Today I decided to force SSL access to my gallery2 installation when uploading photos with iPhoto2Gallery. This involved several steps (informed by the iPhoto2Gallery FAQ):

1. Make sure you can access your gallery2 installation via SSL (webserver config mostly assumed for the purposes of this post, though setting baseUri in gallery2/config.php to include https:// is also useful).
2. Make sure regular http access to your gallery2 installation is disabled:

I added the following to the relevant VirtualHost tag in my apache config file (e.g., sites-enabled/000-default in Debian / Ubuntu):

# Prevent non-SSL access to content in /var/www/gallery2
<directorymatch “^/var/www/gallery2/”>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}
</directorymatch>

Don’t forget to restart your web server. (sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart).

3. If you’re using a self-signed certificate, you must add it to OS X’s key manager. I clicked the lock icon in the bottom right of Firefox while connected to my site via SSL and selected “export” to export the certificate. Save it somewhere with a .crt extension. Double-click it to load the OS X keychain manager. It should import successfully. One must then edit its “Trust” settings and “Always Allow” SSL.

At this point iPhoto2Gallery worked as expected, connecting only via SSL. Note that I did have to delete my existing entry in iPhoto2Gallery and add a new one, this time including https:// in the URL and selecting the “Use SSL” checkbox.

Reporting tree problems, road problems, water main breaks, etc is actually quite easy. Just dial 311 in the Pittsburgh area. There’s also an online form available. The city seems to perceive these services as being part of the Mayor’s Office, and not directly the public works dept, etc.

This is an interesting little rant.

I recently raced in the Grassroots Racing Point-to-Point, which I will hopefully write about soon. Anyways, it took us on the first 18 miles of the Laurel Highlands Hiking Trail.

This trail was previously unknown to me but it is quite beautiful and nicely located within about 90 minutes of Pittsburgh. The “first 18 miles” to me is the southernmost part of the trail from Ohiopyle to Rt 653.

In trying to plan a “family-friendly” hike on the next part of the trail, I have decided that Rt 653 to Rt 31 is too far. Grindle Ridge Shelter is located along that stretch, but there does not appear to be any car access. However, that stretch also seems to go through Seven Springs, right around Lake Tahoe. I thus embarked on a mission to try to figure out where at Seven Springs it crosses, since I know the ski resort fairly well.

Here is a thread in the DeLorme forums about a fellow who has hiked the whole trail and posted some GPS information in .an1 (DeLorme-proprietary format). I used GPS Babel (free – GPL’d) to convert lm1_70points.an1 to a KML file, and then load that with Google Earth. It is then pretty easy to see that the trail crosses Seven Springs property between miles 26 and 28.

“Dane” also has some information about the LHHT, which includes the following:

Oct 07, 2008…Please be advised the park has made some route changes to the LHHT, specifically, the area around Lake Tahoe at Seven Springs Mountain Resort. Hikers are now being re-routed around the opposite side of Lake Tahoe. New signage and posts with yellow blazes have been installed.

Thus, the trail goes right along the edge of Lake Tahoe. Perfect. I will try to update this post to confirm that Seven Springs is a reasonable waypoint for a hike on this trail.

Update 2009-10-25

Just hiked from Rt 653 to 7 springs. The trail does indeed come up from behind Lake Tahoe. It is very well marked with yellow blazes. It continues on and passes beneath the ski lift that I think of as the North Face Quad. After that we hiked to our car in the north face parking lot. I’m not sure where the trail goes after this… yet!

Just what the doctor ordered: here.

Firefly, Gumstix, Olimex, and Sparkfun all sell interesting stuff. For some reason I sometimes have trouble remembering these guys’ names.

One of those is an HP 8530p laptop. Updating to BIOS F.0E will prevent the problem, but if it has already happened, these instructions may be able to help.

Intel DQ45CB boards may also have a similar problem.

I usually go to Thought Police or Chrysaor. The Chrysaor images tend to have VMware Tools already installed, which can make life more pleasant (but sometimes more complicated).

Use the torrents! They’re fast and folks like these two couldn’t provide these images if they had to pay for the bandwidth!

I just discovered that the Ubuntu kernel team maintains a “testing” build of the latest kernels from kernel.org. This enables the convenient downloading of .deb-based versions of the latest kernel. Here it is:
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/
Some wiki info about it:
https://wiki.edubuntu.org/Testing/KernelPPA