Noah's Randomness

I was looking to find an iPhone app that would allow me to upload pictures automatically from my iPhone to my gallery on this site. So, with that said, I googled for a few to see what apps I could find that would allow me to do this. I came up with two (that interact/upload to Gallery2, the photo gallery software I use on this site). They are PixelPipe and Eye-Fi, both available in the Apple App Store for “free” (notice the free in quotes — I’ll get to that in just a few).

PixelPipe

Eye-Fi

So after finding the two, I downloaded them and installed both of them to my iPhone. Up first — Eye-Fi. I went to open it and it asked me for my username and password. Not having one, I returned to the Eye-Fi Website assuming I could register for one. Once there I found that in order to get an account, one must own one of Eye-Fi’s Secure Digital card products. So, in essence, this “free” application actually costs $49.99 (which is the cost of Eye-Fi’s lowest cost product).

With that said, I decided that Eye-Fi was no longer a viable option and that PixelPipe had won out over Eye-Fi.

Next up, PixelPipe. As PixelPipe states on their website:

Pixelpipe is a content distribution gateway that allows users to publish text, photo, video and audio files once through Pixelpipe and have the content distributed across over 115 social networks, photo/video sites and blogs, and online storage around the globe. We provide a number of mobile & desktop applications for users, liberating their content and sharing their life.

So, with that said, I signed up for an account at http://www.pixelpipe.com. Once in, I created two “Pipes” — one for my Facebook account and another for Gallery2 on this site. I configured PixelPipe to use both as default destinations and set them to utilize custom folders instead of uploading to PixelPipe’s default (which is an album aptly named PixelPipe).

Now anytime I upload a picture from my iPhone using the PixelPipe app, it gets automatically uploaded to my “Mobile Uploads” folders on Facebook and Gallery2. How neat!

Note: I did have a little trouble in getting PixelPipe to upload to my Facebook Mobile Uploads folder. Even though I had defined it to do so on the “My Pipes” page on the PixelPipe website, a “PixelPipe Photos” album kept getting created and the photos were being uploaded to it. Facebook then wanted me to approve each and every photo that got uploaded to that folder before it would be posted to my Facebook account. This made no sense.

Anyway, the reason for this is that I had created my PixelPipe account some time ago and there was an older version of the “link” between Facebook and PixelPipe. I went into Settings > Application Settings on Facebook and deleted the old “link.” I then went into PixelPipe and deleted the Facebook pipe and recreated it. Once this was done I tried uploading via PixelPipe to Gallery2 and Facebook and guess what? It worked! My photo appeared in the “Mobile Uploads” folder on both sites.

UPDATE/Fix Information:
I found out that this was all related to the previous solution of disabling the postgresql instance on the machine. I had (mistakenly) thought that by doing /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 stop that BackTrack’s posgresql instance would stop. Unfortunately I was wrong, and a “ps aux | grep -i sql” showed me this. After I did a “kill <PID>” I removed all NeXpose files/folders and reinstalled it. However it still wouldnt run correctly/gave me the same error. After some discussion in #rapid7 on irc.freenode.net, I was informed that NeXpose requires 1GB of RAM. So I edited my VMWare config to provide 1GB of RAM to my BackTrack guest.

However, then I had another issue — the NeXpose server kept crashing after starting. So, again I turned to the guys in #rapid7. With their help, I ran “cd /opt/rapid7/nexpose/nsc && rm conf/nsc.xml && ./nsc.sh” and voila! Success!

So, to reiterate, to fix “Could not start the nxpgsql daemon,” I:

• Determine the running PostgreSQL’s PID by doing “ps aux | grep -i sql”
• “kill <PID>” the offending PID from above
• Reinstall NeXpose
• If you are utilizing VMWare or some virtualization software, increase the VM’s RAM to 1GB (or greater)
• Delete nsc.xml from /opt/rapid7/nexpose/nsc/conf/
• Start the NeXpose daemon

Again, the cause of the “Could not start the nxpgsql daemon” is due to the fact that the nxpgsql server is trying to start, but there is already an existing PostgreSQL server running. The nxpgsql server tries to use the same default port (5432) as the existing PostgresSQL server. Knowing this, I set out to fix this problem. Here’s how I did it:

• Edit /opt/rapid7/nexpose/nsc/conf/nsc.xml
• Change line #4 to say: <Database dbms=”postgresql” db=”//127.0.0.1:5433/nexpose”>
  <Database dbms=”postgresql” db=”//127.0.0.1:5433/nexpose”>
• Save nsc.xml
• Edit /opt/rapid7/nexpose/nsc/nxpgsql/nxpdata/postgresql.conf
• Uncomment line 60 and change it to say: “port = 5433 # (change requires restart)”
• Save postgresql.conf

At approximately 1 AM on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 I was returning to the fire station from a scene of a medical assistance call. While driving on Bethel Lane, a deer jumped out in front of my car. I attempted to avoid it, but unfortunately was not able to do so.

The pictures below show the aftermath:

And here’s the car post repair work:

Thanks to the guys at Bloomington Autoplex for their great service and work on my car. It looks even better than ever! Even though there were delays (I was supposed to have my car back on Friday, December 11th but due to an issue with receiving a specific part, I did not get it back until Wednesday, December 16th).

On top of that, they took the time to go the extra mile and buff out some extra scratches that have occurred over the past few years on my driver’s door (and were unrelated to this accident). Thanks again and great job, Bloomington Autoplex!

If you’re having the same problem I did, where when you upload an image to Wordpress it does not let you change it from the original uploaded size, then simply do the following (on Gentoo):
emerge gd

For those of you on other distros, try doing the same thing with your package manager, or just install the GD libraries from scratch (you can find them here: http://www.libgd.org)

Of course, this won’t be effective without recompiling PHP to use GD, so again, on Gentoo:
emerge php
And again, on other distros, you’ll have to do some digging yourself to either A) use your package manager to recompile PHP or B) recompile it by hand.

Once that’s all said and done, you should be able to click the buttons to select a small, medium, or large image as well as the original one. Nifty? I think so…

From left to right: Yellow (Probationary Firefighter) Helmet, Rookie of the Year award, Black (Active Firefighter) Helmet

Out with the old, in with the new. Last night at the Bloomington Twp Fire Dept. December Business Meeting, I was presented with my Black Helmet (Right), which means that I’ve been released from probationary firefighter (probie) status and am now considered an active firefighter.

On the left is my old yellow helmet that designated me as a probie with BTFD which I’ve had and worn for almost a year now.

In the middle is the Rookie of the Year award that I was presented with at the BTFD Christmas Party on Saturday Night!

Finally — Thank you to all of those who have helped me get to where I am today in the fire service. I couldn’t have done it without all of my Fire Department family and friends (BTFD members both paid and volunteer, as well as those from other Monroe County departments), as well as my friends and family who’ve been there to support me along the way. I can’t thank you all enough!

When I first tried to add my blog to the iPhone Wordpress app, it kept coming up with this error: NSXMLParserErrorDomain error 5. I did a bit of research on the Wordpress for iPhone Forums but everything I tried did not help.

Finally, I used this XMLRPC Debugger to connect to my Wordpress site’s XMLRPC daemon to see what the issue was. The first time I tried it, I was presented with this error:
---GOT---
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 05 Dec 2009 16:57:38 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.11-pl1-gentoo
Content-Length: 169
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Fatal error: Call to undefined function xml_parser_create() in /var/www/noahjaehnert.com/htdocs/wp-includes/class-IXR.php on line 165
---END---
HEADER: date: Sat, 05 Dec 2009 16:57:38 GMT
HEADER: server: Apache
HEADER: x-powered-by: PHP/5.2.11-pl1-gentoo
HEADER: content-length: 169
HEADER: connection: close
HEADER: content-type: text/html
XML error: junk after document element at line 2, column 0

After reviewing the error message, I guessed that this had something to do with PHP not being installed with XML Support. Upon running phpinfo(), I was able to determine that this was indeed the case. In my case, the fix for this was to add the XML use flag to my Gentoo /etc/make.conf. For others who are not using Gentoo, your best bet will be to recompile PHP with XML enabled (Google is probably your friend here).

Once the recompile of PHP completed, I restarted Apache (the webserver) and used the XMLRPC Debugger again. This time it came back with a valid response. So I then attempted to connect to my WordPress blog using the iPhone application and… you guessed it… it worked!

So, now I can edit and update my blog from my iPhone. How cool!

For more information on my struggle with this error, see my posting on the WordPress for iPhone Forums