The Adventures of Eiki Martinson

Sketchbook: a Thatched Hut

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 21:38:45 -0800

This is an older drawing of a hut from somewhere in Southeast Asia, after a photograph in Architectural Digest. I drew this with a black Pilot G2 05 pen in the sketchbook I was using at that time.

A New Design

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:53:44 -0800

I've redesigned my personal site and blog, and would appreciate criticisms or comments. The layout adapts to a wide variety of screen widths using CSS media queries; try scaling your browser window or looking at the site on your mobile phone to see what I mean.

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Great Balls of Fire

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 17:28:00 -0800

Some of my wayward engineering friends paid me a visit on this weekend, an event always marked by pranks and mayhem simultaneously creative and destructive. This time, it took the form of exploding cans of hairspray.

This is seriously dangerous; nobody should ever perform this experiment. Shrapnel could fly out of the hairspray cans at high velocity, or you could get burnt by the flammable contents. I will repeat: DON'T TRY THIS. EVER.

Now, the standard thing to do with hairspray is simply to squirt some out and light it on fire, like a little flame-thrower. But what if you could get the entire can to come out in a fraction a second? Easy enough with an air-rifle.

Briefly, we placed two cans of hairspray (we initially did it with one, but two is even better!) in this Asian-looking garden shrine thing, thoughtfully left behind by some previous owner of the house (it has seen hard service since we took over!). Then we surrounded the cans with burning newspaper, stood at what we considered a safe distance (wearing eye protection, of course), and shot through both cans with one shot from the air rifle. This released all the gas at once, which was ignited by the newspaper and formed a massive fireball, as seen in the photo sequence above.

Another sequence of photos—note that some fuel remains for a few seconds after the initial blast, burning at a slower rate.

“Desalination Boys”

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 17:22:57 -0700

Brandon Moore and I have made it into local glossy Boca Raton Magazine with our desalination project. Many thanks to Kevin Kaminski for the article; many thanks also to the photographer, whose name escapes me, for taking on the thankless task of making two scruffy geeks look good. If you live in Dade, Broward, or Palm Beach county, go and buy a million copies, on newsstands September 1.

LED Mortarboards—Technology Marches On!

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Wed, 30 May 2007 21:15:03 -0700

I would like to bring to the attention of my readers an impressive technological advance made by one David Worden, lately graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a well-deserved degree in Electrical Engineering. Mr. Worden enlivened his graduation ceremony with a light show built into his mortarboard: 64 LEDs driven by a microcontroller programmed to produce a variety of animated effects. Let me be the first to congratulate Mr. Worden on his splendid achievement in Mad Science—but as a Mad Scientist myself, let me also remind the young upstart that he was not the first to have this idea!

In the long-past days of my miss-spent youth (err … 2004), I also graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering, and sported a light-show hat of my own at the ceremony. The mortarboard had four diagonal lines of 8 white LEDs each, controlled by a central PIC microcontroller; all five circuit boards were painted black and atttached to the top of the hat with velcro. Though I must admit, Mr. Worden's design is rather more complex, with twice as many LEDs as mine and a fully-concealed circuit.

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Mjolnir Pendants—Yet Another Skill for My Mythbusting Résumé (New Year's Eve Part 3)

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 10:46:00 -0800

I made some Mjolnir (that would be the hammer of Thor for those who don't speak pagan-geek :) ) pendants for viking party costumes. It was also an opportunity to try my hand at sculpting and moldmaking, bringing me one step closer to living the life of a mythbuster—that is, a mythbuster without his own television show. I based the design on this one (found on google images); for the price, I probably should have just bought that one instead, but that's not really in the creative spirit of this whole New Year's Eve theme party thing.

The first step: I melted down some old bits of candle wax and cast them into a puck shape, from which I carved the original pattern using one of my very favorite tools, the X-Acto knife.

Continue reading "Mjolnir Pendants—Yet Another Skill for My Mythbusting Résumé (New Year's Eve Part 3)"

Battery Beach Burnout—Electric Car Drag Racing

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 12:18:00 -0800

Friday night the boys and I spent some hours immersed in a weird mix of high-octane drag racing and electrical engineering geekery—the Florida Electric Auto Association took over a "run-what-you-brung" drag racing event as part of their Battery Beach Burnout weekend. The venue was one Countyline Dragway, an 1/8 mile strip of pavement in the middle of the woods in northwest Dade county. One of the competitors brought this homebrew 240 volt electric bike, with 20 batteries driving a shifter kart tire hard enough for a smoky burnout - in the picture I'm holding the brake down to keep the bike from moving as he tensions his drive chain, which unfortunately broke on his first run of the night.

The following picture is of a Porche 912 with an improbable modification: two DC motors inline and hanging out of the back like a rocket engine. This car set the Countyline Dragway electric record at 67 miles per hour at the 1/8 mile.

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From the Fury of the Norsemen, O Lord Save Us! (New Year's Eve Part 1)

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 11:48:26 -0800

New Year's Eve 2007 was the latest in what has become a Martinson tradition: a themed costume party. The theme this year? Vikings! As always, this party involved a great deal of creative work beforehand in making the costumes, props, fireworks show, and all the rest of what our guests have come to expect out of a not-so-typical New Year's Eve. I can't publicly thank everyone responsible for these preparations, but you know who you are, and I know what you did. Thank you all. This post (and the ones to follow), however, is more for the benefit of those who weren't at the party, but are interested in some of the projects completed for it. First, my viking shield:

This is probably the only costume item that bears any similarity at all to actual viking kit, or at least measures up to a reasonable re-enactor's standard. Yes, it is plywood (11/32") rather than joined planks, and the fanciful dragon motif (taken from a shield on display at the Norway pavilion in EPCOT center) was probably never seen in actual dark age combat, but other than that, it's not bad. The plywood blank I cut out with a jigsaw. The steel boss was made by an armourer named Mad Matt (it's the "satin-finished" round boss available on his site)—a solid, economical choice I'm very happy with. I also applied an edge-banding of 3" wide rawhide strips (soak a large rawhide dogbone till it unravels, apply when moist and flexible) nailed over the edge with blued carpet tacks. The grip in the back picture is just a bit of hardware-store mild steel bar, drilled and riveted through to the boss.

A Fireworks Mortar Rack (New Year's Eve Part 2)

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 20:19:26 -0800

One of the new elements in this New Year's Eve fireworks show was this 16-shot mortar rack, designed to accommodate the "festival ball" type of readily available mortar shell. The tubes are HDPE with a 1.875 inch bore, available from Skylighter at $27.25 for a group of six. HDPE is really the best material for this application—do NOT use PVC, as it will shatter into dangerous shrapnel if the shell fails to clear the tube and detonates inside. Certain types of cardboard launch tube, available from pyro suppliers, might be acceptable but I have no experience with this so you take your own risk if you choose to use it. The Skylighter HDPE tubes have a wooden plug at the bottom—I drove stainless steel wood screws into this plug from the base of the rack to secure the tubes.

The rack itself I constructed from various bits of hardware store lumber. Since this rack is deployed outside, in potentially wet environments, I painted it with several coats of Kilz primer, then glossy black exterior latex (glossy to make cleaning off any powder, soot, or dirt easier). I also mounted two carrying handles on either end.

During the New Year's show, this rack was loaded with a mix of Black Cat "Gold Class" spherical shells and their "Fort Knox" cylindrical shells. One row of eight was electronically detonated using my computer-controlled firing board (of which more anon), while the other side was lit with a blow torch, like most of the fireworks that night.

Leaping into the Present with the Samsung Galaxy S

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Mon, 16 May 2011 19:29:31 -0700

Those who know me personally have come to expect a certain amount of frustration when trying to contact me on my phone, which until recently was a Motorola W755 clamshell phone which frequently lost connections, often failed to ring on incoming calls, and had a broken USB connector requiring me to remove the battery and place it in my previous Motorola phone whenever I needed a charge!

Enter the Samsung Galaxy S (“Fascinate” in Verizon's lineup). Yes, I'm aware that the S2 should be arriving in the USA in the third quarter of this year, but it will probably be priced around $300. The original S already has all the features I'm interested in, such as 6-axis inertial sensing and the OLED screen; 4G is less valuable than one might think given a lifestyle that affords constant wi-fi coverage as mine does; finally, at this late date, any smartphone at all is such an enormous discontinuous jump into the present that I can't really lose with any choice at all in this market!

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Colebrook Equation GNU Octave Script

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 19:32:37 -0700

As a way of trying out github for myself I uploaded a small script that iteratively solves the Colebrook equation for the Darcy-Weisbach friction factor, which can be used to estimate head loss due to pipe friction; this played a very minor role in my recent MSEE thesis. The script runs in GNU Octave and it certainly should run in Matlab as well, although I haven't tested that.

Link Love from MAKE, Others

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 09:59:39 -0700

Some of my projects have been drawing attention from Maker circles lately. I'm very excited that the Color Changing Doorbell was featured on the blog of my favorite magazine MAKE.

Also, a website called BuildLounge was kind enough to link to my serial-controlled fireworks igniter, under a category of "Explosions". Welcome, new visitors from these sites!

The Pipe Crawler—A Hit in Poland?

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 21:16:01 -0700

One of my recent google searches about pipe-crawling robots brought up this link, which appears to be a translation into Polish of some of the documents I wrote about my senior engineering project. It includes pictures from both the pipe crawler web page and the final report we submited to our professors. I should thank ... er ... somebody, though I'm not exactly sure who. They appear to be a lab or research institute of some kind. Well, thanks for the translation anyway!

I'd also like to take a few words here to insist that my friends Sheraz Wasi and Mark Miller be credited as co-authors of the Pipe Crawler work. It seems like my name is the only one that gets attached to it anymore, because I wrote and hosted the web page about it, and that's not fair; both of them toiled away in the robot lab from morning to midnight just as I did. By the way, this is not a criticism of my new Polish friends—many web sites and email correspondents get the impression that I was the only author simply because the page happens to be hosted at www.eikimartinson.com, and this seems like a good opportunity to set the record straight.

Audi Caravan to Key West

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Mon, 23 May 2011 16:43:00 -0700

These pictures are from an Audi Owner's Club caravan to Key West on May 21, 2011 using Jay Wilson's brand new Audi S4; a fun trip!

Tektronix 547 Oscilloscope—Getting an Old Soldier Back in the Fight

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:20:00 -0700

Of all the 500 series modular scopes made by Tektronix, the 547 is one of the most desirable due to its 50 MHz bandwidth and innovative dual timebases. When released, this machine was way-hot high tech, crammed with a mix of vacuum tubes and discrete semiconductors, and worth as much as a new car. I got mine through a friend who found it at a church rummage sale and paid $10 for it, complete with cart, some extra modules, and manuals for everything. Any problems? Well sure—the thing's been in service for 40 years, knocked about by at least two private companies (judging by the calibration stickers) and its original owner, the United States Navy. A short list:

The dust filter that covered the fan was missing, because the bolts that kept the bezel on were sheared off—though the bezel came with the scope in the drawer of the cart, at least.
The original power inlet was cracked, and missing its ground pin, which is more than a little dangerous.
The fuse holder was chewed up and unable to retain the fuse and cap, which was missing entirely.

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Ruminations on Leviathan, Prompted by the Film Potiche

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Sun, 08 May 2011 16:06:55 -0700

As an excuse to try out FAU's new Living Room Theaters I spent some time Sunday seeing a French film named Potiche, which was surprisingly and tediously political at the same time. The surprise was my own fault: I didn't research it too closely before buying my ticket. Blame for the tedium falls elsewhere! Whereas most of the audience, I expect, saw Potiche as a charming and funny celebration of female empowerment, I saw mostly a nightmare in which everything was politics, everything from business decisions to paternal pride to tender moments between husband and wife tainted with the tawdry operations of socialist democracy.

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New Web Project Done

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Wed, 27 Oct 2004 12:35:00 -0700

I just finished a new web site, for Campbell Property Management. Take a look and tell me what you think.

UPDATE: The current site is not my design.

Curiously Vulgar

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 14:55:42 -0700

Altoids mints have for many years been marketed under a brand that has successfully conveyed an image of Victorian understatement, exaggerated politesse, and quirky humor. I would think these lovely characteristics, which carried the mints to such success in the US market, would be enough for Callard and Bowser. Apparently not! A reckless experiment in marketing has resulted in what strikes me as more of a misstep than previous Altoids attempts at boundary-pushing. Recently I opened the familiar tin of peppermints expecting to be soothed by anachronistic charm, instead to be assaulted by an earthy imperative:

“Open your mint hole”? How of-the-moment. Thank you, but I don't think I will.

Moon Shot

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 17:50:25 -0800

I took these images of a total lunar eclipse early in the morning on December 21, using the intervalometer on my Canon G6. You can see how the autofocus lost it on the last exposures, probably because the moon became too dim by that point. The individual photos were taken three minutes apart and screened together in photoshop to make this image.

Comcast DNS Broken

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 16:01:00 -0800

I've been getting a few complaints about various sites not being accessible by Comcast users and discovered that quite a lot of domains are inexplicably not resolved by their DNS servers. Here is an extremely partial list, generated purely at random:

These are all popular blogs, and none of them work on Comcast's DNS. So I switched to OpenDNS, a free public dns service. You can sign up for an account, which gives you access to some features like porn-filtering and statistics on DNS usage. You don't have to have an account, however, you can just go ahead and start using the servers: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.

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MSEE, Finished

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 15:40:53 -0800

“Master of Science” is really very grandiose-sounding, isn't it? I promise I won't insist on being styled as such, now that the unthinkable day is here and I actually have my degree in hand.

For new readers: I've been working on a master's degree in electrical engineering for the past 5 years or so, acquiring along the way a textbook case of ABD (“All But Dissertation”, a disease which is actually a formal status in some parts of academia). This summer, growing weary of the debilitating symptoms of this illness, I sat behind my computer and effected a cure, which required every scrap of free-time available from August to November. Hence the lack of updates on this blog in recent months.

Now, of course, I have all the time in the world—time enough, at least, to start on some exciting new projects. Come back soon for details!

I Move From WYSIWYG to Real Typesetting

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:45:58 -0700

Not long ago I began writing my Master's thesis, and fortunately took a moment to consider what might be formatting 'best practice' before I got too deep into what will probably be the longest text I've ever written. Of course, most students these days write reports, theses, dissertations, and everything else in Microsoft Word, or (if the student is poor or motivated by hatred toward Microsoft) one of the free clones of the same. But I decided instead to try something I've long been meaning to try: the TeX typesetting system, or to be more precise, the LaTeX language built on top of TeX. I learned some important lessons from this.

To use (tongue only somewhat in cheek) my new favorite metaphor, Microsoft Word is like the Persian Empire: decadent, soft, corrupt, encouraging of mysticism and lazy thinking. Whereas LaTeX is like Sparta: cold, clean, hard, disciplined, rational. And outnumbered 2000 to 1.

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Defend Lighthouse Point!

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 15:41:00 -0700

Finally I am resisting temptation no longer. I did what I always knew I would do and opened up a Cafepress store. My first product: the Defend Lighthouse Point t-shirt!

Why “Defend Lighthouse Point”? Why the carefully rendered silhouette of an AK-47? It's partly a homage to a shirt that Adam Savage wore on Mythbusters that read “Defend Brooklyn”. It's partly a reference to tongue-in-cheek orders I gave my roommate when I was in California during our last hurricane. And partly a ha-ha-only-serious nod to the idea that maybe our little corner of suburbia is worth defending, dammit. Anyway, if you have to ask, it ain't for you!

Check this space for more exciting products allowing you too to “Live the Eiki Martinson Lifestyle”!

Are You Feeling Lucky? (Culinary Adventure Week 2)

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 19:36:40 -0700

Tonight was the first dinner of our second Culinary Adventure Week. The theme: Google recipes! Simply type two ingredients into google, plus the word “recipe”, like so: “chicken bacon recipe”. Then hit the “I'm Feeling Lucky” button and cook whatever comes up! You really place your stomach in the hands of fate with this one—but so far with good results. Even unusual test cases like “italian sausage mussels recipe” came up looking tasty.

Sheraz wasn't home tonight, so we feasted on forbidden fruit: pork and tomatoes. Google came up with Pork Chops with Fresh Tomato, Onion, Garlic, and Feta, which worried us somewhat but turned out to be really very good.

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Culinary Adventure Month: Week One

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 20:45:00 -0700

My roommate Sheraz and I suffer from a certain indecision about what to eat; nothing seems good to us anymore, and this results in discussions of the “What do you want to eat? I dunno, what do YOU want to eat?” kind and in disastrous expeditions like today's, in which we drove around aimlessly for an hour looking for something that would hit the elusive "spot". I have no illusions; this is a mark of decadence, one more of the minor pyschological problems that comes of limitless opportunities and a complete lack of survival pressure. But to hell with that—we decided to solve our problem by turning it into an amusing adventure, applying our favorite tool for doing so: eccentric wagering.

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Always Bet on Black

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 14:04:07 -0800

Silver was the New Black, but black is the New Silver. It's true. The pendulum has swung back. Portents of it are everywhere in the consumer electronics industry.

Black lost out years ago because it looked plastic, despite the fact that plastic really looks best in black. So the mainstream started to emulate the high-end brushed aluminum thing, and it worked, for a while. Respectable mid-market home theater gear HAD to be silver. But turnabout was inevitable, really, once you could buy a shiny silver DVD player for $29.99 at Walmart. Then it was obvious that the sexy new silver was mostly the same plastic as ever, tarted up with what amounts to chrome—in some cases even actual chrome. And chrome is the sort of thing that seems like a good idea for about ten minutes. As soon as everybody and their third grade teacher owned a cell phone that looked like it fell out of the Tin Man's ass, we were bound to be back in black again.

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Test Driver for a Day

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 18:33:00 -0700

Last Sunday my cousin Torm and I were invited to a Car & Driver / Road & Track "Editor for a Day" event at the Homestead Speedway. After a wild ride from Boca Raton to Homestead in record time, we had the chance to drive some interesting cars for comparison purposes; some of our comments might even be published in the magazines! Two courses had been laid out with cones on a large parking lot there—they wouldn't let us go out on the NASCAR oval for some hot laps no matter how much we begged.

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A Couple Days Ago in a Theme Park Three Hours Away

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Thu, 26 May 2005 14:57:31 -0700

I went with some people associated with FAU fencing to Disney MGM Studios in Orlando for the 2005 Star Wars Weekend, a nice event for Star Wars geeks, although not everybody was quite as hardcore as we are. When one of the “crowd control” stormtroopers cracked “He hasn't been the same since he hit his head on that bulkhead” the entire audience was silent except for the five of us, laughing and cheering maniacally. Regardless, a good time was had by all; pictures follow.

A mob at the Star Tours attraction.

Meeting the characters is a cool feature of Star Wars Weekend; Vader was by far the most popular.

Emily, wearing the coolest Star Wars T-shirt EVER, tells Greedo what's what.

Undone By the Blade of a Mere Stripling

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 22:17:00 -0800

I competed recently in my university club's own divisional tournament. If you are ignorant of the noble science of fencing, thrill to the dramatic photos below! If you do know something of this sport, don't bother—I've already heard all about my lousy form from my coach...

A Political Party We Can All Agree With

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 11:38:00 -0800

Concerned about hot post-election tempers and the fractured nature of the American polity (and always after an excuse to drink like mad), my roommates and I threw a smashing election party on the night of the 2nd. We invited our most radical friends from both sides, served drinks in red and blue cups (“party self-identification”), and nicely avoided stewing in front of the television all night cursing the other half of America in a blind rage. This was also a chance to display a healthy contempt for the political process and its probably irrelevant outcome by partying through the wearying hours of exit polls and electoral vote counts.

My vision: four years from now, election parties will spread across the land, partisans of all stripes will be brought together, and the jagged rift in our nation can begin to heal! People of America, please, please care LESS! Or at least, drink yourselves silly!

The Winter Olympics and the Perception of Time

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 08:35:31 -0800

Watching the closing ceremonies of the 2006 Torino games last night, I was struck by an observation on my own mental state, which must have been bubbling to the surface over the last two weeks: the periodic nature of the Olympics has fractured my personal flow of time. Every four years, more or less the same athletes come back and resume their stories; during the opening ceremony, I see some of the old faces and hear their names, and it all comes rushing back. Then for the next two weeks I experience time as running on a track parallel to the main, day-to-day chain of events—the Winter Olympic track. This train started at Calgary '88 or so, but it makes slower progress than the train of normal time, as it runs for only two weeks every four years. The Summer Olympics run on another parallel track because the characters involved are usually different.

I think this is why watching the games is so beautifully comforting; when I jump into Olympic time I'm able to reach back with ease to 8 or 12 or 14 years ago, to a time when I was a child or an adolescent. Each of those two week Olympic periods gets appended onto the end of the last one, so all the great events of Lillehammer '94 (and whatever I was doing at the time) are as though they happened only six weeks past.

The Italian Renaissance: an MMO I'd Like to Play

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 09:19:05 -0700

Picture it with me: an MMO based in the Italian Renaissance. Races could correspond to the various city-states of Italy, or to foreign nations, perhaps. Play as:

Merchants (sea voyages out of Venice, perhaps?)
Unscrupulous churchmen
Stiletto-armed assassins
Scheming Medicis
Your typical painter-sculptor-scientist-architect renaissance genius (should be an epic roll, this!)

Imagine riding into battle atop some Leonardo-designed war machine! Fencing with rapiers! Imagine going on quests:

Steal the head of John the Baptist for the glory of Florence
Dissect executed prisoners to level up in Anatomy
Bring back exotic goods from around the Mediterranean
Earn yourself an equestrian statue in your city-state's palazzo with military exploits

There's something very appealing about this, at least to me. It would be just the thing to finally get me to play an MMO.

Thirty Stories of Demolition in West Palm Beach

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:55:20 -0800

This building at 1515 Flagler Drive has been a bit of an eyesore since it took hurricane damage in 2004. It was brought down with explosives on Sunday, the third tallest building to ever be demolished so in the United States. And I was lucky enough to be there!

I set up my Canon G6 on multiple-shot mode for this—it did pretty well, especially given that I was just holding it above my head in the tightly-packed crowd.

Fixing Awstats on Mediatemple DV

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 20:05:26 -0700

So far I'm relatively satisfied with my new Mediatemple DV hosting service. I have, however, discovered a problem with the Mediatemple configuration of Awstats, the logfile-analyzing web statistics package I use. Awstats can't find its images because the path is broken in the standard Mediatemple installation - browser and country icons are missing, and the bar graphs are empty:

Here's how to fix it.

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Giving Subdomain FTP Users Shell Access on Mediatemple DV with Plesk

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 20:02:52 -0700

I recently created a subdomain on my Mediatemple DV service, but for various reasons, I wanted to have a separate user responsible for that subdomain, with FTP and shell access. The user can be created along with the subdomain in Plesk as normally. Unlike the creation of users associated with domains, however, there is no option in Plesk to give this subdomain user shell access.

Fixing it is trivial if you have root access. Just edit /etc/passwd, find the line that starts with the username you just created, then change the last field of that line from /bin/false to /bin/bash (or whatever shell you like). This will allow you to su to the subdomain user or login via SSH, as you prefer. Easy, I know, but I noticed the option wasn't present in Plesk and well, maybe this tip will be helpful to somebody else out there.

Inkscape Criticism

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:34:41 -0700

First, let me preface this tale of User-Interface Woe with a disclaimer: I am far from an Adobe fanboy. I love open-source software. And of course, like everyone else, I really hate Adobe's prices. But I've learned to use Illustrator and Photoshop pretty well, so now, of course, switching to anything else causes work not-so-much to grind to a halt as to slam into a brick wall while I figure out all of the different metaphors, keyboard shortcuts, and little tricks I need to approach anything like my former productivity.

Trust me, I yearn to cast aside all Adobe products! Which brings me to Inkscape, the open-source vector illustration program. I really, really want to like it as a replacement for Adobe Illustrator. It's one of those open-source apps I install every couple of years to see if it's There Yet. And, yet again, I'm starting to think that it's not. Which brings me to the first problem I encountered on my most recent attempt at mastering Inkscape.

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Fixing Subdomain Configuration on Mediatemple DV

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Thu, 20 May 2010 17:30:38 -0700

I recently found myself having to make some php configuration changes which are specific to a particular subdomain on my Mediatemple DV web host, and found that yet another part of subdomain setup is mildly broken out-of-the-box. This is the sort of thing that most people who need it can probably figure out for themselves, but I'm posting the solution hoping someone will find it useful.

On my DV the domain specific apache configuration is located in /var/www/vhosts/domain-name/conf/, where domain-name is of course replaced by your actual domain name. In this directory you should find at least httpd.include, and possibly vhost.conf as well. If you open httpd.include you'll find the following alarming warning at the top:

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Finally! Web Site Updates!

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 11:40:00 -0800

I have added a new section to this site, intended to be a place to publish the results of all my smaller-scale one-day experiments, mostly involving explosions, destruction, and low comedy. These never really merited a entire page by themselves, so I'll be putting them all together onto this new page, named Bad Ideas as a not-so-subtle warning to the reader.

UPDATE: Not anymore! I should probably fold them into the main line of the blog.

Letterpress and Bookbinding: Book Arts 101

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Sun, 16 May 2010 11:13:15 -0700

I recently took a workshop titled "Book Arts 101" at Florida Atlantic University's Jaffe Center for the Book Arts, which, besides introducing us to a world I had only barely-glimpsed before, that of artist's books, taught us to dabble in those arts themselves, using the techniques of letterpress printing and hand book-binding.

After ogling the extensive collection of the Jaffe Center, we printed covers on a vintage proof press (a Vandercook 4) set with wood block type, then bound them into neat pamphlets using needle and thread. The residents of South Florida are truly lucky to have such a world-class collection at hand. I extend my thanks to John Cutrone of the Jaffe Center and Lake Worth's Convivio Bookworks for teaching this workshop and allowing us to experiment with this at-once anachronistic and up-and-coming craft.