bradt.ca

Typically, printing several RSS feeds from various blogs on a single page is known as aggregation. This script not only aggregates RSS feeds however, it also merges and sorts them by date using the merge sort algorithm. The result is a blog of postings from several blogs.

1. You will need to include the RSS parser class known as lastRSS. Click here to download it from their web site.
2. Each item must have a pubDate child element. RSS 2 will work, but RSS 1 will not.

This script was written to make use of the Wordpress stylesheet and can be integrated into your current Wordpress blog. Click here for detailed instructions.

• rss_merge.phps
• lastRSS.phps (from lastrss.oslab.net)

v0.2.0 (2005-02-25)

• Added support for content:encoded tag to display complete posts.

Brad Touesnard - http://brad.touesnard.com

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Below is a merging of the RSS feeds from the following blogs:

• bradt.ca
• Pierre Grandmaison Personal Blog
• sean mcgrath's weblog
• chad lindstrom's blog

The Playdates:

NIKON D700, AF Zoom 24-70mm f/2.8G
f/5, 1/30, ISO 200, 24mm

Strobist Info:
White Lightning X1600 camera left w/ beauty dish
AlienBees 800 camera right with standars reflector
Triggered with Skyports

The Playdates:

NIKON D700, AF Zoom 24-70mm f/2.8G
f/5, 1/5, ISO 200, 24mm

Strobist Info:
White Lightning X1600 camera left w/ beauty dish
AlienBees 800 camera right with standars reflector
Triggered with Skyports

The Ashleys:

The Ashleys, and great new band with some really killer tunes. Check them out here: www.facebook.com/pages/The-Ashleys/122203691126607

NIKON D700, AF Zoom 24-70mm f/2.8G
f/2.8, 1/200, ISO 1000, 24mm

The Ashleys:

The Ashleys, and great new band with some really killer tunes. Check them out here: www.facebook.com/pages/The-Ashleys/122203691126607

NIKON D700, AF Zoom 24-70mm f/2.8G
f/4.5, 1/160, ISO 2000, 24mm

Strobist info:
SB-900 behind the band (visible), aimed strait up and a bit toward the camera to help cast those shadows
Triggered with Skyports.

chadtobin:

I had a chance to spend the afternoon with Robert Frank this past weekend and the experience was nothing short of amazing.

He was gracious, welcoming and had wonderful stories. I brought along a copy of the Americans expanded edition and as he went through it he smiled and reminisced about some of those moments. He talked about rangefinder photography and how it just seemed to “fit” him. He played with my Leica M8 and was amazed to find that it felt similar to his M6. When I asked him what he thought about digital photography he replied “Its great, a camera is a camera its what you do with it.”

I cannot even put into words what it was like to spend time with one of the world’s most influential photographers. I got to take a quick portrait of him before leaving and as I went to my car he told me to “Keep looking……keep making photographs.”

Photo info: Leica M8u 35mm 1.4 CV mc at 500th, 1.4 iso 320

Cheers,

Tobin 

The speed of light

Mr Hung

Cloud pump #2

Cloud pump #1

The Ashleys recording sweet music to my ears.

Today is my birthday. And although birthdays can be great for the gifts and attention, they are also a reminder of years gone by. In my annual birthday chat with my mom, I was telling her how my work was going and we started reminiscing of the challenges I faced when I was doing internet work in my teens. I thought I’d share.

In 1997, we had one computer (a Pentium 90 with MMX!). I have two brothers and of course we had to share. I wasn’t very good at sharing. In fact, I hated it. But when we got the internet, the situation got a whole lot worse. With the internet, not only were we sharing a computer but a phone line as well! That’s right, dial-up. Times were tough.

I had learned how to hand-code HTML in school.^[1] Eventually I learned about MP3s and created one of the first music download web sites. Running a music download site back then was a pain. Never mind the controversy over whether or not it was legal. Bandwidth was very expensive. No web hosts allowed music downloads for cheap. It just didn’t exist. If it did, they probably would have went out of business anyway. Instead, I would sign up for a web hosting account, upload all the music, use it for a few days, maybe a week, then they would cancel the account. I would move on to another host and do it all again.

This sounds pretty frustrating. But remember the time. I was uploading a 2-5 MB songs over a 33.6 Kbps modem, so about 15-20 minutes to upload each song. Then factor in the internet disconnecting because someone picked up the phone, my brother (who loved to talk on the phone for hours at a time) pestering to use the phone, or the upload failing for no apparent reason. It’s a wonder I didn’t give up.

Eventually I figured out that using a pool of free web hosting accounts (Geocities, Virtual Avenue, etc) with a couple of songs per account was the way to go. Not only did it take quite a while for them to identify and shut down an account, but when they did, I only needed to upload a couple of songs.

After a couple of letters from the CRIA to my physical address, I decided to hand the site off to someone else and pursue building more legitimate web sites. Ironically, I started a web hosting company a few years later and had to deal with the trouble caused by punks like my younger self. To make amends to the music industry, I have consistently gone to live shows and recently started to buy music direct from the artist’s web site and through Zunior.com.

The End.

Have any stupid geek stories from your youth you’d like to share?

¹ Our teacher actually organized a series of field trips to a nearby C@P site. Maybe because we didn’t have decent computers at our school, maybe because there wasn’t anyone at our school capable of teaching HTML (probably both). In any case, I thank Industry Canada for starting the Community Access Program and my teacher Calvin Peters (who I have thanked in person) for going above and beyond the responsibilities of a grade 10 teacher. If it wasn’t for C@P and the field trip, it’s possible I wouldn’t have a career I love today.

Recently, when I researched the encryption of credit card information, or card holder data (CHD) as it’s known in the industry, I was somewhat frightened by what I found. Almost every tutorial suggested using MySQL’s AES functions. While AES is an excellent symmetric-key algorithm, a symmetric-key algorithm is not a great choice for storing CHD long term. Symmetric-key algorithms use a single key for encryption and decryption. So in order to encrypt a user’s submitted CHD, the key must be accessible by the code. The code might look something like this:

$key = '[x[{n&)NF11\p506J`>~ta;~8Xq^1Y>4n5`.YoDfy]>1q%tB?J8pR&5CV9';
$sql = "INSERT INTO credit_cards (name, number, expiry)
    VALUES (AES_ENCRYPT('$name', '$key'), AES_ENCRYPT('$number', '$key'), AES_ENCRYPT('$expiry', '$key')";

Clearly it is bad security to have the key capable of decrypting the CHD sitting on the server. If an attacker gains access to the server, they will have access to both the database and the key to decrypt the CHD.

A better option is to use a public-key encryption algorithm. Public-key encryption uses two keys: a public key and a private key. The private key may also have a password, required to unlock it for use. For our implementation, we will store the public key in the code on the server to encrypt the CHD as its submitted. Once encrypted with the public key, the CHD can only be decrypted with the private key. We will keep this private key in a safe place (offline) and when it comes time to decrypt the CHD (to process a bill for example) we will enter the private key and its password into a web form and submit it over SSL. If an attacker gains access to the server they will only have access to the public key (which again, can only be used for encryption) and will not be able to decrypt the CHD. Obviously this implementation only works for you if you don’t mind manually processing payments. You could however store the private key on a secure server (on a different network, behind a firewall) that would run a program to automatically process your payments.

The open source software package OpenSSL is excellent for implementing this public-key encryption technique. Many programming languages have an OpenSSL library including PHP (you will need to have compiled with –with-openssl). To get started with OpenSSL, you first need to generate your public and private keys and choose a private key password:

openssl genrsa -des3 -out private_key.pem 2056
openssl rsa -pubout -in private_key.pem -out public_key.pem

In PHP, you can try the following script to get started (again, make sure PHP is compiled –with-openssl):

<?php
$num = '4111111111111';
$name = 'Brad Touesnard';

$public_key = openssl_pkey_get_public('file://public_key.pem');
$private_key = openssl_pkey_get_private('file://private_key.pem', 'your_password');

echo 'Original: ' . $name . ' - ' . $num . "\n";

openssl_public_encrypt($name, $name_enc, $public_key);
openssl_public_encrypt($num, $num_enc, $public_key);

echo 'Encrypted: ' . $name_enc . ' - ' . $num_enc . "\n";

openssl_private_decrypt($name_enc, $name_dec, $private_key);
openssl_private_decrypt($num_enc, $num_dec, $private_key);

echo 'Decrypted: ' . $name_dec . ' - ' . $num_dec . "\n";
?>

The Hads - Saint John, NB:

The band The Hads, taken in an old church that has been converted into a recording studio.

Strobist:
AlienBees 800 camera left with standard 7” reflector (triggered optically)
White Lightning X1600 camera right with standard 7” reflector (triggered optically)
Nikon SB-26 snooted on center two band members (triggered optically)
2 x Nikon SB-900s zoomed to 200mm point up at the ceiling (triggered with Skyports)


NIKON D700, AF Zoom 24-70mm f/2.8G
f/9, 1/200, ISO , 24mm

I’ve been taking a lot of photos on my iPhone lately, probably more than on my Nikon. It is definitely an underrated camera if you ask me.

Last year I registered WordPressFreelancer.com with grand plans to build a directory of freelancers who work with WordPress complete with a job board and blog consisting of freelancer interviews. Once I sobered up, I realized I already had more than enough on my plate and that this probably wasn’t going to happen.

Recently however, I decided to put the domain to use and create a simple, well-crafted site to showoff my WordPress -fu. It turns out it was also a good excuse to play around with HTML5 and some CSS3 features which have recently been rolled into most of the popular web browsers.

The site is composed of fully valid HTML5 markup and uses Remy Sharp’s HTML5 enabling script to get all versions of IE to play along nicely. I used Google’s recently released Font API to render all of the text in Vollkorn. In terms of CSS3, I’m using transform on the avatar and to rotate the transparent loading PNG when portfolio images are clicked. I’m also using gradient on the form button and text-shadow to make the text more readable on the textured background.

With help from the recent ALA article Responsive Web Design from Ethan Marcotte, I was able to create a fluid layout that looks great on any screen. I used CSS Media Queries to tweak the CSS for several different screen widths, maintaining a nice neat layout for every screen size. To see this in action, go to the site and try resizing your browser window. You’ll notice the portfolio goes from 2-column to 1-column and the 3-columns of text go to 1-column as the browser window decreases in size.

For IE6 users, they get Andy Clarke’s lovely Universal IE6 stylesheet which delivers a simply formatted page in black and white.

Jill & Adrian:

Here’s one of my favorite shots from an incredible engagement session Carrie and I shot this past weekend.

Shot in Black’s Harbour, New Brunswick.

NIKON D700, AF Zoom 24-70mm f/2.8G
f/2.8, 1/800, ISO 200, 24mm

Taylor:

More on the blog! This was from a shoot that my wife setup, so take a peak and some of her photos from the shoot here.

NIKON D90, AF Zoom 24-70mm f/2.8G
f/2.8, 1/100, ISO 500, 24mm

Promenade in the Rain:

My first shoot with the D700. I am in love!

NIKON D700, AF Zoom 24-70mm f/2.8G
f/2.8, 1/800, ISO 800, 24mm

Mike and Brianna (Prom):

My first shoot with the D700. I am in love!

NIKON D700, AF VR Zoom 70-200mm f/2.8G IF-ED
f/2.8, 1/125, ISO 800, 70mm

The Alley (Medium Format Film):

A direct scan from a shot I took on my Yashica 124. Film was Ilford XP2 400.

No post processing at all.

My Hometown (Medium Format Film):

A direct scan from a shot I took on my Yashica 124. Film was Ilford XP2 400.

No post processing at all.

Carrie (Medium Format Film):

Just an update to anyone who has been following…I will no longer be following through with my 365 project, at least in the traditional sense.

I have been taking more pictures lately than I ever have, but I just don’t have the time to commit to posting them all on Flickr. Lately I’ve been posting a lot of shots on Facebook and not on Flickr, just because it is easier.

I have a massive backlog of shots to get around to posting, so hopefully you’ll be able to see them soon. I won’t be posting all of them, but instead, I will only be posting the ones that I think are the best of the best!

The above photo is a direct scan from a shot I took on my Yashica 124. Film used was Ilford XP2 400.

No post processing at all.

A few recent iPhonearoids.

84/365 - Girls Would Kill:

Working with bands is probably my favorite thing ti do photography wise. So lately I’ve been working on reaching out to local bands to get some shoots lined up.

View On Black

Here’s a shot from a session I did last night with Girls Would Kill. Check them out at:

www.myspace.com/girlswouldkill

Don’t forget to grab their 2 free tracks they have up for download either.

Strobist:
SB-900 high camera left into silver umbrella

NIKON D90, AF 20mm f/2.8D
f/9, 1/200, ISO 640, 20mm

82/365 - She doesn’t ride anymore…:

Just a test shot with a new lens of an old bicycle out in the woods behind my house. Looks like it has been there for a long time now.

82/365 - What’s in my bag?:

Just finished rearranging my main camera bag, so I thought I’d post one of these shots for all the gear heads out there.

Check out the notes for the details!

A microsite to promote SAP’s Crystal Solutions product. A PSD was delivered to me by Fjord Interactive and I converted it to a working web site, cutting up the images and coding the HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

I’m often asked by friends and family, “What does it cost to build a web site?” And although I’m sure none of them will read this, at least now I have something to point them to.

Asking “What does it cost to build a web site?” is a lot like asking, “What does it cost to build a house?” It depends what you want (we call it “requirements” in the biz). If you don’t know what you want, a trusted web professional (web designer or web developer) can help you determine your needs quite easily. However, your options are usually limited by your budget.

There are two different sets of costs when setting up a web site for the first time. There is the one-time cost of having the site built by a web professional and then there are the recurring costs of hosting your site and registering/renewing your domain name (i.e. www.yourname.com). If you can’t afford some or all of these costs, sacrifices will need to be made.

No budget ($0 – $500)

If your budget is very low or non-existant, you need to adjust your expectations accordingly. You will not be able to hire a professional. If they claim to be a professional and are interested in a project with your budget, beware.

I suggest preparing yourself to learn and put in some work setting up the site yourself. For this situation, I always recommend using WordPress.com. It’s 100% free. After signing up, you choose one of their pre-made design templates that best suits your site, add your logo, add your content, etc. WordPress has a vibrant community with video tutorials and active support forums to help you along. They make their money through upgrades. For example, if you at least have a few dollars to spend, you can purchase a domain name upgrade ($15/year). I highly recommend at least getting a domain name as it makes your site appear a lot more professional. If you have a few more dollars, you could hire a web designer to customize the site colours, etc.

With this option you’re mostly sacrificing your time and the design of your site as WordPress.com only allows you to choose one of its 85 designs.

Low budget ($500 – $2,000)

With a low budget you can afford to hire a web developer to setup a site for you with one of the thousands of templates (some are even free) on the web. WooThemes, ThemeForest, and Template Monster have great templates for WordPress and other content management systems (CMS). You may also be able to afford a few tweaks or additions to the template you choose.

You will need to purchase web hosting and a domain name to put your site online. I am co-owner of the web hosting company Zenutech, so I recommend you get your web hosting and domain name there. Once your site has been setup on your web hosting account, the designer will give you access to the CMS and you can enter your content.

Modest budget ($2,000 – $5,000)

With this kind of budget you can afford to hire a web designer. If you don’t yet have branding for your organization, they can also work with you to develop a brand that works. Although the process differs between designers, in general it goes as follows:

1. The designer initiates a conversation with you to get an idea of the design you’re looking for and to gather your web site requirements. They should also give you an idea of the creative direction they have in mind.
2. A design of the web site is produced in Adobe Photoshop (sometimes Adobe Illustrator) and presented to you. This is often called a “mockup.”
3. You offer feedback and the design is revised.
4. #2 and #3 are repeated a couple of times until you are happy and sign off on the design.
5. The designer then converts the Adobe Photoshop file into HTML, CSS, and image files and codes them into a template for WordPress or another chosen CMS.

As above, you will need to purchase web hosting and a domain name.

Large budget ($5,000 and up)

With a larger budget you can afford to take further steps to ensure you get a quality product in the end. You could hire a copy writer to develop your site’s content for you. Before going into design, you could have an information architecture (IA) developed for your site’s content to ensure that your information is strategically organized and your users will find what you want them to find. You could also have wireframes developed which allows you to focus on layout, navigation, and the overall user experience before jumping into design and getting caught up with colours, shadows, and other aesthetics.

Then there’s the unlimited number of features you could add to your site. Maybe you want a forum enabling your users to discuss amongst themselves. Maybe you want your users to be able to sign up to the site and have a profile. Maybe you have products and want to sell them on your site. The possibilites are virtually endless.

With larger budgets you can also afford to hire an agency. Agencies usually have web designers, web developers, and project managers on staff but may also have copy writers, customer service agents, and user experience professionals. Agencies can usually pull off large projects in less time than an individual working alone. However, hiring an agency doesn’t ensure the best quality by any means. There are lots of talented independent web professionals producing web sites of the highest quality, better than most agencies.

Hiring a web professional

You can find web professionals by posting on one of the many job boards that are out there. My favorites include:

1. Authentic Jobs
2. Freelance Switch
3. WordPress Jobs
4. Smashing Magazine
5. Krop (design only)

The right professional will not only produce quality work but offer invaluable advice and direction along the way, saving you time and money. If you are considering someone but having trouble communicating, keep looking.

The Skate3 Community site is a new addition to the web site for EA’s Skate3 skateboarding game. With the new addition, gamers can now create a skate team, find skaters for their team, view statistics, and lots more. I was charged with helping the team out with the frontend development and making sure the web site matched the design. Visit the site »

A Place of Mind is a web site created for the University of British Columbia to aggregate their content from a variety of online sources like YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and blogs. The site is configured to pull feeds from these sources and import specially tagged posts. The impressive creative work was produced by Fjord Interactive, who delivered wireframes and a PSD. I was charged with converting the PSD to a working WordPress theme and coding the custom Contribute form and feed importer. Visit the site »

I received this amusing Firefox error message when opening Firefox this morning. The strange thing is that Firefox still let me load all my tabs from the previous browsing session, so I’m not sure if there was actually a problem. I upgraded an extension as I was opening, but I’m not sure if it was related.

I’ve been very happy with Firefox 3.5 and enjoying the speed improvements.

I got involved with the Pirate Party of Canada simply by participating in the discussion forums early on. I then took on the role of establishing the brand, creating a web site design, and developing a WordPress theme. Visit the site »

After a lot of debugging, I was able to figure out that Media Temple’s (dv) configuration was responsible for the “Missed schedule” errors I was getting in WordPress.  By default, the /etc/hosts file looks like this:

127.0.0.1  yourdomain.com yourdomain localhost localhost.localdomain

To execute cron tasks, WordPress needs to post to the URL http://yourdomain.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron. This isn’t usually a problem, but with the above hosts file and Plesk’s Apache configuration, that URL will actually result in a 404 error.

I tried removing yourdomain.com and youdomain from the hosts file:

127.0.0.1  localhost localhost.localdomain

127.0.0.1  localhost localhost.localdomain
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx yourdomain.com yourdomain

Now when you restart the VPS, these changes to the hosts file will remain.

I looked at several other possible solutions to fix the “Missed schedule” problem.  One solution was setting the “ALTERNATE_WP_CRON” constant in the wp-config.php:

define('ALTERNATE_WP_CRON', true);

This activated some very messy redirecting for the user as they browsed the site though.  Not a great solution.  Another solution I was considering was just executing wp-cron.php from a cronjob every hour. Something like this:

0 * * * * /home/yourdomain/htdocs/wp-cron.php >/dev/null

After two years of working my finger muscles, I have decided to finally get out and start working out with my fiance Melissa and my friend Allain. At this old age we’re getting, we figured it’s time to get in shape to stay healthy
Look for us at the 2010 olympics in the weight lifting division!!!

The farthest I had been so far in my life was Edmonton Alberta. Well, in less than 2 weeks I’ll be heading further to Victoria, BC and Vancouver, BC to go visit a nice customer we have over there. What’s nice is that I think it’s been a couple years since I saw Brad, it’s about darn time we meet again after running Zenutech successfully all these years.
It should be pretty interesting.

Just thought I’d write a litle something on the new laptop I aquired last week on a dell business lease.
I went for the Inspiron 9400 for maximum screen space (17 inch). I can never seem to have enough screen space, especially on a laptop.
I think it will last me for a good 3 years with the specs I upgraded to. (2 GB RAM, etc)
I will be mostly useful on my trips when I visit my parents and business trips, as carrying my desktop had become way too pain-in-the-butt.

It’s definitely not the most liteweight laptop though, but that’s the price to pay when you want 17 inch.
Brad tried to convince me on a mac. I dunno but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to switch over. I hate having to learn how to re-use a computer. Same like Ill likely have a hard time upgrading to windows vista. I use my computer for getting work done, and I don’t really care how windows stores my pictures

Well, it’s about that time of the year to get in shape…
So I’ve joined the Fredericton Ultimate league, and the Fredericton Beach volleyball league.

It looks like it’s going to be lots of fun. Melissa’s also on the ultimate team. Oh and we won our first ultimate game of the season…we played amazing. Go Deep Throat go! (Hey, I didn’t pick the name, don’t blame me!)

Unfortunately, I wasn’t so luck on the sand playing volleyball. Our team took a loss against one of the best teams of the league. We’ll try again next Monday against a likely-to-be less-experienced team.

Brad and I have been working very hard in the last couple months to continue to improve both our business and its services.
We’ve recently launched a new front page on our web site as an effort to convert more visits to sales. We both believe that this new front page better showcases the great features of Zenutech.

We’ve also recently entered in several new marketing campaigns and things are looking great so far. The ROI so far has been attained, and it can only be surpased once WOM kicks in (word of mouth)

In the last month, we’ve purchased a new server and a new cisco switch. Next week I’ll be going to Montreal and we will be moving all servers to a new data center (Canix 2) where a brand new room with new cabinets are waiting for us. The current data center has run out of room and we don’t have space for new servers!

We have several greats things on the horizon for Zenutech:

1) Migration to a BGP4 high quality network. This will be a great improvement in redundancy. Currently, we rely on the high quality peer1 bandwidth solely. In the new BGP4 infrastructure, we will be receiving bandwidth from multiple high quality providers (to ensure we stay up if one provider such as peer1 is down)
2) Addition of PHP5, FastCGI and Ruby on Rails (oooooohhh , yes Brad - it’s coming!)
3) Addition of JSP/Java servlet hosting services
4) New features in the control panel
5) Addition of Windows Web Hosting coming soon as well

The addition of all these improvements will obviously span several months, but that is what’s hapenning at Zenutech!

Some updates under way:
- fixing the pictures section a little more the way I want it
- Post pictures
- Doing a better Contact page

So it’s coming along…

Set your alarm for a couple days in the future, and when it goes off, come back here.

It’s not ready yet!