During our Christmas Trip of last year we came through a place in Arizona that was once home to the largest and deadliest weapons system ever built by the United States. The Titan 2 Missile System in Arizona is the only of its kind left. It has been turned into a Museum where one can be stunned by the reality of what was once the cold war of two of the most powerful countries on earth. It serves as a reminder to a time not so long ago. After seeing all this madness and talking about blast radius and destruction I am surprised that we are still not much smarter then we were during this time. Enjoy the grisly-beautiful Gallery: Titan 2 Missile Silo and Pima Air Museum

 

One of my favorite places in California is the Sierra Nevada. Unspoiled Nature and left alone by tourist crowds it is a photographer's heaven. During the hot summer months, I usually try to avoid those places, but spring and autumn are wonderful for exploring Eastern California.

I have recently added a new gallery entitled Ghost Towns of the Sierra Nevada. These pictures used to be part of my Highway 395 Gallery, but this gallery is growing too large already. There are still a few ghost towns left for exploring. I added some pictures of Silver City. The city is a collection of old stuff and old buildings brought together from other real cities. I guess they are doing a good thing, claiming to have saved all this stuff from decay. The attention to detail is fantastic. I would not mind paying again for another tour. Remind the person at the entrance to show you his "ghost pictures."

The only mistake I will not be making again is to stay in Ridgecrest. I think officer B. will have to find another victim to stick his traffic tickets to. If you drive through any city in the area, you should be very aware of the cops, as tourist traffic is a major income source for these cities and the cops down their pride themselves in how many tickets they hand out year. They are so proud that they even announce this on big billboards.

Canon 5D + 24 - 105mm L LensI love buying equipment at Amazon. Its convenient and I trust them. They have excellent buyer protection and are very responsive to claims.
I also buy at their Marketplace where people and small businesses sell their stuff. Amazon's protection covers this too, but that doesn't mean you should be completely careless, as they only cover you up to 5 times for life.
Unfortunately scammers have found out ways to use Amazon Marketplace steal your hard earned dollars.
Especially high priced electronic items (and that's what I usually buy there) are being used for this kind of fraud.
Obviously people lose all reasoning skills when something is being sold at incredibly low prices, although above all that should be the first indicator that something is wrong.
When I was looking at some items, I ran across the Canon 5D + 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM Lens package offered at just $1400 (the next cheapest package price was around $3400).
The lens alone is easily worth almost $1100 at Amazon.
I was pretty sure this was just another scam, but I decided to send the seller an email and poke around a little to see what he would tell me.
I sent him an email asking about some more details. 

Me: I noticed that you are selling this camera with lens far below the normal price range. Is there anything wrong with the camera, is this a mistake ?

He promptly replied within the hour:

Fraudster: Thank you for your express interest in my Canon EOS 5D Camera. First of all i want to tell you that my products are brand new in box,with 12 mounths manufacturer warranty from Canon, with all the cables, accessories etc. The price for immediate purchase of 1 Camera is only 1400 USD and the shipping, handling and inssurance are included.i sell so cheapp because i have a stock liquidation. tell me if you are intrested to buy it so we can make the next step.

So lets see. He could easily sell this package for $1000 more within one hour. He made up some reason (clearance) to make the deal sound legitimate.  A bunch of spelling mistakes don't look very professional either. Lets poke a little more:

Web Server Traffic from Digg during day 1, outlining some important events Last Sunday I casually wrote a post about the most common pitfalls in photography.
I had written the post a long time ago, but I never put it on this site.

The story ended up on the front page of Digg, stayed there for nearly 12 hours and was picked up by a bunch of secondary sources, resulting in 100,000 Visitors within a day (most of them within the first 12 hours). Trying to keep my server up and alive, I learned a lot about what it takes to keep the server alive, hence I decided to slide a non photography related post in, hopefully giving everyone who finds themselves in a similar situation some points to consider.

On Sunday Usproblogger (Digital Photography Blog) submitted the story to Digg (probably using the button that my blog software puts below each post).
Initially I wasn't aware of what had happened and while I was watching a movie the post must have hit the front page of Digg.

My site is hosted on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) with 256MB guaranteed RAM and 1GB burstable RAM. I have tweaked my VPS significantly, turning off all non-essential demons and keeping only the things that are required for hosting. This article is not about tweaking a VPS machine; I assume you have already done it.

This website is powered by a dynamic content management software. Among the many benefits (visitors can comment, I can maintain a site with over 2000 pages easily), it has one major drawback. The web content is stored in a database. Each time someone views a page; a program is executed (php). That program gets the information from the database (MySQL), and literally builds the page for each and every visitor (enough of the basics, I am going to assume you know all this if you are having the same problem that I had).

With such limited resources and the amount of traffic Digg can send, my Server quickly ran out of breath and was unable to handle the traffic.
The server recovered somewhat, probably because the traffic dropped momentarily.
By the time I noticed what was happening, i was completely locked out of my system and had to reboot in order to regain control and do something about the situation.

What I did to keep the Server up

As some of my visitors have already figured out, I have recently enabled download of pretty much all my images in the Store.

If you need a high resolution image, there is no need to ask for it anymore, you can simply download it from the picture store area. Lower resolution images for web publishing are available as well.

Put the image in the shopping cart and instead of ordering prints, you can select Download and select a size. Currently there are about 12 GB of pictures available for download, but this will grow quickly as I upload more.

I will put up some more detailed information in the store soon.

Meanwhile I have started to upload some new pictues into a new Gallery:

California's Missions

It is still a work in progress (there are 21 Missions and tons of pictures to upload).

Yesterday some particulary nasty individuals have hacked this site.

All content was removed from the site and the only thing that saved me was my recently implemented backup stragegy. I have now a dedicated linux box running at home that backs up the database and files through rsync every couple of hours. Even though this site is about photography, I will probably write a short tutorial about this. The cost is minimal and the security and peace of mind is outstanding.

I have also updated the software package that runs this site. This proofs just how important it is to implement all security updates and to have a solid backup strategy. I have probably become a bit too lazy for my own good.

It is very sad that some people have no other purpose but to destroy the hard work of others. It has taken me years to built this site and a loyal reader base.

At this moment I am still considering the possibility that the database somehow got corrupted. Since there were no server issues and the database on another site got corrupted also, I think this may not be the case. There is no way to be sure until I have analyzed the server logs

I sincerely apologize if you came to the site yesterday and you only found empty pages.

Somehow I have been bullied into giving away a prize for Bets on the Handball World Championship. Since I already commited to this, you might as well give it a shot. You can win an Amazon Gift Certificate or a Print of one of my Images to hang on your wall (you choose).

All you need to do is create a login and post a bet (just follow the link). If you win, you will get an email telling you how to claim your prize.

No more bets allowed at this point

Recently there has been a lot of talk about how Google is loosing their edge and putting up smokescreens to tell webmasters its their fault, while frantically working in the background to fix their problems.
Amazingly Googles search result really seem to be changing a lot on a daily basis now and their cache seems to be outdated.
But worst of all is this: Google is dropping indexed pages for no obvious reason on a daily basis. I have noticed the same thing on this website.
A short while ago, the Google Index showed that it had over 10,000 of my pages indexed, which made me wonder how this could be, as I only have around 2000 or so.
Yesterday I checked again, and voila, Google showed around 1000 indexed pages (far less than I have). I haven't used any suspicious advertising techniques mentioned in the link above, nor have I used any techniques that could explain the 10,000 pages and subsequent punishment by googles algorithm.
Today I checked the index again and this is what I found:

Google:

All of a sudden google only shows 954 of my pages. This number is dropping on a daily basis now.
Since this website is one of the few honest websites with original content not stolen anywhere, with no links to suspicious sites or any other problem that could explain this, I can only agree with some of the other webmasters in saying that Google appears to be broken.

I checked MSN:


And I checked Yahoo:


What's really amazing is that the MSN bot is the busiest on my website, yet MSN shows only 355 results. Googlebot is the second busiest, and I used to have the most pages with Google. However recently I see a large portion of this site dropped every day. The Yahoo robot is one of the least busiest robots on my site, yet in the Yahoo Index I show up with 2,170 pages (which sounds about right). Go figure. The only explaination is this: For some reason this site is being devalued by Search Engines. Meaning the faster they come, the faster they tune down the value. That shouldn't really matter, fluctuations happen. But why drop pages from the index instead of ranking them different?

EDIT: I just double checked. Actually yesterday I got massively bombarded by the Inktomi Slurp bot (I believe this is what yahoo uses). Seems like Yahoo is seriously improving their crawl capabilites.

What is happening in the search engine world?
Are the cards being shuffled again?
When will search users realize the problems Google has and move on to Yahoo or MSN?
Why are their bots so busy?
Why is the Google cache showing so many old pages?

The results above may not be representative as they only refer to this website, however I have read a lot of comments from a lot of unhappy people recently.
From now on I will start using other search engines in parallel with Google to make sure that I get the most relevant and up to date information.