February 2008 Archives

I've re-implemented my contact page here on my new site.  It's been a while since I've programmed anything in PHP so it took me a little longer than I expected. 

I'm using reCaptcha to keep all those filthy spam bots at bay.  I was previously using jCaptcha but reCaptcha is far cooler.  When people use reCaptcha they're contributing to the digitization of books that were printed way before the advent of the computer.  If you're interested, you should check them out.

So go on, send me a message!

Our last day of skiing was on Saturday.  We finally had a chance to see some of the TELUS Whistler World cup, we made it to Blackcomb and we saw a great show at the Garibaldi Lift Company.

We managed to get up early enough on Saturday morning to make our way to the mountain by 9am.  Our intention was to take the Peak to Creek run to the race course.  I took a digger near the top while growing accustomed to my new Ridiculously Stiff binding cartridges.  Missing the turn-off for the race, we ended up all the way (a long long way) at the bottom in Creekside.  Taking the Gondola up we had a great view of three racers on the men's Giant Slalom course. 

As it turns out the Gondola really is the only way to see the race unless you take a bus to the finish line.  They really need to figure out how to get spectators to the race for the 2010 Olympics or everyone might as well stay at home.  Some of the locals we spoke to suggested it may be an effort to get people to pay top dollar for tickets.  Even then, I couldn't see many places where spectators could see the race.  My suggestion, buy a HDTV and a TiVo and ski on your home mountain.

After a few more runs on Whistler mountain, we made our way all the way back to the Whistler Village base to head over to Blackcomb.  Next year the peak to peak gondola will be running so you won't need to go base to base.  After checking out the support structures and the span between the mountains, I can assure you I will continue go base to base.  It's insane!

We started by skiing around 7th Heaven which was anything but. A nice crusty layer of ice had formed on top making ice skates the more appropriate equipment choice.  We closed out the day with the real gem, Blackcomb Glacier.  You have to take your skis off and hike a short traverse but you're rewarded with nature's great ice box of soft snow.  I was an idiot and forgot to put my memory card back into my camera but Boester had his and this is what the hike looked like.

It's a little treacherous down that chute so I mostly kept my eyes focused straight ahead.  Once we got our skis back on, the snow was spectacular and the views were even more so.  At the base of the glacier there's quite a run-out but there's enough of a pitch to keep you moving at a pretty good clip.  Overall an excellent way to close out the skiing portion of our trip.

That night, after polishing off our booze back at the condo, we piled into a cab for a ride back to Whistler Village. We had dinner at another over priced restaurant in the village where the food really wasn't all that good and the wait staff had no sense of humor. I've come to the conclusion that if you're in Whistler Village, you might as well just hole up at that Garibaldi Lift Company (the locals call it the GLC).  The food is good (we had apres ski there every day), the wait staff are friendly and best of all we were able to catch EOTO (remnants of the String Cheese Incident) on Saturday night.  We closed out the night at Maxx Fish which I imagine is great if you're in your early 20's but unfortunately I'm not.

Next time I'm in Whistler, I plan to check out what goes on at night in Creekside and I'll definitely be back to the GLC.  My next stop is Vail in a few weeks, I'm ready for some powder.  

Well, it's obvious that the decline of the U.S. dollar isn't just hurting us poor Americans (I know you feel bad for us).  We had dinner at the Brewhouse in Whistler last night and our $16 burgers (Canadian or U.S. they're the same now) came with barbecue sauce but that was about the only thing.  A charge for Ranch Dressing showed up on our bill ($0.50)... what?!?!  It's not really about the money, it's about the nickel and diming.  If you can't sustain your business without charging for a few extra condiments, charge more for the food.  The beers weren't cheap but like I said, it's not about the money... we had our fair share.

We hit the mountain again this morning around 11am.  They weren't willing to hold up the Womens Super G just for us this morning so once again, we missed the races.  On the bright side, it did snow... about a half centimeter.  The overcast sky made it difficult to see but eventually the clouds broke and we had some great views.

Usually the Internet works great and I can get to everything I need to from wherever I may be.  Sometimes, however, I find myself in a network with a firewall that blocks access to something I want.  At times like those I revert to using SSH tunnels.  Unfortunately (depending on how you look at it) I don't find myself in those situations often enough to memorize the proper command syntax.  Hopefully this blog entry will save me the hassle of sifting through Google results for the solution.

If you're following along at home, you're going to need a few things to make this work.  First you're going to need an account on a machine that you can SSH into.  That machine will also need access to the service that is currently blocked by a firewall.  Next you'll need an SSH client.  If you're on MacOS X you can probably access SSH from the terminal window.  If you're on a Windows machine, you'll need PuTTY, Cygwin or some other capable client.  If I'm on my own laptop, I usually just use my Cygwin installation.  If I'm on a foreign machine I tend to use the portaPuTTY application on my USB key chain.

For example purposes, let's say we need to access a website that is running on a non-standard port  (e.g. http://www.example.com:8080).  Our top notch IT staff has blocked port 8080 in order to protect the network so we need to create a tunnel.  We just so happen to have an account on the server www.mikedalrymple.com, we can SSH to it, and that server can access www.example.com on port 8080.  Now we just need to tunnel our requests for www.example.com:8080 through www.mikedalrymple.com.  Using a command line SSH utility we can build the tunnel with the following command.

ssh -L 9090:www.example.com:8080 mike@www.mikedalrymple.com

Once I execute that command, I'll need to supply the password for the user mike on the server www.mikedalrymple.com.  After I successfully sign in I should be able to put the URL http://localhost:9090 in my browser and see the contents of http://www.example.com:8080.

Here's what each element of the command means:

• ssh - Use the SSH program.
• -L  - This indicates we're going to set up a tunnel on a local port to a remote destination.
• 9090:www.example.com:8080 - 9090 is the local port number I want to use to access the service, www.example.com is the remote host I'm trying to tunnel to and 8080 is the port on the remote host I'm trying to access.
• mike@www.mikedalrymple.com - mike is the user name for my account on www.mikedalrymple.com which I can ssh to in order to create the tunnel.

If you're using PuTTY (porta or otherwise), you need to setup your tunnel in the UI.  Following the same example, the first step is to create a session for www.mikedalrymple.com, as shown in the following screen grab.

Next you'll need to enter the tunnel information in the Tunnels screen entering your local port number in the "Source port" field and the destination host and port in the "Destination" field as shown below.

Once you click the "Add" button, your entry should show up in the list of "Forwarded ports" as the next image shows.

You'll likely want to save the session if you plan to use it again but all you really need to do is click the "Open" button and then you're caught up to where we were after we executed the command line version.

I used 9090 as my local port number in this example to make this example clearer, I would usually just use 8080 (or whichever port I'm trying to access on the destination server) to keep things clearer in my head.

Usually when I'm doing this I'm having to access something that is on a non-standard port, the only somewhat standard port I regularly use this with is Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection software which uses port 3389.

I hope this helps, let me know if I missed anything.

It's hard to believe but 2008 marks the 10th anniversary of my personal web site.  The Wayback Machine picks it up in 2001 but it began in 1998 as a way to help find a job during the dot-com boom in San Francisco.  It worked and I soon found myself working at a web development company call Vivid Studios (not to be confused with Vivid Video).  Since then the site has undergone roughly four major revisions which have included the addition of photos and blogging.

To kick off its 10th anniversary, I'm starting off fresh.  The photos will be back soon but most all of the old outdated content is gone.  I'm coming to grips with the fact that while I would like to, it doesn't always make sense for me to build every application from scratch.  So, this edition of the site is being built on top of the MovableType publishing system (version 4.1).  I even forked over the $100 for their professional pack because the designs it comes with are pretty slick and it allows me to manage more than just my blog.

As time permits I'm going to be moving my photos off my server and into my Picasa Web Album.  I plan to use their services API to integrate the photos directly into my site but we'll see if time permits.  There are literally thousands of photos so it will take some time before I get them all loaded.  In the meantime, I'll try to get my old album back up and running but if you're dying for an old photo, just let me know.