When researching options before writing the code referred to in this article, I came across a comment from someone I understand to be involved in the admin/author side of certbot. While I can’t find the link any more, they basically replied to someone stating that certbot would never provide plugins for DNS providers, which made sense since there are so many. However, shortly after finishing off this software, I came across the shiny new release of certbot, which  has some pre-written plugins for, you guessed it, DNS providers.

These plugins are not yet packaged for Ubuntu, so while I tried to do a quick test, I ended up still using my new script. If you’re starting out with certbot 0.22.0 or higher and get their plugins, they are probably a better option however this stuff will still work and is an option for you. And I’ll keep the code live for anyone who wants it, if for no other reason than it’s something else others can pick as an example to learn things from.

Introduction

Many of you will have heard of Letsencrypt, a service that enables creation of SSL certificates for use on websites (and anywhere else technically) for free; cost being one of the barriers to wider adoption of secured websites. I use this service for several sites, including this one.

I had a particular issue when it came to certificate renewal time that wasn’t supported automatically. In this post, I’ll explain a little about Letsencrypt and its client application certbot, and about “challenges” which are how Letsencrypt verifies you should be given a certificate you ask for. I’ll only be dealing with the authentication side of certbot: while it and a number of other clients are able to install the certificates for you as well, I did this part manually to fit within my Nginx configuration the way I wanted, but there is plenty of information out there if you want to learn more about that side.

My Setup

If you’ve read my previous posts you’ll likely have an idea of this already, but a simple overview for those who haven’t.

I run my domains on servers hosted in AWS on Ubuntu servers. I use Nginx (Open Source Version) as a hosting and proxying platform. My websites are, for the most part, exposed via CloudFlare (Free Tier).

For me, these certificates are securing the leg between CloudFlare and my server so users don’t normally see them, but they form one leg of the end-to-end security chain..

Letsencrypt

Letsencrypt can be managed by a number of software clients, however, the main one and the one I use is called certbot. Certbot allows the issuing of new certificates and the renewal of existing ones; renewal being important because the main caveat of these certificates is that they are only valid for 90 days. And the key part of this process is validating ownership in a challenge/response style setup, which can be done 3 different challenge methods.

HTTP-01

Probably the most common or most easily achieved method of validating your domain is HTTP-01. It involves posting a specified file in a specified location on the website. There are plugins for certbot that make this really easy for a number of hosting setups, including Nginx which I run.

For me, this wasn’t so practical. As I mentioned the DNS wasn’t pointing to the new server yet, and I didn’t want to mess around putting stuff on the old servers. Also, I had an additional site that I wanted a certificate for but I wasn’t able to modify the content to support this method.

TLS-SNI-01

I haven’t actually heard of anyone using this in the wild, and I haven’t tried it as it’s not functional when using CDN in front of your servers.

DNS-01

So this is the one I chose. DNS-01 involves adding a TXT record to your DNS with the specified value. For me this was great, it didn’t matter where my website was pointed yet, or if I could modify files. Because I could edit the DNS this way I was able to ensure zero downtime getting the certificates issued and in place before I did the cutover.

The downside to DNS-01

DNS-01 got me going well, however, when it comes to renewal time it’s not something that can be automatically supported. HTTP-01 has various options and settings to dump files in a specified location to automate that, but DNS is much more diverse and not all providers even offer an API. I gave it some thought and confirmed for my self that I couldn’t change to HTTP-01, mainly as I had this system issue certificates for domains that didn’t point to this server still (yeah maybe I’m a special case, but it is what it is).

Certbot has hooks to do things before and after any validation steps, so I decided I’d make it automated myself!

Automating DNS-01 challenges with CloudFlare

CloudFlare offers a great API, even on its free tier, so I decided to write a hook to automate the necessary updates. Since I’m that way inclined too, I’ve made it freely available, hosted here.

Basically, it’s a NodeJS script that runs through the following logic:

• Given a domain and a validation code
• Get a list of the users’ domain zones from CloudFlare and find which one is appropriate for this domain
• Check that zone to see if we already have an ‘_acme-challenge’ TXT record for the domain
• If we don’t create it. If we do, update it. In both cases, set it to the validation code provided.
• Query DNS and see if it’s updated yet and if not, look at the TTL for the query and wait that long plus a 10-second buffer and try again up to a configurable number of times until it is updated.
• Done.

This basically sets up the new validation information and waits until it is deployed, then returns allowing certbot to do it’s check and provided that succeeds, get the newly issued certificates. Now, of course, I’m simplifying a few things. It’s not certbot doing ALL the validation etc, but between certbot and the server they work it out; the finer detail isn’t too important for us just here.

What you get in the end is the ability to run a command like the following, and have it automatically manage the DNS-01 challenge setups required, which means it can be put into a cron job and not require manual intervention every couple of months!

sudo certbot renew --manual --manual-auth-hook "/path/to/node /path/to/hook.js"

As it turns out, the hook can also be used for certonly certificate issuing; it creates and manages validation just as well as the renew does. There is more detail and examples for installation and usage in the readme file in the code repository so if you want to check it out that’s a good next place to look.

Summary

Wow, that was a lot longer way of saying “I made a script to support DNS-01 challenge automation on certbot manual renewals” than I expected…

Anyway, please feel free to check it out, have a look at the readme which has some helpful info on getting it going, and I’ll try to address any questions or issues that come up. It’s far from perfect, but it works well for me so for now, it’ll do. Perhaps in the future I’ll try and improve any error handling etc. but no doubt that’ll come if I start seeing more errors I need to handle!

If you manage a website and you don’t have it secured with SSL, DO IT!!! There really is no good reason not to anymore.

Thanks for reading!

The post Automating Letsencrypt renewals with DNS-01 challenges appeared first on Random Insanity.

Domains

I thought domains would be easy. I have a pretty good understanding of domain registration and DNS, having worked with them for years so I went looking for a new registrar. I needed to relocate registration and hosting of both domains, and my main requirements looking around were ease of management and price.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’d already settled on Amazon Lightsail for my site hosting, so Amazon seemed a good option for DNS to keep it all together also.

While the web hosting was basically identical for the 2 sites, the domain portion has a little (only a little) variety.

RandomInsanity.net.nz

As the first of the 2 sites I moved, I jumped into AWS Route53 and set up my DNS settings. Quite easy, and as best I can tell, will at worst cost me a couple of bucks a month if there are lots of requests (I’m thinking spamming etc; I don’t expect my readership to be that large!).

I also used Route53 and transferred my domain hosting over. Pretty easy, although it gave me some messages about my current provider having to approve it etc. which in the end I suspect is a just half generic warning for some other registries that require that. Route53 wasn’t the cheapest registrar I’d found here, but for ease of management, I thought I’d just keep it all together.

The one thing I’ll note is to keep an eye on your email. They send you info and anything you need to do which may not always be obvious on the console.

SaferHomes.nz

After randominsanity.net.nz being so easy, I planned to so saferhomes.nz the same way. And then I hit the real world.

The easier part first: instead of the Route53 hosting of the domain records, I used the inbuilt DNS part of Lightsail which as best I can tell has no particular additional charge beyond the Lightsail plan I was on. Same general result but different management location. Cool, done.

And then I went to transfer the domain.

Despite .nz having been commonplace for New Zealand for a couple of years now, it seems Route53 does not support this top-level domain (the support .co.nz, .org.nz, .net.nz, but plain old .nz). Gandi, the registrar AWS state they use supports it, but AWS themselves don’t. Bugger.

At first, I thought I must be doing something wrong, but after a while, I’d found numerous forum posts asking AWS when they would support it, right back from when it first became available, with no commitment beyond “it’s on our backlog”. Amazon’s own documentation, when you dig deep enough, has a list of the TLD’s (Top Level Domains) that they support and .nz is not listed.

So, there goes my plan of keeping it all together. In the end, I have moved the registration to Domains4Less and then just entered the AWS name servers for the domain into the records. Not ideal, but it seems to be working well.

Email

The email was much easier in the end. I actually had saferhomes.nz using Google’s GSuite already so I left it where it was.

For randominsanity.net.nz, my initial thought was that I would just find a way to forward it all to a Gmail account I currently tie my personal address in with. However, until now, I’d been basically using a full email account on my ISP network, with Gmail just grabbing email using POP and sending to that user using SMTP. Given I wanted to kill that mailbox, that wasn’t going to work.

I probably spent a couple of hours looking at solutions. Ideally just finding somewhere that’d charge me bugger all to do a blind mail relay for my domain, but that wasn’t really a service in wide supply. I looked at Amazon services, using their Simple Email Service which short of using a lot of work (S3 buckets and Lambda functions) probably wasn’t going to do what I wanted nicely anyway.

In the end, I just bit the bullet and setup another GSuite account for it. It costs me $5 to have my mailbox. I could have used Amazon’s WorkMail feature for a similar price but it didn’t look as polished as Gmail/GSuite so I erred on staying with the option I was familiar with since I had no intention of moving the saferhomes email.

Summary

Well, that’s really it at present. Maybe there won’t be a part 3…

In short, this is what I’ve ended up with:

RandomInsanity.net.nz

• Domain Registration: Amazon Route53
• Domain Hosting: Amazon Route53
• Website Hosting: Amazon Lightsail
• Email Hosting: Google GSuite

SaferHomes.nz

• Domain Registration: Domains4Less
• Domain Hosting: Amazon Lightsail
• Website Hosting: Amazon Lightsail
• Email Hosting: Google GSuite

SSL was a bit of a mission, and I can’t say I’m 100% on exactly which bit resolved it but it can be done. Basically following various Bitnami documentation.

Outbound email required configuration of SMTP credentials in WordPress but once that was done it worked fine, for what I needed anyway.

Hopefully, someone might find this something resembling interesting, and maybe even helpful. I’ll try to provide updates as the journey continues or as my setup evolves (I may still try moving everything to a more home-grown EC2/RDS type setup, but we’ll see how we go).

The post Migrating WordPress to AWS Lightsail (and other related changes) – Part 2 appeared first on Random Insanity.

Besides the obvious Broadband, I’ve got 2 websites (well, more than 2 but only 2 I’m going to keep alive) and a number of domains, as well as some email hosting. Moving all this has been a bit of a mixed journey and although it’s still going on, I thought I’d start putting together a bit of the story, challenges, lessons, solutions etc. for anyone else who is looking at moving such things for themselves.

After getting part way through this article, I realised how long it was getting, so I’m going to break it down into parts. Part 1 will be websites, part 2 will cover the rest.

TL;DR

I moved 2 WordPress sites to Amazon Lightsail, mail to Google GSuite, and domains are still a work in progress with domain hosting being a mix of AWS Route53 and Lightsail, and domain registration being AWS Route53 and Domains4Less. Do you want to know why? Read!

The story

After 11 years at my current work, I’d just tended to keep all the things I could in our systems. Partially because I built said systems so had great control/flexibility/etc. and partially because, for the most part, it cost me nothing. So as part of leaving, rather than keeping everything in place and paying their advertised rates, I decided a move was necessary!

For the purpose of this post, I’ll concentrate on 2 domains. The first one “randominsanity.net.nz” (AKA, this site) is my personal stuff, blog, email, basic. The second is a business domain “saferhomes.nz” (A company I’m a co-founder of). For both, we’ll look at domain, website and email (not necessarily in that order mind you).

Websites

As the generally larger part of the project, I started looking for a new web host first off. Both the sites I’m dealing with are WordPress, currently hosted using Plesk on my employers’ web server.

I looked at various locations, both web hosting and straight out VPS, with varying cost and resources. I liked the VPS idea in that I could probably just run both sites (they are pretty low traffic) on one server; I’ve certainly got the sysadmin skills to run the server and manage all that so why pay for someone else doing that stuff! In the end VPS still looked like it would end up more expensive than just outright hosting in many instances.

Due to already evaluating AWS for another project recently, this was one of the places I looked, almost out of pure curiosity more than serious intent. While the pricing on AWS can be quite hard to piece together, best I could tell I could probably do what I needed within their free tier (at least for the first year) and costs wouldn’t be tooooo huge beyond that.

So, I could setup a server on EC2, run a MySQL database on RDS, and even do a bunch of my DNS on Route53 (we’ll talk more about DNS soon). Appealing, not overly difficult concept, and just enough new stuff to make it an interesting challenge. However, as one might imagine, with less than 4 weeks of employment left, a job hunt in the works, a mortgage and all the other bills one acquires as part of being an adult, I came to the conclusion that I wanted something a little faster and easier, with less thinking.

Still, AWS had strong appeal as I wanted to do more there in future. Then I spotted Amazon Lightsail. Almost a sub-service of AWS, accounts linked but designed to be nicely functional for those not dealing with the normal AWS console. Lightsail touts a low-end plan of $5 (US) per month and the ability to deploy a pre-configured WordPress site, which I took an educated guess I’d be able to migrate my current sites overtop of without too much effort.

So Lightsail it was.

I started with my personal domain as a guinea pig first (experiments are rarely good on business domains). A new AWS account was easy to setup, and jumping over to Lightsail I had a generic WordPress site going in about 5 minutes flat.

Lightsail gives you a dedicated IP address for your container (I consider their deployed site/server as a container – maybe I’ve just been playing in the docker space for too long) which you can use to access your website before sorting any DNS; a nice way to be able to prep the site before migration.

The first gotcha I realised in Lightsail is that although you get a public IP, it’s my understanding (from reading rather than having his the issue) is that the IP they allocate is dynamic, which I assume means either that a new IP may get allocated of you restart the container, or (and this is probably more likely) that it’s a little like EC2 where you could kill and redeploy the container but you’d lose the ability to get the same IP again. While the latter wasn’t a major likelihood for me, in case it was the former, I made use of the easy spot in Lightsail to create a Static IP which I can then point to my container and use henceforth. A quick note for young players, while the Static IP is free (for up to 5), it will get charged if you don’t have it attached to a container!!

Okay, so I have WordPress running and accessible… now how to get all my content across?

I had a quick go with WordPress’s inbuilt export/import. That moved all my posts across just fine, but then the theme I was using no longer seemed to be available from WordPress. Cool, copy the theme directory over… nope, seems I’d done some customisation of the theme which I couldn’t recall, so the theme looked quite different out of the box.

Right, plan B (there’s always a plan B, and as is often the case, it was Google). Rather than reinvent the wheel, a quick Google confirmed I wasn’t the first to have this mission (Shock!), nor the first to document a little of the journey for the benefit of others. You can find the article I read here, but basically there is lovely plugin for WordPress (All-in-One WP Migration – love the creative naming) that does a really good and complete site export/import. Install the plugin at each end and follow your nose!

The one trick I did find during export was that since I was keeping the same domain, under the advanced options on the export screen I selected “Do not replace the email domain” as well as “Do not export spam comments”. Other than that it was plain sailing!!

Saferhomes.nz was pretty much identical. Although, while I chose the advanced export options on my first site, when it came to the saferhomes domain I forgot them and it caused a sufficient headache on the other end that I actually went back and re-did the export with them selected. If you’re changing domain I don’t expect it’ll be such an issue but it certainly helped for just moving the domain to another).

With saferhomes.nz though I have an additional challenge. Under Plesk I had it using Letsencrypt to automatically get and keep an SSL certificate up-to-date. Lightsail’s WordPress has no such easy feature, and it uses a custom server setup for WordPress and Apache from Bitnami. SSL is a must on this site, so I’m currently working on getting Letsencrypt running in this new landscape. It’s a work in progress, but I’ll ether make a new post on how I succeeded (yes, I’m backing myself to crack it) once I finish.

Other than that, 2 websites running on Lightsail and accessible via IP!

Wow, that’s a lot. Stay tuned (or go look) for parts 2 and probably 3 in due course.

The post Migrating WordPress to AWS Lightsail (and other related changes) – Part 1 appeared first on Random Insanity.

The insurance debacle…

Those who read my last post may recall the “fun” I had with a lady deciding her car should be part of mine. Well, after the lovely letter I sent into my insurance company (at their behest) detailing my side of the incident, I followed up a week or so later just to confirm they had it for a start, and to see if any progress had been made.

While on the phone, a nice guy dug through their shared email system in which my submission should have supposedly arrived (it hadn’t been logged on my file yet) and found it. Equally, no responses from the other party had been logged, but he said if I didn’t mind holding he’d call her insurance company and see if they had got it from her yet. So after about 15 minutes of being on hold he came back to me reporting that the other insurance company hadn’t got their clients version back yet but after reading my submission both my insurance and hers agreed that she was in the wrong and even before they got her side. So my excess was waved and I finally got my car repaired!

I didn’t ever really think that they would side with her but I was surprised that even her insurance decided she was in the wrong without her side! I must have made a compelling argument lol.

I did finally get a copy of her side when she submitted it and I can see how she may have managed to convince herself that I was at fault, but it was one of those stories that if you started asking questions about any of the points it would have unraveled nicely. At the end of the day the accident happened because of the way in which she introduced herself to the existing flow of traffic. ’nuff said. Cheers State!

Music…

Those of you who know me will know that I love my music! At the moment I’m listening to “The A Team” by Ed Sheeran. It’s a really sad song once you listen to the lyrics but damn catchy tune.

I also imported “A State of Trance Year Mix 2011” from europe. Ordered around christmas and arrived shortly into January. Cost me all of about $35 including shipping for a 2 CD album and it’s been played over and over so I think it was a bargain and money well spent lol.

People…

I’ve met a few new and interesting people already this early in the year. Some more interesting than others, and some particularly who are helping encourage me to try new things and forced me to think about some things that I have avoided for quite some time. This is a good thing for the record (I think…). I’m told I’ve been smiling more recently too lol.

Between road trips and spa baths it’s been a lot of fun and relaxation with new friends; not entirely stress free but certainly enough to tip the balance back the right way.

There has of course been the sad farewell to someone who while wasn’t a blood relation certainly rated as family to me. Farewell Grandpa, I’d like to think we celebrate your life will lived. You are and will be missed by many.

Speaking of Road Trips…

Well last month saw a trip to Auckland and Hamilton for a weekend (one night in each) involving live music and possibly a little too much to drink. Definitly too much driving in a fairly short period of time but well worth it over all. Good to catch up with friends too.

This coming Friday sees another trip starting too. Off to Wellington with one of those new and interesting people for Homegrown. There’s actually a small group of us going so should be an awesome experience and again good to get out and do something different! Who know’s what will eventuate…

Work…

Well we all know that work is one of those things that just kinda has to happen, but lately I’m pleased to say there’s been some improvement after all the uncertainty and things are looking up. Certainly enjoying work a little more again. And it’s helped by us all having moved offices much closer to home and town (pretty much anywhere away from smelly Whakatu would have been an upgrade!).

They jury is still out on how things will go long term but things are showing more promise than they have in some time!

Website…

Another thing one or two people in the world may have noticed is that my main website is currently replaced by a holding page as I build its replacement. The old one was an experiment in CSS based design and the ability to have the same content displayed significantly differently through the use of alternate style sheets.

That was all well and good but it’s rather outdated now and with more of my photos going public with the website URL in the watermark it seems a good idea to revamp it into a more professional front. The new design is simplistic and clean.

While the basic bits are done I’m writing a new gallery engine to display some of my pics; a mix of open source JS based popups with a bit of maths to get some gallery thumbnail pages with some more iterating layout (if all goes to plan). It’s been slow going with lots of other stuff on as well but hopefully something new to go live not too far off!

Anyway, time to start on dinner (yummy pork roast) so maybe I might make it back to another update some time soon and fill in the many things I no doubt missed! =P

The post 2012 is well underway… appeared first on Random Insanity.

Friday the 22nd of July 2011 was a slow rainy day. As we do from time to time, some of us at work decided that being a rainy Friday, it made it a perfect candidate for fish’n’chips, so after doing the rounds for orders I placed a call to the shop and then headed into Clive to pick it all up. The rain had eased and was more of a drizzle now, so while still wet and not fun to stand in, visibility was pretty good for the short drive. After picking up the order I jumped in the car and headed for the office again.

Southbound just into the 100km stretch of SH2 I started to accelerate as I came onto the first small straight, and noticed a white car on the opposite side of the road, but pointing in the same direction I was with its nose nudged slightly to the oncoming lane. It looked like it was parked, except that it was too close to the road, especially as it was facing the wrong direction. And sure enough as I got closer it pulled across the oncoming lane and tried to pull into my lane… the only problem being that my car was occupying that space already! The white car hit mine, we got the cars off the road, inspected the damage, exchanged details etc, and as the cars were both still drivable, went our separate ways. While I felt pretty pissed off at it all, I was glad at least that she hadn’t tried to say it was my fault and hoped that things could just get repaired and back to normal.

Upon arrival back at the office, the rest of the team started on lunch, while I spent the better part of 20 minutes on the phone with my insurance company (State), relaying the information I had collected from the driver of the other vehicle, and giving a detailed description of what happened. This included the drivers comment that she had “misjudged” how close I was and that she had intended to move over to the southbound shoulder, wait for me to pass and then pull out behind me. Unfortunately while on the phone, the lady I was speaking to had tried the cell number without response so a quick effort to get her admission of responsibility wasn’t going to play nice, but State would continue to work on getting in touch with her. The lady also assured me that as I had Full cover plus hire car cover with them, that while my car was being repaired they could arrange a hire car. Great, wonderful, glad to know the dosh I fork out each week might actually pay off!

A short while after I got off the phone with the insurance company I took the car into one of their preferred repairer’s for assessment which included nothing more (and I mean NOTHING more) than a couple of photos of the damage; no questions, no further investigation to see if it was more than panel damage etc. But that’s fine, I figure they know what they are doing and I’m certainly no mechanic to question their process for such an initial assessment.

So everything should be good… In a perfect world at least.

My concern was raised the following Tuesday when mid morning I received a call on my cell asking to speak to … the driver of the other car! After a bit of back and forth, I established that they were returning a call she had made to them, and somehow the cell number had got mixed up by the return caller. I thought that while the mix up was a little concerning, at least they were getting to talk to her to get things moving along further. Silly me!

Tuesday afternoon, after hearing nothing I phoned the insurance company again to enquire about the status of my claim, only to be told that the driver of the other car was not admitting liability for the accident and that both she and I would receive in the post some paperwork asking us to give a written statement and a diagram. At this point I started to get a little more pissed off; I was driving a car that I couldn’t open the drivers door properly on, and that had developed a lovely little shake in the stearing that resulted in me deciding that I wasn’t willing to drive it to Wellington the coming weekend for fear it would crap out while in transit somewhere far from home!

So on the 1st of August the letter finally arrived and today (the 2nd) I filled it all out and emailed it to them this evening. The more I wrote, the more pissed off with it all I got. Excess aside, they still haven’t got my car fixed; what would happen if it wasn’t drivable? What if there is as yet unseen damage that is going to result in additional damage or failure, of the steering for example! I decided to put it all on here and vent my frustration to the world. I’ll also be asking some rather pointed questions about other aspects of my policy to the insurance company to see what they have to say, and ultimately will decide if I want to stay with them or if I want to change.

The following is the email I sent to them and the accompanying picture. For now I won’t put any identifiable details about the other party in here, but who knows, that may change depending on how irritated I get before this whole thing is over!

To whom it may concern,

The following statement and attached pictures are in reply to the letter dated 26^th July 2011 from <The name of their “Claims Consultant”> requesting further information in relation to claim <Claim Number>.

At approximately 12:30, Friday the 22nd of July I was travelling south bound from Clive returning to work in Whakatu. The weather was overcast and had been raining heavily, however there was only a light rain and good visibility at the time. As a matter of habit I had my headlights on to increase my visibility to others with the sporadic rain that had been coming.

When the accident occurred I had transitioned from the 70km/hr to the 100km/hr speed zone and started to increase my speed as I came into a straight section of road. As I entered the straight I noticed a white car on the opposite side of the road facing southbound (the wrong direction for the side the vehicle was on). Once I gotten closer that car began to move forward onto the road, crossing the oncoming lane and heading for my lane. I was forced to move left off the road and did so as much as I could without moving into the muddy siding and risking total loss of traction; I also applied the brakes and sounded the horn as I did so. The white car continued and impacted my drivers side front door and front panel; it also bent my wing mirror in.

After both vehicles had come to a stop, the white car was in the southbound lane and had pushed my car off the road even further. In order to avoid a further accident I moved my car left and forward to allow both cars to get off the road. The driver of the white car seemed very concerned and apologetic. We inspected the damage to both cars; I’d had difficulty opening the drivers side door on my car and notable bending had occurred on the impacted panels as well as damage to the front drivers side tyre. Her vehicle showed little noticeable damage however the bright white paint and overcast day made it hard to distinguish any minor deformities that had resulted in the accident.

At the scene, she apologised and explained that she had misjudged how close I was when she pulled out, and that her intention had been to pull her car across both lanes and onto the south bound shoulder, allowing my car to pass before pulling out behind me. It seemed clear from her comments that she acknowledged that it was her misjudgement that had resulted in her hitting my car and I took this as to an acknowledgement of liability.

Due to the apparent agreement on the cause and the fact no one was injured and that the damage appeared relatively minor (both cars were still drivable without significant risk) I opted not to ask Police to respond.

After exchanging details and inspecting my car to ensure it was not likely to do too much more damage driving the remaining few minutes to work, I returned to the office and called State to report the accident. Logs indicate this call was made at 12:42pm.

After loading the claim, I took the vehicle to Napier Collision Repair for an assessment, during which they took photos of the visible damage. Since then having had to drive my car in its current state I’ve also noticed that there is now a shake in the steering that I can only attribute to being shunted in the side by another vehicle. Access to the drivers compartment is still restricted also, due to being unable to properly open the drivers side door.

On the morning of Tuesday the 26th I received a call on my cellphone asking to speak to <the other driver>, which is the driver of the car that hit mine. There had obviously been some confusion as someone at State was apparently returning <her> call and had for some reason mixed my number up in the process. That afternoon after hearing nothing back and growing more concerned as to what other details may have gotten confused, I decided to follow up with State at which point I was told that <she> was not admitting liability and that although I had given a statement and description over the phone I would now be required to give one in writing along with a diagram.

The accompanying diagram shows the relative position and movement of the two vehicles both before impact and at the point of impact, with vehicle A representing my vehicle, and vehicle B representing the other vehicle. Both vehicles were pointing in a southbound direction with vehicle A approaching in motion along the southbound lane, and vehicle B beginning from a stopped position facing the wrong direction on the northbound shoulder. From here, vehicle B moves across the northbound lane and merges into the front right hand side of vehicle A (my car). At the time I was traveling somewhere under 100km/hr as I had only just entered the 100km/hr zone and following a brief period of acceleration had started to slow my speed (prior to reaching 100km/hr) as a result of recognition this hazard unfolding.

Please feel free to contact me if you wish to clarify any further details. I trust that this provides sufficient information to allow you to make an informed decision as to the liability for the accident allowing the claim to progress.

 

Kind Regards,

<me>

So what do you all think? Had the same trouble yourself? Feel free to name and shame (or complement if appropriate) your insurance company, as I’ll be shopping around again in the near future!

The post Insurance Pains appeared first on Random Insanity.

Pre Snorby:

Before I looked at installing Snorby I’d setup Snort, Barnyard2 and Apache2 with BASE. Snort was logging to a unified2 log file, which Barnyard2 was parsing and storing in a database as well as logging to syslog so I could get a rapid view that things were actually working prior to BASE being setup. Then BASE came in and grabbed info from the database to display in its standard fashion.

While this setup was pretty good and while BASE was able to generate some interesting stats, it wasn’t the most slick thing I’ve seen and its links to rule info and IP lookups etc seemed to have been invalidated due to updates in the websites or subscription requirements of the websites.

So then I stumbled across Snorby. It looked much more user friendly and appeared to generally just be a nicer system than BASE, so I thought why not. Initially I had intended to run both BASE and Snorby in different folders of the web root… that of course turned out to be a bust due to the nature of Ruby on Rails; a language I know nothing about and gave no thought to at the time.

Installing Snorby:

While Snorby can run all on its lonesome using Webrick (never done it but the interwebz told me so!), I had Apache running already and as I mentioned was still thinking that other stuff would be running along side. So, on the Snorby website I found the wiki page “http://wiki.github.com/mephux/Snorby/snorby-recipe-with-barnyard2-unified2-and-apache-jjc” which after some later googling appears to just be an excerpt from “http://global-security.blogspot.com/2009/07/snorby-for-snort-recipe-with-barnyard2.html“.

Now that recipe was aimed at FreeBSD, which while I used to use, was somewhat different in it’s operation to Debian. That aside i thought I’d use it as my guide and just wing the differences between the ports of FreeBSD and Apt from Debian.

My first attempt (and failure) involved installing ruby and a few other packages from Apt. Never having dealt with it before all the references to “gem” and “rake” etc were foreign to me, so I installed a few other packages that looked related too. Short version; this all ended up in a nauseating mess of version incompatibilities, file path issues, and multiple versions of the same program floating around the system with different ones being used by different commands.

So I purged all those packages and grabbed ruby and rubygems tarballs. Installed those, and tried again. This time got closer, and actually got Snorby running, however with one issue… Any time I tried to view the detail of an event, I got an error. This was linked to their being no sensor info even though all the events were logging fine.

This could have possibly been resolved easily enough, had I been able to get into the command line debug console for Snorby. I’d jumped onto IRC and found Dustin Webber (aka “mephux”); the author of Snorby. Working with him we tried a pile of things and found that there was a hugely messed up mix of files and stuff. The most annoying error while trying to access the debug console was “Rails requires RubyGems >= . Please install RubyGems and try again: http://rubygems.rubyforge.org” which given Snorby was installed and running seemed to indicate that Rails and RubyGems were there and playing together prior to this to get things going at all.

Everything was looking completely snotted so after around an hour of getting nowhere, I decided to start from scratch again. I de-installed anything vaguely resembling ruby, rails, gems etc. I also located and forcibly deleted any cached files, directories etc that bared any resemblance. I wanted to make sure it was REALLY cleared out!

The following is how I got things to work (or as near as I can remember) after that.

I grabbed ruby-1.8.7-p174.tar.gz and rubygems-1.3.5.tgz from their appropriate websites. While the recipie I was using as a guide didn’t mention the specific install of ruby itself, gems required it to install (I assume the ruby-gems port installs it as a dependency maybe).

Installing ruby was a stock standard untar, ./configure, make, make install. I did run configure with the ‘–enable-shared’ flag this time which I hadn’t earlier, although I’m not sure if that made any difference at all. once that’s done, rubygems was a bit different, needing to run “ruby setup.rb” after untarring as the method to set it up.

Once that was done, things became a bit more standard. I’d already grabbed Snorby using git and placed it in /var/www/snorby/ (I made it lower case because I was expecting to have the “snorby” in a url, however the folder was named with a capital S when first grabbed.

The command sequence from there (I’m not listing the output to keep it brief) was…

$ gem install prawn
$ gem install rake
$ gem install rails
$ gem install dbd-mysql
$ gem install passenger
$ passenger-install-apache2-module

At first I accidentally missed the rails one and dbd-mysql gave an error, but after I corrected my mistake it installed fine.

The passenger-install-apache2-module is one of a few scripts that passenger seems to have for getting things setup with different web servers. It is pretty helpful and takes you through a couple of steps to get things setup. It will tell you if you are missing anything it needs, and even gave the correct apt command to get anything it needed. At the end, it tells you three lines you need to add to your Apache config.

After that, it was time to get Snorby sorted again.

Setup database.yml and email.yml as per the normal docs. In my case I cut email.yml down to remove the authentication stuff.

As per the doco “rake gems:install” was next.

Next was the database.

$ rake snorby:reset RAILS_ENV=production
$ rake snorby:setup RAILS_ENV=production
$ rake snorby:update RAILS_ENV=production

Now, I’m not 100% convinced that I ether needed all three of these commands or any of them actually. I had the database setup already with barnyard logging to it. This process dropped the entire db and re-created the tables, but I can’t spot anything specific schema wise that Snorby added that wasn’t there before. However, while debugging these three command were given to me by Dustin as what was needed and I didn’t have the patience at the time to test different combinations or the knowledge of ruby to check the code for exactly what each did.

After that, restart Barnyard and Apache. Id also made the changes to the Apache DocumentRoot by now to work as per the global-security version of the recipe, these were left out of the one on the Snorby Wiki but seem essential to getting the ruby stuff working rather than just showing as files.

Browsing to the appropriate url it now all seemed go. I found I’d missed the iconv install but an “apt-get install libiconv-ruby” fixed that. I could see alerts being logged, the sensor showed fine, and now 16 hours later Snorby is running happily!

The two other things I did come across that I didn’t spot in the doco’s but that showed in the Apache logs were changing permissions on snorby/log/production.log and the snorby/tmp/ folder to allow the application logging and the generation of email attached PDF’s respectively. The log snippet that showed this up was:

Rails Error: Unable to access log file. Please ensure that /var/www/snorby/log/production.log exists and is chmod 0666. The log level has been raised to WARN and the output directed to STDERR until the problem is fixed.
spawn> Exception in child[2924] - Errno::EACCES: Permission denied - /var/www/snorby/tmp/tmp-event.pdf


Post Install:

A huge thanks to Dustin for not only writing the thing, but for several hours of assistance in trying to track down the problems to get it working under my particular config.

Reflecting I think the first problem with lack of a sensor was because the Snorby install had blown away a perfectly good database, combined with barnyard2 not restarting properly causing it to manage to keep logging events when it reconnected to the db, but not recreating the sensor info in the db as that seems to be done on barnyard loading.

You may ask why barnyard didn’t reload properly… I “think” that may have been do to with the load the server was under: this sensor is in a very high traffic network so snort and barnyard were working their butts off to keep up with the traffic that was being sniffed – so even though barnyard was told to restart, I think it was still trying to finish the records it was working on inserting into the database, which was in the tens of thousands. I actually fully “kill -9″ed it at the last restart but previously I hand just told it to restart without checking process id’s etc.

I’ll try and update this post to clarify anything if I get questioned or if I feel motivated to expand anything into more detail. Feel free to post any questions you have on the install process  of Snorby or the other components here or go checkout the Snorby website for places to get help if you’re having trouble with Snorby itself. As I said, I know nothing of Ruby so my ability to assist with a lot of Snorby specific problems is probably pretty limited.

Edit [2009-09-10 13:09]: Ok, so not everything was perfect. Turns out the cron jobs to do the daily/weekly/monthly reporting weren’t installed for some reason (apparently I’m not the only person to have this happen). To fix it:

$ gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
$ gem install javan-whenever
$ whenever --update-crontab snorby --set environment=production

and it should be all setup to run. =]

Links:

• Snorby Homepage: http://www.snorby.org/
• Snorby Wiki: http://wiki.github.com/mephux/Snorby (has contact info and install doco)
• Snort Homepage: http://www.snort.org/
• Snort Additional Downloads: http://www.snort.org/downloads/additional-downloads/ (where I found BASE, Snorby, Barnyard2 and has a pile of other tools as well)

The post Running Snorby on Debian (lenny) with Snort, Barnyard2 and Apache2 appeared first on Random Insanity.

So, what gets me into a suit and onto national TV you ask? Well it’s a new campaign called “Drop the Rate Mate”, and basically it’s a movement lending its support and allowing the public to better support the current draft recommendation issued by the Commerce Commission on Mobile Termination Rates.

The campaign was launched on the 11th of August 2009 and initially there are 8 organisations supporting the campaign, including Airnet, Consumer NZ, Federated Farmers, FoMA, NZUSA, TUANZ, 2degrees and Unite, and is chaired by Matthew Hooton of Exceltium. The key however is that it’s actually designed as a way for every day New Zealanders to have a voice to battle against the well financed incumbents: Everyone deserves their say!

The full Commerce Commission report can be found here _(pdf) if you’re sufficiently interested; but here I’ll try to summarise a few key points and throw a few more facts amongst all the debate (even though there’s plenty of misinformation to wade through).

A Few Definitions:

MTAS: Mobile Termination Access Services. Incorporates Mobile-to-Mobile, Fixed-to-Mobile and Short-message-service termination rates.

Key Recommendations:

While the report is not a final report, it is expected that after public submissions are taken the key recommendations will still hold. These two key recommendations are that:

• MTAS should be regulated. This would be done by making the change listed as paragraph 959 (page 206) of the draft
• That the revised undertakings submitted by Telecom, Vodafone and 2degrees should not be accepted (Paragraphs 960 and 961)

There are a couple of reasons that MTAS are being investigated. One is that it is a barrier to entry, which has unfortunately combined with 2degrees participation in the droptherate campaign has led some to claim that it’s all a big marketing stunt by them because they can’t compete normally. For the record I don’t think that’s accurate personally; 2degrees have already launched competitive pricing. A MTR reduction will definitely help them compete on a more level playing field but if they don’t change 2degrees will still battle away and I believe still be commercially viable.

Barrier to Entry

The barrier is best summed up by the following image…

Figure 1: MTAS Between Mobile Carriers. Each customer makes one equal call to every other customer on other networks. For the illustration I've chosen a communication that leads to a 15c MTR each. Source: Daniel Hopkirk. (Click image for larger version)

The situation is this: The new carrier “C” comes on board and initially has a significantly lower customer base than the other two incumbents. Logically, with less on-net customers, the majority of calls and txts will be bound for another network. Equally, as the majority of phone users are not on their network, very few calls or txts from other networks will be destined for the new carrier. This leads to a significant imbalance in MTAS paid by Carrier C when compared to that which is paid and/or recouped by the other Carriers.

“… the provision of [mobile termination rates] at prices above cost represents a barrier to efficient entry and expansion in the retail mobile services market.”

NZ Commerce Commission
Draft Report on whether the mobile termination access services should become designated or specified services
30 June 2009
Page 12, Paragraph xiv

Now Carrier A and Carrier B will tell you that they don’t really matter and that it all evens out, which may be accurate if there is a comparable volume of traffic inbound and outbound for your network, but for a new Carrier this isn’t the case. All this adds up to a significant cost that Carrier C has to pass onto it’s customers, which makes it very difficult to compete on cost, especially when the ComCom investigation shows that the rate charged by the other Carriers is significantly above what it costs them, and above internationally accepted rates.

And that leads us on to the second issue…

International Benchmarking

Sure, there’s nothing wrong with trying to make a profit, but one could speculate that the high rates serve to keep the two larger and relativity balanced carriers in a controlling position with minimal direct cost to them. For the record, the campaign estimates that over all it ends up with Telecom paying Vodafone a little more than the reverse, but this is a small price to pay to keep the market to themselves!

The ComCom investigation shows that we basically have some of the highest MTAS in the world. And just before anyone starts to talk about Bill and Keep regimes and all that stuff, yes it exists however that’s not what the ComCom are recommending and 2degrees have declared that even if that was implemented they would NOT charge their customers to RECEIVE calls as some people have tried to claim.

Table 1 below has a fair bit of info, but basically it covers what Telecom and Vodafone have volunteered to do and what the ComCom believes would be a likely regulated rate based on international investigations. Here’s what the headings mean (Note that as the investigation was carried out pre-launch of 2degrees, their rates are not included in this data):

• Current Voice/SMS Undertakings: MTR for voice calls under the current undertakings that Telecom and Vodafone have. This undertaking expires in 2012… Not sure why Vodafone SMS rate is’t listed in the report yet but it’s possibly just not part of their current undertakings.
• Revised Voice/SMS Undertaking: The proposed voluntary undertaking that Telecom and Vodafone submitted during the investigation. The recommendation of the report suggests that these are not excepted.
• Comparison of expected Voice/SMS MTR: This one’s a bit more tricky. It’s a comparison between what the ComCom expect the regulated rate would be (The “Factual” rate) and what they call the “Counterfactual” rate which they note as being…
  

  The counter-factual converts the undertakings rates weighted on a calender basis for each year. … These figures are then weighted for the proportion of mobile subscriber numbers on each of Vodafones and Telecoms networks.

  NZ Commerce Commission
  Draft Report on whether the mobile termination access services should become designated or specified services
  30 June 2009
  Page 14, Footnote #4

  Basically it’s designed to be an average per customer on those networks based on their proposed undertakings, or at least that’s how I understand it… I could of course be wrong…

Table 1: A comparison of current and proposed undertakings and expected regulated rates which would be inline with international expectations. Source: Data compiled from Telecom, Vodafone and the Commerce Commission, all listed in the ComCom report.

Summary

I know that I haven’t done the most brilliant job of walking through the information (my brain and the wee early hours of the morning in which this was thrown together don’t really agree with each other), and I may try tidy it up later, but I hope I’ve helped shed some more light on the story at the very least.

• Lowering MTAS would increase competition based on value and quality of service, rather than who most of your friends are already with (or forcing you to have a phone for each network)
• Compared against international carriers, Telecom and Vodafone’s proposed voluntary undertakings represent an insufficient decrease over too long a period to bring us into line within an acceptable time frame

If you’d like to support the campaign you can do so by going to http://droptheratemate.co.nz/ and adding your name to the petition.

For those who have any questions feel free to leave them here and I’ll try and help out where I can.

Links

Some links to other posts, articles or various other sources of information on the matter. Note: These have nothing to do with me and may be pro or con when compared to my view on the matter. Got any good ones I’ve missed? Let me know.

• 2009-08-18 – Stuff – 2degrees denies secret pay-for-calls plan
• 2009-08-12 – Hawkes Bay Today (clipping) – Campaign targets two providers’ mobile costs
• 2009-08-12 – The Dominion Post (clipping) – Cellphone charges ‘ripping off users’
• 2009-08-12 – Greens.org – Green Party backs the ‘Drop the Rate, Mate’ campaign
• 2009-08-12 – hawkesbay.co.nz – Drop the Rate, Mate! mobile phone users’ Campaign Launch
• 2009-08-12 – The Techsploder – Snow job on termination rates
• 2009-08-12 – Scoop – Are we getting a good deal with our cellphone charges?
• 2009-08-12 – NZ Herald – Phone giants say call for price rules could backfire
• 2009-08-12 – Scoop – Telecom and Vodafone Responses “Laughable”
• 2009-08-12 – Scoop – Campaign Launched Against Telecom/Vodafone Rip Off
• 2009-08-12 – Stuff – Cellphone charges ‘ripping off users’
• 2009-08-12 – NZ Herald – Phone giants say call for price rules could backfire
• 2009-08-12 – Computer World – Mobile termination row goes nuclear
• 2009-08-12 – Steve Zone – Droptherate – Are people being mislead by PR spin?
• 2009-08-11 – 3 News Radio Live – Lobby group wants regulation on cell phone market
• 2009-08-11 – Computer World – ‘Drop the rate mate’ campaign targets MTRs
• 2009-08-11 – KiwiBlog – Drop the Rate, Mate
• 2009-08-11 – Infonews – Campaign launched against Telecom and Vodafone rip offs
• 2009-08-11 – Steve Zone – Droptherate – How about telling us the truth?
• 2009-08-11 – Voxy – 81% Of Kiwis Say Drop The Rate, Mate!
• 2009-08-11 – Newstalk ZB – Vodafone & Telecom “ripping off” NZers
• 2009-08-11 – NBR – 2degrees rallies Consumer, Federated Farmers, service workers’ union to mobile pricing cause
• 2009-08-11 – Vodafone – The Truth About Mobile Termination Rates, Our response to the ‘drop the rate’ campaign
• 2009-08-11 – Infonews – Airnet, Consumer NZ, Federated Farmers, Federation of Maori Authorities, NZUSA, TUANZ, 2degrees & Unite
• 2009-08-11 – Voxy – Drop The Rate, Mate! Campaign Launch Notes
• 2009-08-11 – NZPA – National organisations join with 2degrees in mobile campaign
• 2009-08-11 – NZ Herald – 2degrees leads mobile charges fight
• 2009-08-11 – Computer World – ‘Drop the rate’ campaign not about 2 Degrees
• 2009-08-11 – One News/NZPA – Push to reduce mobile phone costs
• 2009-08-11 – Telecommunications Review – “Rates are already falling mate” – Telecom
• 2009-08-11 – Stuff – New group in mobile phone termination battle
• 2009-08-10 – Stuff – 2degrees on course, despite wobble
• 2009-06-25 – Stuff – Please terminate my high cell phone bill
• 2009-05-20 – OFCOM – Wholesale mobile voice call termination: Preliminary consultation on future regulation (multiple documents)
• 2009-03-26 – NBR – Tuanz: telcos charging $300 a year too much for mobile

The post Drop the Rate Mate – What’s it all about? appeared first on Random Insanity.

Ok, now let me think, what’s happened over the past … (checks) … 3 months (wow it even feels like it’s been longer than that). Well, let’s look at the key points I guess.

Oh, but before I do, I have to say I think the arsonists that lit fires in Victoria (Australia) should be summarily shot. It’s mass murder on a grand scale and shows a severe lack of respect for anyone and anything. In fact, lets make arson a capital offence all round. Even the idiots here in NZ who set alight buildings that were part of the Whakapapa ski fields on Mt Ruapehu. F**king dropkicks, the lot of them.

Ok, and rant and on with the rest of it…

Christmas:

Christmas was pretty quiet. I spent lunch with my surrogate family (GlitterGirl will know who I’m talking about =P) which was nice. A good low stress affair really. Dinner at home alone infront of a movie was good too. I’m not a Christmas person really, too commercialised and all that junk. I did however get given a plant (which is still alive and sitting in my lounge), and a piece of neck jewlery stuff from my mother (Not sure what you’d call it exactly, but it’s not too shabby or feminine so my friends assure me lol).

New Years:

Ok, so this was a big one as such. I took 4 days out and went up to Auckland. Stayed with a good mate up there, and along with another good mate spent a nice few days.

Driving up was pretty crap weather. I probably averaged about 50km/h along the Taupo straights, a stretch renound for people being caught doing well in excess of 100km/h. The rain was so heavy that you could hardly see the road. Fortunaly the further north I went the better things got so it was actually quite plesent when I arrived in Auckland.

I got up there on the evening of the 30th after a stop part way up to meet some people I’d been chatting to digitally for a while. Dinner was shortly in order, followed by a walk up Mt Eden to play with a LASER! A movie or two when we got back ended the night.

New Years Eve… We bussed into Central Auckland and went for a little bit of a wander. Even sat and had a coffee at some nice little spot that was in what looked like a small lane way. While sitting there and with no small amount of convincing necissary I managed to talk the boys into a spot of rockclimbing. So back to camp and a quick phone around managed to find somewhere open! An hour or so out there and I had two new converts who apparently quite enjoyed the activity!

Home and showered then along with a few other vague aquaintances we spent New Years Eve at Oxygen, a rave setup by Incline events.

It was a pretty random evening. A bit of mucking around before we got in there delayed our arrival but we made it in by about 11:30. I was still stone cold sober but after the countdown and half the populace leaving I soon delt to that.

We partied away until about 5:30am New Years Day and then started the walk from K-Road back to Mt Eden. The rave closed at 6am and there wernt many left by the time we gapped it so we decided it wasn’t worth hanging around the extra half hour.

After an all too short sleep (I was up again at about 8:30) I downed a few coffees and waited for the others to emerge. Then we all headed out to the flat of one of the guys who had been at the rave with us and had a nice afternoon bbq.

Friday the 2nd marked my last day in Auckland, and was kicked off by one of my mates and I going and catching up with a guy I deal with lots for work but had never actually met. So managing to avoid most of the rain that was setting in we sat at one of the Mt Eden cafe’s and talked geek for a bit. Then back and pickup our 3rd and off for a late breakfast at Circus Circus.

Then it was all over. Back and pack the car and start the drive back home. It was a pretty uneventful trip except for it taking over an hour to get 11.1km’s through Taupo. Traffic along that stretch was TERRIBLE!

Since New Years:

Well it’s been pretty standard since then. The offices opened back up so back to the daily grind. I did go up to Auckland for the last weekend in January for a meeting, then came back via Wanganui to catch up with someone. I left work and headed up there around 11am Thursday, and got back to Napier about 3am Saturday morning. It was a long trip home!

Before heading up for that meeting, I sent off three photos of mine for a photography competition. I found out a couple of days ago that out of 450 entrants, a total of 85 awards were maid. One of which was an award of commendation to one of my pics!

Well known Diamond Harbour photographer and experienced judge Lynda Harper was most impressed with the variety and quality of images entered in the 2009 Focus on Flowers competition run by Carole and Frank Green in association with the Christchurch Garden City Trust’s Festival of Flowers. She felt it had been her hardest judging assignment ever. Display constraints allowed only a small percentage of the 450 entries to gain awards and thus many excellent images did not make the cut. – fusiontrust.co.nz

The three pics I put in were…

Makahu Farm

Poker on Gray

Lillies at the Grays

The first one (Makahu Farm) was the one that got the award. The last one, believe it or not, was taken in the middle of the day in a perfectly well lit room and has not had any editing except to correct the white balance. It was a fluke of light metering I guess you could say. All in all, having one chosen for display was more than I expected do I can’t complain about the result. =]

Yesterday:

Yesterday was Valentines day. Also known as National Singles Torture day. I pretty much avoided the world as much as possible by not leaving the house lol.

All in all I think Valentines has been made into commercial crap like most holidays, but I do miss having someone to setup elaborately simplistic romantic situations for. *sigh*

And of course I do miss GlitterGirl lots. :'(

Ok, so moving right along… I did end up watch “Changeling” on the night of valentines. It’s just hitting the cinemas I think. (Do yourself a favour and don’t ask how I watched a new release without leaving the house). Now, usually when films come out and people are raving that it’s a great movie I usually take a deep breath and brace myself before watching, and I’m usually left wanting more from the story. This time, I was pleasantly surprised. Be warned, the follosing may contain spoilers. =P

Directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Angelina Jolie it’s a story set around the 1920’s in Los Angelies and inspired by a true story “Changeling” tells a story of Christine Collins (Jolie) and her battle with the police when her son goes missing. After a search the then extremely corrupt LAPD return a boy to her claiming that it’s her recently found son. Collins claims this isn’t true, but the police and various others try and convonce her that it is, finally resorting to trying to discredit her when she doesn’t accept it to be the truth. Of course she is correct and it’s one big setup, but the police have had enough bad press, and can’t afford to have this one go south on them too.

Over several months the story of a determined and strong willed mother continues, and with some support from some people who still have a moral compass pointed in the right direction, she triumphs over the lies, however sadly she ends the movie without being reunited by her son.

The only criticism of it that comes to mind is that Collins left her 9 year old son at home alone while she was at work… yet no one ever hinted that this may have not been a good decision. I don’t know, maybe I missed something, or maybe this was just common place. Who know’s. But that aside it was still a great watch, say around a 7 out of 10.

I think that’s pretty much all for now. If anyone is still reading thus far I’ll be highly impressed.

Oh, and Sarah, what comment do you refer to on my last post? I didn’t delete any from you… go make it again! I’m curious now!! =P

The post Wow, it’s been a while… appeared first on Random Insanity.

As a result, I thought I’d put up a before and after of one of the basic pics I have done some really simple correction on. This photos was taken in my office with my Nokia N95.

Before:

After:

It’s by no means perfect, but it’s a start. I’ll post further revisions of this image as I get time to do more work on it. =]

The post Colour Correction appeared first on Random Insanity.