More kid pix

Bea is in awe of her big sister, and how fast she moves. Click on the picture below for a larger version of the same...

Wiggly Bea

We a new digicam for christmas, with a much better movie mode - it'll go up to full VGA. Here's a movie of Bea doing her wiggly baby dance. There's some wiggly Laurel in here too... This is about a 3.3 mb download.

You'll need Quicktime 6 to view it; you can get that here:.

Minnesota Malaria, Take 2

The Minnesota House Commerce Committee quashed a statewide smoking ban proposal. It'll be back. I'm proud to say that my house representative was a co-sponsor of the bill, and that my state senator supported the senate version of the bill.

Both Ramsey County and Hennepin County have enacted county-wide smoking bans, so that at least covers most of the places where I'm likely to eat, but both bans have exemptions for bars and other places that derive more than 50% of their revenue from alcohol sales. Unfortunately, this probably includes my local watering hole. I'll have to call them to find out for sure.

I'm disappointed in the state House, in particular, because the bill was killed on a voice vote.

Leaving Las iXmatch, and going to school

After much soul-searching, I've left my old employer, iXmatch, and I'm now an employee of the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts. I'm working as a development manager for the Minnesota Population Center. The Population Center has US Census microdata from 1850 forward (except for 1890, which was mostly lost in a warehouse fire), and international data as well, from all sorts of locations. There's also some aggregate data as well. My job is to work with a team of developers to publish this data, allowing researchers to generate extracts that comprise just the years and variables they're interested in.

There's some neat code in the plumbing of all this - the data files are quite large (although not huge), and they're pretty tightly encoded.

We've got a mishmash of technologies right now, but inside of 6 months it'll mostly be on java and struts. The sites are mostly running on a series of solaris boxes from Sun- we've got both sparc and opteron based machines.

It's such a pleasure to be working with demographic data for the purposes of furthering social sciences research and maybe even informing policy debates, rather than working with it for the purposes of selling people crap they don't need.

It's also cool to be able to bike to work. I had a friend complain about a job that she thought would involve a 90 minute commute. This job might be a 90 minute commute - if I walked to work. So far, I've been taking the bus, which picks me up about 3 blocks from home, and drops me off at the front door of my building at the U.

I had had some misgivings about becoming a state employee, given my somewhat libertarian leanings towards the growth of government, but I think I'm over them now. :-)

Fun with Windows XP and WebDAV

I have an apache server in my basement, and I host sites for a number of people, including this blog. I've tried to give WebDAV access to my clients, but have had all sorts of headaches with accessing Apache2 WebDAV from Windows XP. Windows XP is supposed to support WebDAV pretty nicely (they call it Web Folders), but it's broken in a number of places.

I think I've figured out how to fix that.

The symptom is that a user tries to add a Web Folder from the Windows XP "My Network Places" window, using a URL of the form http://my.site.com/mydirectory.

For discussion's sake, say that their name is 'user', and their password is passwd.

They get a WebDAV authentication window, and they enter their name and password. The authentication window will say "Connecting to my.site.com" in both the titlebar and the message above the username and password fields. The authentication window comes right back, with a username of the form my.site.com\user prefilled in. They enter their password again, and the authentication window comes right back. They can't get into the site. Even if you've got entries for both "user" and "my.site.com\user" in your apache passwd file, it's no good.

You'll see this sort of stuff in the apache access log:

10.0.0.3 - - [06/Mar/2005:15:28:54 -0600] "PROPFIND /mydirectory HTTP/1.1" 401 529 "-" "Microsoft-WebDAV-MiniRedir/5.1.2600"
10.0.0.3 - - [06/Mar/2005:15:28:54 -0600] "PROPFIND /mydirectory HTTP/1.1" 401 529 "-" "Microsoft-WebDAV-MiniRedir/5.1.2600"
10.0.0.3 - - [06/Mar/2005:15:28:54 -0600] "OPTIONS / HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Microsoft-WebDAV-MiniRedir/5.1.2600"
10.0.0.3 - - [06/Mar/2005:15:28:54 -0600] "PROPFIND /mydirectory HTTP/1.1" 401 529 "-" "Microsoft-WebDAV-MiniRedir/5.1.2600"

And interestingly, you'll see nothing at all in the error log.

The secret is to add a port number to the URL - for instance, use:
http://my.site.com:80/mydirectory
rather than
http://my.site.com/mydirectory.

When you do this, you'll get the AuthName from your httpd.conf file in the authentication window above the username and password fields, and the username and password should work, without having to have my.site.com\ prepended to the username.

The theory is that Windows is trying mount this as a CIFS share rather than using WebDAV, and the port number in the URL forces it to be WebDAV, but your guess is as good as mine.