Last weekend we had the City of Lakes Loppet, a collection of skiing related events centered on Lake of the Isles. This photo shows the launch of the Sons of Norway Minne-Loppet, taken while I was waiting for the crew of Mitchster, Rob, and Matt to arrive for our trek onto Lake of the Isles.

Back from yet another trip to Singapore, I managed to visit the Raffles Hotel, the birthplace of the Singapore Sling. This photo was taken at the Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel, just before we received the somewhat shocking bill of $238 Singapore Dollars for 2 drinks each for a party of four of us. Despite the exchange rate they were still rather expensive drinks. But they sure were tasty.

After getting my new server up and running, and setting up new email accounts, I realized all my old emails where still on the old server. So on the chance someone might run into a similar situation decided to write up the recipe I used to transfer old emails.

Assumptions:

1) You’re using an imap mailserver (if you’re not you really should), i.e. all your emails are stored in ~/Maildir on the server, not in a pop file on your local machine.
2) You have network accessible samba shares on both old and new server, and they’re both connected to the same network and accessible from a network client.

Procedure for transferring emails between servers:

1) Log on to old server (console, telnet, or ssh) and go into your old home directory
2) Compress mail directory into a single file with ‘tar cvf Maildir.tgz Maildir’
3) Copy the tar file to a samba share on old server ‘cp Maildir.tgz /(samba share path)’
4) Copy tar file from old server samba share to new server samba share. I used windows explorer which had both the old server samba share and the new server samba share mapped. The file was about 600 meg.
5) Create a temporary user on new server, like oldjohn (john being the current user on new server and the original user on old server), with a full account (mail, home directory, etc). Webmin works great for doing that.
6) Log on to the new server, and copy the Maildir.tgz file from the samba share to oldjohn’s home directory
7) Go into oldjohn’s home directory and extract directories and files with ‘tar -xvf Maildir.tgz’
8) Important step here. Make sure you change ownership of extracted Maildir and contents to oldjohn (you were john on old server, so extracted files are still owned by john, not oldjohn) with ‘chown chgrp -R oldjohn Maildir’ .
9) On your desktop machine which you use to get your emails, which presumably has your current email account, set up a new account on the new server for user oldjohn . My favorite email client is Thunderbird.
10) Connect to your oldjohn email account and voila, there they are. If you want to you can drag and drop your oldjohn emails and folders to your john account. To avoid inbox confusion, I created an ‘Oldinbox’ folder and dropped all the inbox emails in oldjohn’s inbox into it, then moved the Oldinbox over to john’s account. Also moved all the folders from oldjohn to john. Final step delete oldjohn’s email account from your mail client.

This HDR image was taken a while back at an abandoned factory. I do believe the device behind the blue box with some type of logo on it is a dynamometer, used for testing engines. Looks like a few hundred horsepower capacity.

Between work and some computer/network projects at home, not to mention the bitter cold and our slush- turned-ice bobsled tracks called roads, haven’t been out much shooting. Been pretty busy designing test support equipment for a new turboshaft engine for Sikorsky’s new CH53K heavy lift helicopter. What a machine that will be. Three 8,000 hp engines in a helicopter! That’s more power than on a C130! At the bottom of the engine link you can see the engine in it’s test stand. Unfortunately the real interesting stuff that the engine actually connects to is off to the right, not in the photo. Got two additional projects going with this engine, different places, and more travel in store, back to Singapore in a week and to Munich in February.

Also set up several new computers at home, one machine with Mandriva 10 for desktop use and another as a server using Centos 5. The server is replacing a couple of machines that were starting to fall apart, and is used primarily as a samba file server, and a mail server running postfix with amavis for virus and spamassassin for spam filtering, plus the usual dhcp and dns servers. That brings the computer count in my house down to nine when you include windoze, laptops, and Imac machines. It takes quite a bit of tweaking to get everything on the server working just right, but once it’s going it will run for years with little attention. The last one sure did, had been running on a now ancient version of Fedora. Linux has it’s benefits.

Not sure when I’ll post again. Hopefully not to long from now.

After having walked around the area in the evening, I barely recognized the Singapore riverfront during the day time. What a difference lighting makes. This is the Fullerton Hotel, another Singapore landmark rich on history, on the Singapore River. I think I’ll ask to be put up there next time I’m in Singapore. Yeah, sure :)

Back from a short trip to Singapore, I managed a couple of photo outings in the evening. The heat and humidity, though it’s now the ‘cool’ season, was difficult to deal with. No matter how much your pace yourself, it doesn’t take long to turn into a sweat soaked mess. At times the relative humidity is so high raindrops seem to materialize out of nowhere. Always carry an umbrella with you, and a small towel to wipe the sweat of your forehead.

This is the Lionhead, the national symbol of Singapore. Located in front of the Fullerton Hotel along the Singapore river, it is a main attraction for visitors.

This one was bit tricky as I had only the length of a red light minus turning traffic to stand in the middle of the road.

Out on a photo shoot with a group of photogs, there are always friends and some of the photogs that volunteer to be models. Not sure who this lady is (photog or friend of one).