Dave Bullock / eecue

PhotographerEngineering LeaderNerd

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EOS 20D Overload

So I just got back from the desert, and I took about 500 photos. The only problem with my new camera is that it takes photos so quickly. With bracketing it really adds up quick. I got some great photos including 2 separate run ins with desert tortoises. I am sorting through them now.

Sunday, March 13th, 2005 - Read more...

Daffodil Macro

This is one of the first really nice photographs I have taken with my new Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens. I took it in my backyard. The daffodils were provided by the illustrious and beautiful penelope. I am heading out tomorrow morning to the desert and I will be back with many photos of wildflowers!

Friday, March 11th, 2005 - Read more...

Daffodil Anthers and Stamen Cluster

daffodil anthers around stamen clusterI took this photo with my new Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens. I need to get another flash to get more even lighting but this one still came out pretty good. I am going to the desert this weekend to take some photos of flowers. Last time I was in the desert I photographed over a dozen species of flowers. I wonder how many I will get this time.

Thursday, March 10th, 2005 - Read more...

New Macro Lens!

I just got back from Samy's Camera in Santa Ana. So far I have had two good experiences with Samy's and their salespeople. When I bought my camera, they sold it to me below the website cost. When I bought my lens and flash today they also gave me a good deal. I picked up the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens and the Canon Speedlite 580EX. I just played around with the lens for a few minutes handheld (I have work to do) and the results are really amazing. The lens is really quite a deal, as I thought it would be after reading nothing but good reviews about it. I will be heading out to the desert again this weekend in search of more wildflowers.

Tuesday, March 8th, 2005 - Read more...

Gallery changes...

I made some changes with the way that the gallery looks. I made the interface cleaner and changed the order of display of the image details. I also updated the tag creation in the images and log sections. I also fixed the way the comments are added in these sections. Finally I changed the RSS feed in the comments sections so that it only shows replies.

Tuesday, March 8th, 2005 - Read more...

Mojave <del>Desert</del> Paradise

desert lupineThis weekend was my birthday and a group of my friends and I went camping in the Mojave Desert. The normally brown sandy desert, which receives and average 2" of rainfall a year is green and covered with flowers due to the 6" of rain that has fallen so far this year. I took some really wonderful photos with my new Canon EOS 20D. I can't wait to go back and take even more. I identified almost a dozen different species of wildflowers.

Tuesday, March 1st, 2005 - Read more...

My New Canon EOS 20D

loading only sign Today I bought myself a big birthday present. I picked up a Canon EOS 20D, with the Canon EF-S 18-75mm USM lens. I also bought the battery grip and a Manfrotto 3021BN with an Arca-Swiss monoball B1 head. Here is one of the first images I shot. I really love this camera and have been planning on buying it for a while. I am really looking forward to taking nature photos this weekend!

Thursday, February 24th, 2005 - Read more...

I.C.E. 9 and Khumbu Crampon Safety Recall

I just got a letter in the mail from Montrail about their ICE 9 and Khumbu crampons. The recall is for all crampons produced between September 2003 and February 1st 2005.

From the letter:

Montrail has received some reports of breakage on the Kumbu and I.C.E. 9 crampons. No injuries have been reported.

Thhe breakage occured in the vertical reails of the forefoot portion of the crapon just aft of the point array. When the crampon breaks in this way, it will no longer remain attached to the boot or the function as a traction device on snow and ice and and could result in serious injury to the user.

You can call for an RMA#: 800-826-1598 M-F 8-5PST or email custservice [at] montrail [dot] com.

Montrail will provide postage and several reimbursement options.

Monday, February 14th, 2005 - Read more...

Happy Valentines Day!

Happy Valentines Day to all the women in my life especially my fiance Penelope and my mother R.G. Bullock, who are the most wonderful women in the whole world. Thank you for all the happiness you bring me.

Monday, February 14th, 2005 - Read more...

New Tag System

Tagging is a way to identify posts / photos / events / albums / etc. with keywords that you can search by and cross-reference. Technorati has a good introduction to tags. Flickr uses tags as well. Now this site uses tags, of which the top 500 can be found on my tag page. You can also check for tags by using the following url: http://eecue.com/tags/[tagname]. Right now the tags are somewhat one-way (you can only see tags on the tag page... eventually each item will have a list of tags that it belongs to).

Monday, February 14th, 2005 - Read more...

NCRC Training 2004

The National Cave Rescue Commission was formed in 1979 to train rescuers and track rescues related to caves. It is a component of the National Speleological Society which is a non-profit group of over 50,000 cavers who are dedicated to preserving caves and cave environments. The NCRC does NOT do cave rescues, instead it trains rescuers in the latest cave rescue techniques.

california cavern sign Every year the NCRC sponsors a national week long cave rescue seminar. In 2004 there was also a regional week long (actually 10 day) seminar located at California Cavern in Cave City. Most of the SBCSD Cave Team members attended.

NCRC trains rescuers on 3 levels:

  • Level I - Team Member
  • Level II - Team Leader
  • Level III - Incident Command / Rescue Management

[Click permalink to read the rest.]

Monday, February 7th, 2005 - Read more...

Bush's Slash and Burn Tax Cuts

Bush released his new budget proposal and claims that it is fair and balanced, sort of like Fox "News". His budget fails to account for the $80 billion we will spend in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also fails to account for the several trillion dollars that his proposed Social Security "reform" will suck out of federal coffers. Senator Jim Jeffords pointed to the most glaring cuts:

Monday, February 7th, 2005 - Read more...

iPhoto 5 Doesn't Suck

So I have been using the new iPhoto 5 for about a week now and I am really happy with its performance. It is much faster than iPhoto 4, especially with my 5,200+ high res images. The Adjust widget permits me to adjust my photos without having to open them in photoshop (which I can do now easily too). The comment typing bug has been fixed. The search and smart folders rock. [Ed's Note: I should proofread and edit what I write.]

Friday, February 4th, 2005 - Read more...

Spiders

During the month of January I received over 200,000 hits from search engine spiders. Here are the top 6 spiders that crawled my site:

  • 116,448 Hits from Yahoo! Slurp
  • 37,011 Hits from msnbot/0.3
  • 26,424 Hits from Ask Jeeves/Teoma
  • 14,618 Hits from psbot/0.1 (picsearch)
  • 12,204 Hits from Mediapartners-Google/2.1
  • 10,514 Hits from Googlebot/2.1

I wonder if picsearch will ever have more than 4 images from the search for eecue.

Tuesday, February 1st, 2005 - Read more...

Vincent Thomas Bridge Lighting

vincent thomas bridgeI attended the lighting of the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro. I arrived just after the fireworks. I took a group of photos, but my tripod was complete crap and didn't stabilize the camera enough. Oh well, next time I will use a better tripod. Part of the problem stemmed from the fact that my camera doesn't have a tripod attachment point, so I was using my underwater case. I think that may have added to the blurriness but mainly it was the crappy aluminum tripod that I was using. I will either have to invest in a better tripod or use my mom's.

Tuesday, February 1st, 2005 - Read more...

CSS Layout Control

I have created 4 different layouts that you can now choose from. Click on the links in the menu labeled layout. The site is currently laid out to the left. The liquid layouts will allow you to change the size of the window and still see content. Enjoy!

Tuesday, February 1st, 2005 - Read more...

New MSN Search Beta Browser Ugliness

So I saw a news item about Microsoft releasing their new beta search engine as the main search on MSN (instead of yahoo). When I was checking it out i noticed that in Safari there is no left margin so the text is right up against the left hand side of the window... annoying (if you stretch it out it looks ok). I checked it out in Firefox and it looks fine. In Mac IE you can't even see the search box (on the main MSN page...)! If you post the link to the search in the browser it does work though.

Tuesday, February 1st, 2005 - Read more...

Bush Spending our Tax Dollars on Pro-Bush PR Propaganda

Bush has been doing a very naughty thing and now that he has been caught he is passing the buck and asking his cabinet to stop doing it. He has been spending our tax dollars on PR Campaigns. That means our hard earned tax dollars are going towards making Bush look better. I have an idea... instead of spending money on PR firms to spin your ideas in a positive light, why not create sensible policies?

Wednesday, January 26th, 2005 - Read more...

R.I.P. Don Smith of the Desert

Don SmithLast night my friend Don Smith aka Don of the Desert died in a fire at his residence in Twentynine Palms. Don was a master welder and could fabricate anything imaginable out of metal. Rest in Peace Don.

Tuesday, January 25th, 2005 - Read more...

Body Worlds Exhibit Photos

body worlds exhibitYou're technically not allowed to take photos at the Body Worlds Exhibit. The reason being is that they have a contract with Gunther that says nobody can take pictures. It is not a request from the cadavers that are on display. It is so they can make more money selling the posters. I think it is silly, but I still only took one photo of the exhibit. Btw, the California Science Center's site about the exhibit has been taken down but here is the new one for Body Worlds 2.

Monday, January 24th, 2005 - Read more...

Category Archive

So as you can see I have created an archive by category index on the navigational section of my site. These links will allow you to browse just a category if you choose. These links also work with Technorati tags. =]

Friday, January 21st, 2005 - Read more...

Google Fights Comment Spam

Google has added a feature to they search algorithm that ignores links that have the rel="nofollow" tag in them. This is great because it let's google know what information is your and what information was just posted by somebody commenting. They have recommended the nofollow tag be used on all links that can be posted by untrusted users. MSN Search and Yahoo! are both supporting it. Most blogging applications have already incorporated it. I am going to add it to my system too. Here is the link to the original article on Google's blog.

Wednesday, January 19th, 2005 - Read more...

Oil Refinery and the Big Blue Sky

oil refinery and the big blue skyHere is a photo I took. As you can see it depicts a sprawling oil refinery and a huge amount of sky above it. I took it riding in a car on the freeway.

I Like it.

Wednesday, January 19th, 2005 - Read more...

Japan Photos

Here are the links to my photo galleries from Japan that I took in 2003.

enjoy!

Tuesday, January 18th, 2005 - Read more...

Steve a.k.a Kemst

kemst This is a random picture of Steve Kemst that I took after respect. As you can see we are standing outside. I posted it instantly with my new photoblogging feature that i just programmed a few nights ago. Fun stuff.

Friday, January 14th, 2005 - Read more...

Imported and Captioned Akihabara Photos from Japan Trip 2003

Here is a link to the newly captioned photo album of the Akihabara District in Tokyo. I took them a couple of years ago on my trip to japan . There are 5 pages with 20 images per page.

I am currently folding the jp.eecue.com mini-site into eecue along with several other of my mini-sites. Each site will retain a unique design but will be part of the main eecue site. The articles will be integrated in to my main (b)log. Current links will still work.

Wednesday, January 12th, 2005 - Read more...

Photo Blogging!

So I just added a cool feature to my website. If I send a photo email from my cellphone to a certain email address with the correct username and password (just for photo blogging) it will be posted to my photo blog archive and into my main blog. The next message on here will be a test from my phone! The image is actually one my mom took and sent me.

Tuesday, January 11th, 2005 - Read more...

iCalendar Import / Export

I have updated my website to now support iCalendar import and export. This means that you can upload a calendar that you export from nearly any organizer application and you can subscribe to a calendar with the same application. It doesn't currently support recurring events, but it will eventually. Here is a link to my calendar, and here is where you can add my calendar to your organizer program (like iCal, Outlook, Lotus Notes, etc).

Tuesday, January 11th, 2005 - Read more...

One Wilshire

The other day when I posted my old pictures from One Wilshire I did a bit of research and found out some interesting facts. One Wilshire is owned and managed by the Carlyle Group, which is everyone's favorite Bush Family mega-corp which makes billions from the war on terrorism. I wonder why they would want the most expensive real estate in North America, which happens to be the name of a really cool art / architecture exhibit. Here is a excerpt from the study:

One Wilshire is the meet-me room for over 240 of big players in the telecom industry. Everyone who is anyone is located there and they all interconnect for free as they are in the same big room.

I also found some neat stuff like the Tenant Handbook and an Elevator / Card Key request form.

Friday, January 7th, 2005 - Read more...

XHTML / CSS Validation And Photo Imports

So I've been working on a few thing over the last few days and I have finished them for the most part. I have changed all the code on my site to be XHTML compliant and everything should now validate... you can test for yourself with the links at the bottom of the page. I also finished importing about 20,000 images from my old junglescene photo albums. All of the archive pages should be generated in the next few hours... feel free to look through them. I have also changed the CSS code for the image pages so now you can see more than one column at a time (note that this works in everything except Mac IE). I still have about 2000 of the new images from junglescene to import and then I have to import all my old articles and journal entries. Finally I will be creating a page where I can easily edit a whole groups' captions... when that is done I will go through and label all the thousands of unlabeled photos.

Joy!

Wednesday, January 5th, 2005 - Read more...

Unnamed University's Misconfigured Email Adventure

A few days after Christmas I received an email from an upset University server admin who thought my servers were attacking his servers through email. What was actually happening was that a spammer was sending email using random fake address at his server's domain name which I will call anonymous.edu. It wouldn't have been a problem if the server was correctly responding with 550 errors which mean Permanent Failure, but the servers were sending 450 which are Temporary errors, so all the servers that were trying to deliver the bounces, kept trying.

So here is the first email I received from &#x70;&#111;&#115;&#116;&#x6d;&#x61;&#115;&#x74;&#x65;&#x72;&#64;&#x61;&#110;&#x6f;&#110;&#121;&#109;&#x6f;&#x75;&#x73;&#x2e;&#x65;&#100;&#117;:



From: [email protected]
 Subject: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
 Date: December 28, 2004 2:19:23 PM PST
 To: [a bunch of my email address]


Network/Security Administrator,


I'm sending you this mail because one or more IP addresses in your domain
are currently attacking our electronic mail server with a denial of service
attack consisting of multiple, rapid attempts to send mail to randomly
generated, non-existent email addresses.


Please take action with regard to the below hosts immediately to stop this
worm or virus. This attack may be reported to the U.S Federal Bureau of
Investigation for criminal prosecution. These hosts may also have been
blacklisted from sending mail to our server.


64.239.136.142 (www.eecue.com)

To which I responded:



From: eecue AT eecue.com
 Subject: Re: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
 Date: December 28, 2004 2:32:16 PM PST
 To: [email protected]


Hi you will notice those emails are not actually coming from my server.


The spammers are using my domain as their From: address.


Is this email for real?


-Dave

My guess was close, but I had it backwards...

After getting three more of those emails they sent me this:



From: [email protected]
 Subject: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
 Date: December 28, 2004 2:59:32 PM PST
 To: [a bunch of my email addresses]


Excuse me if this email is a duplicate. I forgot to list the IP address
of the victim of this attack. It is: atlantis.anonymous.net (192.168.139.69)
Also, I can be contacted at: [email protected]


I'm sending you this mail because one or more IP addresses in your domain
are currently participating in a distributed denial of service attack
consisting of multiple attempts to send mail to randomly generated,
non-existent email addresses at our site.


Please take action with regard to the below hosts immediately to stop this
worm or virus. These hosts may also have been blacklisted from sending
mail to our server. They can be re-enabled once the DDoS attack subsides.


64.239.136.142 (www.eecue.com)

To which I responded this:



From: eecue AT eecue.com
 Subject: Re: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
 Date: December 28, 2004 3:01:28 PM PST
 To: [email protected]


Hello,


Please send me the full email in question including the headers
so I can track down who is sending said email.


Thanks


-Dave

I didn't hear back about it until today when I received this email:



From: anon\[email protected]
 Subject: Re: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
 Date: January 3, 2005 12:42:57 AM PST
 To: eecue AT eecue.com


It was for real, but was the result of a mis-diagnosis of the problem...


Things have returned to normal, there is no need to do anything on your
side. Our domain was the subject of a massive spam forgery ("Joe Job")
with randomly generated reply-to fields @anonymous.edu. This occurred for over
14,000 domains, and our mail server was sending a 450 temporary error.


Basically we told 14,000 sites to keep trying to deliver bounce messages
back to us, with no valid local recipient, at whatever rate they did queue
flushes. Making it look very much to us like a Distributed Denial of
Service Attack. When really this whole thing would have been only briefly
painful if we had changed the failure notice to a permanent failure,
causing those 14000 servers to trash those invalid messages.


It was not apparent to us what was happening (since we never received any
of the bounces) until someone said, "Hey you know this bounce says that you
are replying with a 450 temporary failure..." It has now been changed to a
550 (permanent failure) response.


Thanks again for looking into this!

Well that was nice of them to fix everything. 



From: eecue AT eecue.com
 Subject: Re: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
 Date: January 3, 2005 7:17:39 PM PST
 To: anon\[email protected]


Glad you worked everything out.


I thought it was somewhat humorous, so I posted about it on my website:


http://eecue.com/


I changed the names to protect the innocent.


-Dave


....
A. David Bullock
eecue : programmer / designer / admin / human
http://eecue.com/ -
anything is possible

Monday, January 3rd, 2005 - Read more...

Happy New Year! Welcome to 2005!

I want to wish everyone a safe, happy and prosperous new year. I also want everyone to take a few minutes from their day and a few dollars from their bank accounts and help out with Tsunami Relief. Click the link in the article below to find charities to donate to. Thanks!

Monday, January 3rd, 2005 - Read more...

Happy 2005!

Just wanted to wish everyone a safe and prosperous new year! =]

Monday, January 3rd, 2005 - Read more...

Back from Las Vegas...

Just got back from Las Vegas. I had a great time. It was really nice spending the holidays with my whole family and my lovely fiance. We stayed at Harrah's last night, ate some good food and drank some good liquor. Here are some pictures.

Sunday, December 26th, 2004 - Read more...

Merry Christmas!

Hope you are all having a merry holiday! I have created a few sites as Christmas presents for my fiance, my niece and nephew, and a couple of friends:

Peneloper

Skyela

Auhstin

Bassbinboy

Mike Rocchio

I haven't done any designs for them yet, those will come in the next few days so for now they looks somewhat generic. Btw if I created a site for you and you need help setting it up let me know!

Friday, December 24th, 2004 - Read more...

Design Updated

Well as you can see (or maybe not if your don't run a CSS compliant browser) my site has been updated. The design update was the easiest one I have ever done! All I had to do was change 1 file and my entire site was updated. I am all about separating content from design!

I have also improved the way the images work so that they can be cached by your browser (and save me bandwidth). I am about to update slacker and created a whole plethora of sites. =]

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2004 - Read more...

Caching Files...

Right now the files are still being cached... it takes a bit of time to create all the flat files so you may find some links do not work... they will just wait!

Tuesday, December 21st, 2004 - Read more...

Caching Mechanism Added...

I have created a caching mechanism for eecue / slacker. Every time a page is added or changed, a (mostly) flat html file is created. This will prevent server overloads from slashdotting and whatnot. It also greatly decreases the page load time. This caching mechanism also creates a flat file for the RSS feeds (which allows HTTP/1.1 to handle the work). I have also improved the page navigation for multiple page albums etc. I am adding this and the other functionality I added to slacker and will be creating sites for several people for xmas.

Tuesday, December 21st, 2004 - Read more...

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photography  los-angeles  links  general  technology  eecue  politics  security  japan  apple  sar  food  music  science  black-hat-2007  california  outdoors  new-mexico  nuclear  caves  machine-learning  robots  deep-learning  drum--n--bass  geeks  neural-networks  snarl  ai  computer-vision  gpus  gtd  health  natural-language-processing  object-detection  artificial-intelligence  autoencoders  backpropagation  celebrity-detection  chatgpt  cnn  facial-recognition  feature-extraction  fnns  gradient-descent  ham-radio  imagenet  osxphotos  robotics  sequential-data  spawar  sqlite  tpus  writing  activation-functions  ai-ml  album-names  alexnet  alphago  anomaly-detection  antennas  apple-news  apple-photos  art-center-college-of-design  attention-mechanisms  autonomous-vehicles  autonomous-weapons  bert  big-data  blog-series  blogging  books  california-academy-of-sciences  canon-r6-mark-ii  canon-rf-2470mm-f-2-8-l-is-usm-lens  caption-generation  chemistry  cnns  communication-with-interplanetary-spacecrafts  convolutional-layers  convolutional-neural-networks  crowdrise  data-denoising  data-extraction  data-privacy  decision-trees  decoder  deep-space-network--dsn-  denoising-autoencoders  dimensionality-reduction  disneyland  embeddings  encoder  engineering-leader  ensemble-learning  ethical-dilemmas  ethics  face-detection  family  family-trips  feedforward-neural-networks  fireworks  fully-connected-layers  gans  generative-models  gofundme  golden-gate-park  goldstone-deep-space-communications-complex  gpt  gpt3  gru  hardware-accelerators  healthcare  hidden-states  history  image-analysis  image-classification  image-generation  image-keywords  image-processing  image-recognition  innovation  interplanetary-spacecrafts  ios  ipad  iphone  koreatown  large-language-models  latent-space  layers  led  lemos-farm  llm  locations  loss-functions  lstm  messagepack  military  ml-keyword-detection  ml-photo-scores  mlps  multilayer-perceptrons  nasa-jet-propulsion-laboratory--jpl-  navwar  neurons  openai  overfitting  parallel-computing  photo-management  photo-sharing  photos  photos-app  pirates  pooling-layers  pyrotechnics  python  radar-imaging  recurrent-neural-networks  reinforcement-learning  rekognition  reverse-engineering  rnn  rnns  san-bernardino-cave-and-technical-rescue-team  san-francisco  segmentation  selfsupervised-learning  space-communication  space-exploration  speech-recognition  support-vector-machines  symbolic-ai  tags-labeling  technical-skills  temporal-dependencies  tensorflow  the-vermont-on-wilshire  time-series-forecasting  ujet  vaes  variational-autoencoders  vision-transformers  wag  wired