KevinMuma.com

Today I took some photos in Gibbons Park. Hopefully I managed to capture some of the splendour of the striking fall colours. The overcast sky provided soft diffuse light and a rather dreary backdrop.

My photos were very disorganized, especially after recovering them from my accidentally formatted hard disk.

A word of warning: SATA hard drives do not show as drive C: in the Windows XP installer, unless there are no IDE drives, so if you have more then one hard drive don’t trust the drive letters when installing Windows.

So I wrote this bash script to copy my pictures into folders by date. It uses jhead to get the date, and if that doesn’t work it uses the files modified date. So the final path ends up being something like: “/2005/01.Jan 17/10.34.23 IMG_1045.JPG”. This format is fairly easy to change by editing the script.

The script also makes sure that Picasa.ini entries stay with the photos, so if you use Picasa (like me) your edits and stars will stay with the images when they are copied.

To get the script to work on Windows you’ll need cygwin and jhead.

My internet connection stopped working today, which lead me to an interesting discovery. Generally when my internet stops working just I renew my DHCP lease and it starts working again.

But this time, when I renewed my DHCP I got a private Class C IP (192.168.100.41) and no gateway or DNS servers. This was strange, so I tried pinging 192.168.100.1, which got a response! Interesting, what else is running here? I browsed to http://192.168.100.1/ and found:

It looks like I connected to a web server in our cable modem. Mostly the site just had information about the cable modem. However, under configuration I found, a button to reset factory defaults (I didn’t touch this), and a button to restart. I tried pressing the restart button. When the modem restarted, I renewed my DHCP lease restoring my internet connection.

I started programming soon after my family got our fist computer, a 486/33 DX. It all started when at about 13 years old, I discovered that DOS came with QBasic. So I bought some old books on BASIC and started teaching myself programming. My early attempts in BASIC didn’t lead to any finished products. My biggest undertaking, converting an Asterix chooses your own adventure book into a computer text adventure, ended when I discovered, through a letter to the publisher, that the rights to Asterix computer games had been secured by another company.

From QBasic I moved to Visual Basic. Then while attending high school I taught myself HTML, JavaScript, and PHP and set up own Apache webserver. Once I finished high school I went to university to learn more about computers.