Yeah, there is no doubt about it... It's easier to do this on the weekend!

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Well, at the rate I'm going it's going to be a very long 365 days.  Nonetheless, here is Day 7.

This just struck me as funny looking when I walked by.

I realize as I am trying to do this that my biggest enemies are exhaustion, night time hours and my lack of a decent back drop.  By the time I get home and settled in from work it's dark outside and subjects are pretty limited.  I have stuff I can photograph around the house, but really how many times do you want to see my desk or carpet?  I need to think of something that I can set things on top of and see if maybe that helps me out some.

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History of programming languages (infographic) png.dm/wnHi4V

— Pingdom (@pingdom) February 3, 2012

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Henry is pretty much the perfect subject, most of the time he's still as can be.

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I like this one because he's smiling.

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My Son Hank resting after a long day.

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Day 2: Lucy watching cartoons before Church.

Bonus Photo: Lucy trying to be like mommy and changing her baby's diaper.

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Tonight was Chili night and rather then make corn bread like we normally do I thought we would mix things up a bit and try beer bread.  I called upon the wisdom of Susan Buetow for a recipe, and she sent one my way with the added request to take pictures for her scrapbook.  So below is the recipe and below that are some pictures.  It turned out to be pretty tasty, we used Yuengling Light for the beer and added a small amount of cheese as well.  Next time we make this I'm going to try a different cheese to bring the flavor out some more.

Ingredients 

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 bottle beer-your choice (12 oz)
• 2 T sugar
• 1 T baking powder
• 1 t salt
• 2 honey
• 4 T butter, melted

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a loaf pan. In a bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Stir the beer and honey into the dry ingredients until just combined. Don't over work it. Pour in half the melted butter into the loaf pan. Add batter and then use a pastry brush to add on rest of the butter. Bake 50-60 min until top is golden and toothpick inserted comes out clean from the middle. 

Kitchen Notes

You can also add 1 cup of cheese to this-yum. I have left out the honey and it still taste great. Jalapeños can be added, too. 1 fresh one chopped or 1/4 cup of jar peppers. You can also melt 2 T of butter and pour it over the loaf once it comes out of the oven.

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Artifact from Extinction (sounds more dramatic then, cup of coffee on a winter's day from a school with a new name).  I promise tomorrow's title will be more more bland.

Side Note: If anyone knows about the post-to-posterous from SmugMug is supposed to work, please hollar at me.  Whatever I did, did not work and I am pretty bummed about it.

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My good friend Jon Kohlmeier picked up a new Rebel T3i at the begining of the year and challenged himself to take a new photo every day.  He had the idea in order to help learn how to use his new toy/tool, and I thought that was pretty cool.  Then Michael Schuermann jumped in on the challenge, hoping to refocus in on his hobby of photography. Jon suggested maybe I jump on board, and that seemed to me like a pretty neat idea.  To be honest, I've become a little laxed with my photo taking. More often then not the only thing my T1i is doing, is collecting dust. So, here it goes...  Like Jon said on his blog, I can't always promise I am going to post religiously and I can't even guarantee the photos I take will be worth looking at... but I'm going to give it a try anyhow!

Lastly, I'm a tech guy, so a quick note about the gear seems in order...  I have  Rebel T1i and most of the time I am sporting the kit lens, a Canon 18-55mm or I quite often will use my Canon 18-200mm.  I also have a Canon 50mm 1.4/f USM that I like to use when taking pictures of my kids.  I import everything into Aperture on a Mac Mini server I use at home, and then I'll be uploading to SmugMug.  I'm going to post here, but I'll also be cross-posting to a WordPress blog because both Jon and Michael are doing that too. From time to time I will probably use my iPhone 4S camera as well. It is without a doubt the most handy camera I have, it's always there!  And, truth be told it takes some pretty darn good pictures too.

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via blog.bitbucket.org

This is pretty sweet. I've jumped on the Vim band wagon in recent months and have never looked back with even a hint of regret. As developer web servers like BitBucket and Cloud9 (also recently did this) start integrating key bindings that resemble Vim's I can't help but smile.

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Stormy Weather: Are Americans prepared for a rainy day? bit.ly/xeCQEi

— Mint.com (@mint) January 10, 2012

You gotta wonder who they were polling.  I find it hard to believe that half of all Americans have three months of expenses on hand, or that they have access to 2k in a pinch.  It makes you wonder if the community that answered these questions either didn't understand the questions (does credit count?!?!) or were they scoped wrong?  I just find it hard to believe that high of a percentage of Americans are saving that aggressively.

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I made a move to Posterous with the new year.  I've been rolling my own content management system for quite a long time and while I am still extremely confident in that work (so much so that Higher Things continues to use it) the simple fact is I don't really blog enough to justify the continued cost of my own server for my own site. So here I am, at least for the time being.  Source code and things of that nature which I want to share can be found over at my BitBucket page.  For those looking for jGrowl stuff, there's a link in the left hand menu that should help you get started.  Happy New Year!

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If you do any credit card processing on your website you have to deal with PCI Compliance. I equate the pain of this task to putting your hand into a meat grinder. Yeah, it just is that bad.

I'm a big fan of Braintree as a Credit Card processor for web apps, it's got a really rock solid implementation, the SDK's are done by Braintree for developers and it really reduces the stress of being PCI Compliant. That said... I hit a snag recently.

Braintree set me up with an account at Security Metrics for PCI Compliance scanning. The idea is that Security Metrics scans my server and evaluates our compliance based upon a variety of criteria. Most of those criteria are bunk, but this is what the industry does, so these are the rules we play by. One of the issues that I've run into over and over again is with Apache version numbers. Security Metrics does a HEAD request on port 80 and uses the Server Signature of Apache to peel out the version number and check it against known vulnerabilities. I happen to sport CentOS 5.7, which ships with the latest and greatest security fixes of Apache back ported to Apache 2.2.3. Back porting is common practice in the Linux world, it ensures that you have the most secure version of a piece of software without breaking compatibility via features. Here lies the problem.

When Security Metrics scanned my server they saw Apache 2.2.3, which does not have a security fix for 2.2.18 (in their opinion) and so the scan fails. This is flat out wrong. The truth is I have the fix, but the scanner just isn't intelligent enough to discern this. Some other products in the PCI Compliance world (ie. McAffee for example) provide ways to object to a test and prove that it's a false-positive. Security Metrics unfortunately does not provide an easy route for doing this.

So what's a guy to do? Do you have roll Apache in order to get the right version number? I don't recommend it, that just makes for a lot of work down the road. You can try e-mailing the Security Metrics folks, but I'll tell you that from experience this was mostly a frivolous task. When I e-mailed them I spent three days arguing about nmap's response for a scan of UDP port 1434. Ridiculous! So here's what I discovered last night... If Apache does not return a version number, Security Metrics passes your server on that test. I haven't decided if this is a good thing or not, but it definitely made life easier in a frustrating situation. If you're running into this issue I suggest setting "ServerSignature" to 'off' and setting "ServerTokens" to 'prod' in your httpd.conf. Restart Apache and re-run your test and you should be able to spare yourself the frustration of a wonky PCI scanning test.

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