I’ve spent some time this week implementing user authentication over UNIX domain sockets for CUPS. The basic problem is that there are some operations (cancelling a job or submitting a new job, for example) that ought to require user authentication but do not, simply for the sake of convenience. This is a lightweight method of providing authentication for those operations.
Sue has a large collection of 35mm and (I think) medium format slides and we’d been looking around for a way of getting some prints from them without giving them to someone else and hoping they’ll take care of them. We discovered in the end that we had all the equipment we needed just lying around in the house!
Last night Sue and I had a go at taking a picture of the total lunar eclipse, an event neither of us had seen before. Taking a picture of the moon when it is lit up in the sky is quite a different proposition from taking a picture when it is eclipsed, so this composite picture includes a variety of shutter speeds. In the third moon you can see that the top portion is still lit up directly by the sun while the rest of it gets a lovely sunset red from our atmosphere, but I couldn’t work out a way to see both clearly in one picture.
I’m not going to switch to Sky just to watch Lost. It’s just a TV show. I do think it’s the best TV show I’ve seen, but there will be a DVD. Sure, I’ll miss it on Sunday night, but at least I’ll get to go to bed earlier.
Archiving digital photographs is something that I have always found a bit awkward. The system I’ve been using so far is starting to show the strain, and I think it’s time for a change.