to the guys in #rapid7. With their help, I ran “cd /opt/rapid7/nexpose/nsc && rm conf/nsc.xml && ./nsc.sh” and voila! Success! Read the rest of this entry »

At approximately 1 AM on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 I was returning to the fire station from a scene of a medical assistance call. While driving on Bethel Lane, a deer jumped out in front of my car. I attempted to avoid it, but unfortunately was not able to do so.

The pictures below show the aftermath:

And here’s the car post repair work:

Thanks to the guys at Bloomington Autoplex for their great service and work on my car. It looks even better than ever! Even though there were delays (I was supposed to have my car back on Friday, December 11th but due to an issue with receiving a specific part, I did not get it back until Wednesday, December 16th).

On top of that, they took the time to go the extra mile and buff out some extra scratches that have occurred over the past few years on my driver’s door (and were unrelated to this accident). Thanks again and great job, Bloomington Autoplex!

If you’re having the same problem I did, where when you upload an image to WordPress it does not let you change it from the original uploaded size, then simply do the following (on Gentoo): emerge gd

For those of you on other distros, try doing the same thing with your package manager, or just install the GD libraries from scratch (you can find them here: http://www.libgd.org)

Of course, this won’t be effective without recompiling PHP to use GD, so again, on Gentoo: emerge php And again, on other distros, you’ll have to do some digging yourself to either A) use your package manager to recompile PHP or B) recompile it by hand.

Once that’s all said and done, you should be able to click the buttons to select a small, medium, or large image as well as the original one. Nifty? I think so…

From left to right: Yellow (Probationary Firefighter) Helmet, Rookie of the Year award, Black (Active Firefighter) Helmet

Out with the old, in with the new. Last night at the Bloomington Twp Fire Dept. December Business Meeting, I was presented with my Black Helmet (Right), which means that I’ve been released from probationary firefighter (probie) status and am now considered an active firefighter.

On the left is my old yellow helmet that designated me as a probie with BTFD which I’ve had and worn for almost a year now.

In the middle is the Rookie of the Year award that I was presented with at the BTFD Christmas Party on Saturday Night!

Finally — Thank you to all of those who have helped me get to where I am today in the fire service. I couldn’t have done it without all of my Fire Department family and friends (BTFD members both paid and volunteer, as well as those from other Monroe County departments), as well as my friends and family who’ve been there to support me along the way. I can’t thank you all enough!

When I first tried to add my blog to the iPhone WordPress app, it kept coming up with this error: NSXMLParserErrorDomain error 5. I did a bit of research on the WordPress for iPhone Forums but everything I tried did not help. Read the rest of this entry »