random ten

Last Friday morning I found this odd procession of caterpillars right on the rural road in in front of the house. From far it looked like a snake. But a closer look show revealed something  more unusual: An insectoid train of several hundred caterpillars.



This whole line of caterpillars was about 2.1m (7 ft) long and parted after a couple of minutes into to independent lines to circumvent an obstacle and later the two lines merged back together later. For the caterpillars it seemed to be a real social and disciplined undertaking to cross the road. The caterpillars appeared to be Thaumetopoea pityocampa (Thaumetopoeidae), also known as the Pine Processionary Caterpillar. It is poisonous with stingy hairs that cause skin irritation. It lives off living pine trees, eating vast amounts pine needles and defoiling whole trees. It is also one of the most social caterpillars according to T.D Fitzgerald at the State University of New York College at Cortland.



According to studies these caterpillars are active at night and stay in their social nests during growth, get out to seek food and return to the nests at day. When the caterpillar is fully grown they abandon their nest and seek soft soil to go into pupal stage until they turn into the large, nasty, hairy pine processionary moth.

These insects can cause serious damage to young pine trees and it's considered one the most destructive conifer pests. It a good idea to clear them but avoid any contact with their hairs. Light fluid or hairspray+lighter works pretty well.

The Google Chrome disc and ELO's wurlitzer space station logo from 1977.

I always thought I have already seen Google's Chrome logo somewhere before. And indeed, while it is far from identical it bears some similarities to ELO's logo from 1977. Both are round, shiny discs with a similar color scheme and docking bay doors in the lower right. More inspiration may have come from the 80ies handheld game Simon and the Pokémon balls. Mix all ingredients together, shake well and the result is the Chrome logo. Disclaimer: Highly speculative reasoning.

Some famous last words before desaster struck:

- We'll do this backup tomorrow

- Why is 'rm -rf' taking so long?

- This one cable should do it

- I just need to enable my new iptables-scripts

- We could do it much better on a Windows server

- I think this server is redundant anyway

- We can safely reboot this server remotely

- It's going to be late again, Honey

Cars in summer can get hot - quite hot under the Mediterranean sun. Some things you leave in the car on a hot day will look much different after you retrieve them. Exhibit A: This warped Polypropylene CD case is a perfect example. But it it plausible? CD cases are usually made of Polypropylene. And this plastic doesn't melt too easy: Polypropylene is heat resistant to temperatures up to 160°C. Yet direct sunlight for hours and the lens effect of the disc's surface cover must have been too much for this CD case. The disc itself was fine by the way.

Just when everything seems to run smoothly, just the it's the perfect time for postponed and long overdue updates. And there are always postponed and overdue updates and never enough time. After Liah is now going to the nursery some days a week for a couple of hours, I suddenly have some time on my side. Not just time for work or for getting back into shape but also for fiddling around with things that are awaiting my undivided attentention.

The last update to CMS Made Simple has seen was already half a year old. And while there were important security fixes I refrained from a timely update because all the troubles and unpleasant surprises that 3rd party modules are usually stirring up during updates. As it is the case with other CMS it's also the Achilles' Heel of CMS Made Simple. After backing up everything I made a complete update using the package cmsmadesimple-1.6.5-full.tar.gz and it went impressively sleek and without glitches - or so I thought.

It turned out later that some modules weren't working as expected. The FormBuilder and Newsletter (NMS) weren't accepting user-input. Submitting forms just wouldn't work and the script just ignored the POST-request completely. I tested the same software and module versions on another server with an almost identical setup and there forms were working just fine. The only major difference between both setups are the RewriteRules inside the .htaccess file. On the Domain where forms were non-functional I forced a trailing slash after the URL with mod_rewrite so that www.example.com/foobar would become www.example.com/foobar/. This configuration will not show a file extension on page URLs and instead pages will look like directories.

While it is fine to add a slash for most URLs it will break POST-Requests in CMS Made Simple 1.6.5. The solution is to implement another RewriteRule or to alter the existing Rewrite-Conditions to exempt POST-Requests from rewriting. I quickly found a discussion of this problem in the support forums and fixed the problem by changing the Rewrite-Conditions in the .htaccess file

# 301 Redirect all requests that don't contain a dot
# or trailing slash to include a trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.
# excempt POSTS-requests
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !POST$
RewriteRule ^(.*) %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]

If you run into into a similar obstacle after upgrading to CMS Made Simple 1.6.5 here is the full discussion: http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php/topic,37175.0.html.

After some busy months of Linux software development and extensive technical writing it's time to update this site again and to show off one or two things. And what better way to start an update than with the site's software itself.

This CMS is also a playground to fiddle around with modules and to test new versions before they go live on one of the other servers. So without much ado I started the update process from CMS made simple 1.4.1 to 1.5.1.

On the first try, it failed miserably. The system itself was functional and served all pages apart from the album-module. But it was impossible to log into the back-end, as it would just drop me back to the log-in page. It all pointed to some PHP error, and indeed, in my PHP error.log I found some obscure error messages that pointed to the previously installed modules, that where disabled but not fully removed like this:

PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined method Album::GetNotificationOutput()

I neither had the time nor inclination to try to fix the album module so I put the backup back in place, deactivated and removed all modules apart from some the core modules and did the upgrade again. This time it worked. So If you are stuck with the same problem you might want to find out exactly which of your modules is incompatible with the new version of CMS made simple. It seems that disabling them is not enough, you must remove them completely. Mind though, that you might lose content this way. So it's a good idea to keep a proper backup to put the content back from.

It'll still be some work to get some of the modules back up and running. I had to create this Blog page again from a backup and the gallery isn't back yet. But it's far less work than to put all the content including templates and style sheets back into a fresh installation.

And no, sometimes it's not easy and simple, but just the same hackish job that are are a trademark of most complex PHP scripts.

Update 08-feb-2009: In the meantime I upgraded to 1.5.2 without any hassles and I put the gallery back online. Without mod_rewrite rules, so the URLs look still pretty bad.

While staying a couple of the days in the Dead Sea region I explored some of the many interesting rock formations behind the place we were staying between Qumran and Qalyah. There are lots and lots of signs with serious warnings not to disturb the endangered bats who deserve their peace so I gave those a miss. What I found however, was a really magnificent scenery in a dry Wadi that looked as if only recently had been dug by tremendous floods and mud slides. The gravel was still packed into bizarre and fragile patterns like after a heavy flood that probably reshaped this area again and again in the rainy season only a couple of months earlier. Surely I haven't been the first one visiting this particular place: On one side of the Wadi entrance, further up these cliffs, I found this odd rather graffiti:

This certainly doesn't look like your typical street tag in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv but ancient and archaic. I must dissapoint you though, because considering the paint and the fact that the graffiti is still very well readable, this cannot be very old. Definitely not older than 5 years because the harsh climate here with the strong gusts of wind that blow around these rocks constantly would have definetly rendered it unreadable after more than a couple of years.

But what could it possibly mean? Thise stylized script looks like its using letters in Moavit, Aramaic and/or Phoenician. I searched for a chart so I could translate it, but some letters really irritate me, e.g. the wiggly horizontal line. Joel Nothman who has seen a similar graffiti in Efrat was so kind to help me with the translation of this highly stylized script and came up with this:

כי משורש נחש יצא צפע ופריו שרף מעופף

It is from the Book of Yeshayahu (Isaiah in English) and could be translated as “For out of the snake's root will come out a viper and its fruit will be a fiery serpent“. The full citation from Isaiah 14:29 is "Do not gloat, Philistia; Because the staff that struck you is broken; For out of the serpent's roots will come forth a viper, And its fruit will be a fiery serpent“. I'm not going to interpret Isaiah 14:29 here, since prophets usually make sense in a larger context and you need a lot of historical knowledge and a background of Torah study to make anything halfway meaningful out of this. In general the snake, the viper and the fiery serpent in Isaiah 14:29 are often associated with the miserable situation of the Palestinians and their corrupt leadership that seems to get only worse and worse. So we can assume that It wasn't exactly a leftist group who left this inscriptions. The second graffiti I found reads “Brith Avraham” and on the side of the low stone on the the ground you can see another script reading “Brith Ya'acov”:

Now the next mission is to find out, who wrote this. Who is strolling with a bucked of paint through the cliffs between the dead sea and the judean desert to paint graffiti in ancient stylized script on rocks? If you have a hint, please feel free to contact me. Update: The first hints by Chanen suggest that it could be much older than I thought (up to 20 years) and the first suspects are religious Kibbutznikim, Bnei Akiva or Yeshiva students. Also it could have been part of some paper chase game.

Special Sudoku for Busy IT Professionals: Binary Sudoku

Instructions: Arrange the binary digits 0 to 1 in the square below so that each column and each row contains all digits just once. Each square should contain only one digit.
(from xkcd)

Since the Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in mid-June 2007, 428 missiles and 590 mortar bombs were fired at Sderot and the western Negev, slamming into the ground in and around Sderot and Kibbutz Niram. From Israel's disengagement from the Strip in mid-August 2005 until the Hamas takeover of Gaza 1,826 missiles were fired into Israeli territory from Gaza. (Source: Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

Some of the rockets are 122mm are Russian-made Grad missiles, smuggled into Gaza via tunnels from Egypt. Others, like the infamous Kassam-2 rockets are home-made from dug up water pipes.

Ironically these water were given to them by the state of Israel to help improve the now seriously flawed sewage system in Gaza. For Hamas this seems like a good deal. With very limited means they terrify enough Israeli civilians to bring Sderot and other parts of the western Negev on the verge of mass evacuation.

"Rockets against Sderot will cause mass migration, greatly disrupt daily lives and government administration and can make a much huger impact on the government"
Hamas foreign minister Mahmoud A-Zahar, 21 Aug 2007

But what the brilliant thinkers of Hamas actually do is to create a whole lot of other immediate problems on their own home turf: Sewage floods. In March 2007, just after a big wave of Kassams hit the western Negev, one of Gaza's many sewage reservoirs collapsed. The wave of waste water killed 5 people immediately and forced thousands of Gazans to flee their homes. It seems now that the price tag for the Kassam terror is much higher than expected. Scrap availability of water and sewage service, which has devastating effects in a densely populated area like Gaza. I wonder when they'll do the math.

The snippet on the left is from Yedioth Aharonot, after a exceptionally bad month in 2007 with more than 200 attacks on Sderot and Kibbutz Niram. But no, it's not yet a real forecast but from their humour page.

I just reviewed the photos I took on Smadi's and Yannay's wedding, two friends who live in Kibbutz in the north. And what can I say, the photos are simply terrible. I guess everything that could go wrong went wrong and there are only a handful of usable pictures.

It's somewhat of a disappointment because it's the first time that I would say that I really wasn't up for the job. I'm glad that they had 2 professional photographers around, so they will have plenty of photos. Unfortunately the photographers were not of the unobtrusive types. But anyway, I Here some of the problems that I found quite difficult to master with my (quite) limited equipment:

1. That location was great. The wedding took place at night at an outdoor location. Unique atmosphere and magical atmosphere. Something that you cannot capture easily on film or digitally. They where absolutely no light sources that I could use for ambient light. So I had to do everything with flash. And because there was nothing to bounce the flash from, most of the pictures turned out to be really dull direct flash snapshots. How I hate direct flash. Will not do that again, ever. I ordered another flash, a second hand Metz MZ40-2 and I intent to use it as a indirect slave flash.

2. At one important moment the batteries of my D100 died. Never did that before. Well I guess they hat to way especially for that moment. So I came back from Kokhav Yarden with only a couple of photos. This was really unnecessary, because I had another battery and even my Nikon FM3a as a backup in my car. Unfortunately we weren't driving in my car up to Kokhav Yarden.

3. I was shooting RAW NEF most of the time because using my manual SB-22 flash I knew I would need to tweak the pictures later. Shooting RAW alone can be really slow because the D100 is an old work horse. Also, I had the custom setting NOISE REDUCTION switched on which further reduced the buffer that could now only hold 2 pictures. And that demanded a lot of patience.

It was interesting to say how well (or bad) I would to with my aged equipment on such an occasion. Usually it is good enough for portraits and still-lifes. But fast-action wedding photographers is like playing in another league. Last time I did this, I had much more equipment and lighting conditions were much easier. Anyway, I learned a thing or two about my D100 and how to improve results in flash photography.

A short time ago I discarded my old and battered, but beloved installation of wordpress to replace it with a CMS that would allow more diverse content like downloads and galleries and whatnot. I chose "CMS made simple" for this task but soon hit a wall as I stumbled upon a lot of defunct modules. I didn't spare my criticism about this in the forum and on opensourcecms.com and that started an overdue discussion on the quality of the modules for this other wise very fine CMS.

It will be some time until all the dev stuff is cleaned up and all permanently defunct/discarded modules are discarded. If the dev team manages to maintain a good QA of some important modules that would be a major breakthrough for "CMS made simple". Needles to say that this will not be possible without active participation.

Even while i write this blog modules gives me quite a headache. Bugs seem to be everywhere. And a lot of stuff is not fully implemented yet as I am still struggling to get a blog module to do things that I need. As of now categories are not working because some counter is always zero and if I override this, the smarty compiler is throwing errors. If I don't figure it out I may move part of this site back to Wordpress.

On the other hand, I really can't recommend to fuse a lot of huge and different PHP script into one site. It quickly becomes unmanageable and attacks on fresh vulnerabilities usually appear early after a security issue is published. It's easy to find outdated installations of blogs, wiki or CMS - just use Google and look for version numbers. While most renowned PHP projects have a good record, script kiddies are quick - not to speak about serious hackers who always seem to be a step ahead and are able to check sites and servers for unique 0-day holes.

Update: The blog module (blogs made simple) for CMS made simple has too many unresolved issues right now to be usable. I don't know how this thing could work on the developer's server. So I am now reverting to the standard news-module wich isn't that fancy but at least works.