Monday, October 11, 2010

Link Shrink Adfly Service?

Has anyone else used the Adf.ly URL shrinking service before? Looks like an interesting service though it does cause you an extra click for users to get to you link. I found it as a referral in my Google Analytics data.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Panoramic Eklutna Lake Mug

Just went on a bike ride along the Eklutna Lake near Chugiak and captured this wonderful panoramic view looking down the lake.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Rambling Code

I've been experimenting with Amazon S3 service for one of my latest projects and didn't see many examples out there so I thought I would share some code snippets. Being cheap I wanted trying to keep my storage costs down so I opted to use the reduced redundancy feature of S3. I was having trouble getting the change storage type function to work correctly when I discovered that the following code will work to reduce the storage space when you upload it. Here are two sample lines that will work to save you some money on S3.
To upload new objects with reduced redundancy set use the following line of code.

$result = $s3->batch()->create_object($bucket, $filename, array( 'fileUpload' =>$file, 'storage'=>'REDUCED_REDUNDANCY' ) );

To change existing objects redundancy setting .

$result = $s3->change_storage_redundancy( $bucket, $filename, 'REDUCED_REDUNDANCY' );

Here is how to list all of the objects in a bucket. Not recommended if you have lots objects.

$result = $s3->list_objects($bucket);
foreach( $result->body->Contents as $r ) {

   echo $r->Key;
}

I'm using the Simple PHP S3 Class. I hope you have found this useful.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Yet another postcard.

Check out the new postcard of Mt. Redoubt in the sunset. It appears that the mountain is on fire but it is only the setting sun positioned perfectly behind it.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Bird List

Saw several birds this afternoon at Potters Marsh:
  • Bald Eagle
  • Northern Shoveler
  • Green-winged teal
  • Some type of Gull
  • Greater or lesser Scaup
  • Red-necked grebe
  • American wigeon
  • Northern Pintail 
  • Mallard

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Memory Card File Recovery

Yesterday one of my students was doing an interview with someone and recording it onto my Fostex MR-8. At first everything appeared to be fine. I played back the beginning of the clip and it sounded good but when I went back to process the file it had just disappeared. The MR-8 stores files on a compact flash card (CF) so I searched around and stumbled upon the program photorec which is part of the testdisk package in Linux. I also found out that it also works with other systems such as Windows and Mac.

The the menu was pretty straight forward and the program worked flawlessly and I was able to recover the lost wav file. If you have a basic understanding of how file systems work and their abbreviations it is pretty simple to use.
Nithin Kamath's Weblog

Detailed instructions can be found at the photorec website that will walk you through how to recover your files. I found this website through
Nithin Kamath's Weblog: Recover deleted files from Memory card in Linux
Thanks Christophe & Nithin.