You can read the full story of the Cabazon Dinosaurs here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabazon_Dinosaurs

Helped some friends by taking their family Christmas photos. This particular one probably isn’t the one they’ll pick to send with their Christmas cards, but it’s easily my favorite.

Halloween evening, Emily and I took our cameras to the heart of downtown LA with the intent of getting a few interesting long exposure photographs. I’m always on the lookout for interesting photo locations and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power recently came up on my radar because of the reflection pool that surrounds the building.

The conditions could not have been better for a night shoot and we were both very pleased with our photos. Clear skies on a warm October night!

You can see another image from this shoot here.

This photo is licensed by GettyImages. All rights reserved.

The easiest way to set these as your phone’s wallpaper is to surf to this page on your phone, then tap and hold on the poster image. iPhone will give you an option to “save image”. After that, open the settings app, select “wallpaper” then “camera roll” and select the image you just saved.

UPDATE – Oct 31, 2009: I added another 5 thanks to a commenter. See Dan’s comment bellow for a link to Flickr for more. Thank you Dan!

Retro Disney Poster, Alice in Wonderland

However, because the park had many technical issues with some of the new features of the show, officials have decided to continue showing Fantasmic! on the weekends (Fri, Sat, and Sun) until the end of 2009.

Here is a hand-held shot of the new dragon (ISO6400).

More dragon photos here. Be sure to check out the large version of these images.

OpenAFS is an open source implementation of AFS that works nicely with JPL’s setup. It’s easy to install and quite stable.

Ubuntu:
I’ve tested these instructions in 9.04, 8.10, and even recently in 6.06 (Yes, the apt-get method of maintaining a Linux machine is far superior to using RPMs).

The first step is to build and install the OpenAFS kernel module. The following steps take care of downloading the appropriate software, compiling and installing everything. As usual, this needs to be done as root, or using the sudo command.


$ apt-get install module-assistant openafs-modules-source
$ module-assistant prepare
$ module-assistant auto-install openafs-modules
$ depmod -a


If all of that is successful, your computer should now have the OpenAFS kernel module buit and installed. The next step is to install the OpenAFS client software.


$ apt-get install openafs-client openafs-krb5


Ok, you now have all the software you should need. The last step on Ubuntu systems is to configure OpenAFS per your site. Running the following command will start an interactive program that asks you about your site specific AFS configuration. The most important piece of info you’ll need is your “Cell” name. For us at JPL, it’s jpl.nasa.gov. I’ve found that most of the time, the default responses for the rest of the questions are fine.

Configure OpenAFS:


$ dpkg-reconfigure openafs-client


Installing on Fedora / CentOS / Red Hat:
Unfortunately, installing OpenAFS requires a few more steps on RPM based distributions, but nothing too tough. Mostly, this involves hunting down the appropriate RPMs for your system. I’m using CentOS for this example. For those not in the know, CentOS is basically a free, binary compatible version of RedHat Enterprise Linux. Please visit CentOS.org for more details.

First, you’ll need to locate the appropriate RPMs for your distribution and kernel version. The following RPMs were required on my CentOS 5.3 machines:


$ rpm -qa | grep afs
openafs-1.5.55-el5.1.1
openafs-krb5-1.5.55-el5.1.1
openafs-kmdl-2.6.18-92.1.13.el5-1.4.7-29.el5
openafs-kpasswd-1.5.55-el5.1.1
openafs-client-1.5.55-el5.1.1
openafs-devel-1.4.7-29.el5
openafs-authlibs-1.5.55-el5.1.1
kmod-openafs-1.5.55-1.1.2.6.18_92.1.18.el5
openafs-docs-1.5.55-el5.1.1
openafs-compat-1.5.55-el5.1.1


You can find these RPMs in a few places as none of these distributions provide them for you. First off, ATrpms has them. In the past, I’ve also found them at the main OpenAFS site, OpenAFS.org. Pbone, another third party RPM repository, has OpenAFS rpms that where built for Redhat EL5 here. Those RPMs will work just fine with CentOS 5 too. Lastly, another place to get hard to find RPMs is RPMforge.

Once you have your RPMs installed, then you only have to edit one config file. Populate /etc/openafs/ThisCell with your sites specific cell name. Some smaller sites will have to configure /etc/openafs/CellServDB as well.

Thats it. You should be able to start the OpenAfs daemon (/etc/init.d/openafs start) and then start using AFS.