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Monday, 10 February 2025 Dereel Images for 10 February 2025
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Completing the photo restore
Topic: technology, opinion Link here

The restore of my photo disk completed shortly after I came into the office this morning. It wasn't completely successful:

x grog/19640401/pass2/Untitled-Scanned-19.psf
tar: (null)
x grog/19640401/orig/Untitled-Scanned-02.jpg
tar: (null)
...

I've never seen that message before. What does it mean? Do I care enough to UTSL? It's not serious in itself, since the tar run was just to read in the first 99.5% of the files, to be followed up with an rsync from the dying disk. But yes, if this is on the backup disk, I should follow up. And in this particular case, there was nothing wrong with the copy on disk. So what does it mean?

The subsequent rsync also had its surprises:


could not make way for new symlink: grog/www/forsalad/Pano/embed
could not make way for new symlink: grog/www/forsalad/Pano/gimp
...
cannot delete non-empty directory: grog/www/forsalad/Pano/embed

What's that? An old, worn-out directory, for one. It relies on the now-obsolete Adobe Flash. But why is rsync complaining? Comparing my three copies (old (dying) disk, backup and new disk) I have:

=== grog@dereel (/dev/pts/6) ~ 7 -> ls -l /eureka/Photos/grog/www/forsalad/Pano/ /mnt/Photos/grog/www/forsalad/Pano/ /newphotos/grog/www/forsalad/Pano/
/eureka/Photos/grog/www/forsalad/Pano/:
lrwxr-xr-x  1 grog lemis  58 31 Mar  2013 embed -> /home/grog/public_html/Photos/Panoramas/SaladoPlayer/embed
lrwxr-xr-x  1 grog lemis  63 31 Mar  2013 index.html -> /home/grog/public_html/Photos/Panoramas/SaladoPlayer/index.html
lrwxr-xr-x  1 grog lemis  73 31 Mar  2013 SaladoPlayer-1.3.swf -> /home/grog/public_html/Photos/Panoramas/SaladoPlayer/SaladoPlayer-1.3.swf

/mnt/Photos/grog/www/forsalad/Pano/:
drwxr-xr-x   2 grog lemis   512  5 Feb  2012 embed
-rw-r--r--   1 grog lemis   859 29 May  2012 index.html
-rw-r--r--   1 grog lemis 52405  5 Feb  2012 SaladoPlayer-1.3.swf

/newphotos/grog/www/forsalad/Pano/:
drwxr-xr-x   2 grog lemis 512  5 Feb  2012 embed
lrwxr-xr-x   1 grog lemis  63 31 Mar  2013 index.html -> /home/grog/public_html/Photos/Panoramas/SaladoPlayer/index.html
lrwxr-xr-x   1 grog lemis  73 31 Mar  2013 SaladoPlayer-1.3.swf -> /home/grog/public_html/Photos/Panoramas/SaladoPlayer/SaladoPlayer-1.3.swf

Each disk has different contents in the directory! Why? I need to check more carefully, but it seems only to happen in these (multiple) Pano directories. And in each case, the original symlink has been replaced by a real file, so no data is lost—quite the contrary.

Still, I now have a complete copy of the /Photos disk. Time to replace the disk in eureka? So far it's not broke, eureka is the central machine in our network, and I like to have lots of time for reboots in case something goes wrong, so I'll do it on Wednesday when Yvonne is in town.


Hamas starves Israeli hostages!
Topic: politics, opinion Link here

Seen in my mail today:

14 N   08-02-2025 To Reader  (2689) Times of Israel Dail N   3 hostages freed suffering serious malnutrition; outrage in Israel at their condition

Outrage! Because of three hungry hostages! Why didn't Hamas give them enough to eat? Why didn't Hamas feed its own starving people? Excuses that they had no food? Who would believe that?

I'm disgusted, particularly because it seems that the average Israeli can't see what's going on. It's all the stranger because Hamas really did “mistreat” the hostages by making them recite pre-prepared statements about how well they had been treated.


Ermächtigungsgesetz: done?
Topic: politics, opinion Link here

The other horror that has been unfolding for the past few weeks is Donald Trump. I've been continually comparing his behaviour to that of Adolf Hitler 92 years ago, which led me to predict significant damage to an important public building in the next week or two, leading to his empowerment (Ermächtigungsgesetz).

But I have missed something important. Hitler needed the Ermächtigungsgesetz to rise above the law. Trump already has it: Trump v. United States (2024). Yes, Congress should keep him in check, but they're not doing their job.

What next? Concentration camps? Yes, they're on their way, in a place that former president George W. Bush referred to as a tropical Gulag. Tents! Even the Nazis put their inmates in real buildings! The parallels are terrifying.


PHP programming again
Topic: technology, photography Link here

I have a PHP script (createexif.php) to update the Exif data in my photos. It's currently useful to add information about my 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. But the interface is via the Makejpeg file that I use to do the photo name mapping (one line per image), and that's inconvenient. For example, I would have to update the Makejpeg file like this, run createexif.php and select the output lines:

=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) ~/Photos/20250131 976 -> cat Makejpeg
A1310643_DxO Fisheye-test-1 l 48 f 4
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) ~/Photos/20250131 978 -> createexif.php  -c
,,,
exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -TagsFromFile Fisheye-test-1.jpeg '-all>all' -title=Fisheye-test-1 -author='Greg Lehey' -copyright='Greg Lehey' -fnumber=4 -lensmodel='7Artisans fisheye' -lensserialnumber='43035' -focallength=4  Fisheye-test-1.jpeg
...

OK, fix the interface, so that I can write:

=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) ~/Photos/20250131 980 -> createexif.php -f Fisheye-test-1 l 48 f 4
exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -TagsFromFile Fisheye-test-1.jpeg '-all>all' -title=Fisheye-test-1 -author='Greg Lehey' -copyright='Greg Lehey' -fnumber=4 -lensmodel='7Artisans fisheye' -lensserialnumber='43035' -focallength=4  Fisheye-test-1.jpeg

Straightforward, right? It turns out that the best way to do that is to pass the parameters in an array. Clearly here they're in argv [3] to argv [6]. With the file name it starts at argv [2]. In C that's trivial: pass &argv [2]. But PHP doesn't have an & operator. And my PHP-fu is not very good, and I haven't seen Rasmus on IRC for years.

Ask Google Gemini. Simple! Use the & operator. I hear H. L. Mencken laughing in the background. But with a reformulated question (“how do i create an array in php that contains the last n elements of another array?”) I got a different answer: use array_slice. And that did the trick. Shades of LISP.


CSIRAC lives
Topic: technology, history Link here

It's been over 20 years since I visited CSIRAC, but I was greatly impressed, and I was left wanting to know more. Today, while looking for something completely different, I came across this page, which includes much more detail, including something like a manual and an emulator. Now I just need time to read it all.


Tuesday, 11 February 2025 Dereel Images for 11 February 2025
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Garden work?
Topic: gardening Link here

Paul Donaghy around today to do some work in the garden. For once, it was only stuff for Yvonne, so I wasn't much involved.


A new rug for Yvonne
Topic: general Link here

For reasons I don't really understand, Yvonne likes to have a rug over her legs when she watches TV, even if the surrounding temperatures are high. So she got Julie Donaghy to make a rug for her, with which she is well pleased:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20250211/big/Yvonnes-new-rug-2.jpeg
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hubble down!
Topic: history, technology, opinion Link here

I haven't heard from carneous (on IRC) for some time. He had a machine called hubble which was last booted on 2 March 2010. The last time I heard, two years ago, it had been up for a little over 13 years. Is it still up? Today he showed up, only carn nowadays, and gave the sad news: some time between mid-2023 and May 2024 the power supply died—clearly a machine that got a lot of attention. It would have reached 5000 days uptime on 9 November 2023. Did it? Carn is going to salvage the disks and take a look.


This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have a horror of reverse chronological documents, so all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days, but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry a day or two after I write it.     Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a “blog”, and there is deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise I'll assume that it's OK to do so.


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