Finally something airplane related in 2021, Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino took their P-51 up into the air and I was able to get some shots of it. Not as much fun as shooting an airshow, but still a good time.
Squirrels in the park
I had finished a bike ride and decided to go looking for birds in the park. Instead I ran into some very aggressive squirrels who tried to come after me for food. Just messing around with some shots and like these the best out of what I saw that day.
Installing pyodbc on a mac
After installing pyodbc onto my linux server that runs my scripts I needed to create my development environment on my mac so I could develop the scripts and then transfer them over. I went through a couple of websites to put together my steps:
http://www.christophers.tips/pages/pyodbc_mac.html
https://github.com/mkleehammer/pyodbc/wiki/Connecting-to-SQL-Server-from-Mac-OSX
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
brew update
brew install unixodbc freetds
Pip install pyodbc
Ivy schnauzer in the backyard
Messing around taking pictures in the backyard of our puppy playing with her ball. Used the A9ii to grab the shots with the 24-105 lens.
Northern Mocking Bird
Found this little guy in my backyard keeping my son awake most mornings. It was a cold morning so you can see him puffed out trying to stay warm in one of the shots.
Nurtured by Nature and swimming with Otters
I’ve wanted to do this for several years now. This company Nurtured by Nature has otter swims where you get in the water and get to play with otters. So for Christmas I made reservations for the three of us to go down and do this. It was everything I hoped it would be and was a great time. Here are some of the shots from the GoPro that I was holding during the encounter. I have video, but that is going to take some time to go through.
Bird shooting at the Santa Ana River Trail
Sunday was super windy with gusts up to 50mph, I decided not to ride my bicycle, but go out and do some shooting along the Santa Ana River Trail. For those that don’t know this is a 50 mile long path that goes along the Santa Ana River from San Bernardino through Riverside, and Orange Counties. It ends up at Huntington Beach. After shooting at Bolsa Chica a few weeks ago I wanted to go and work on my bird photography so I set out just after sun rise and started to shoot. I had some hits and quite a few misses. While I had the wind to my back, the sun was off to the side and I needed to find a way to get the sun behind me. A lot of my shots were dark and I couldn’t get a catch light in the birds eyes because the sun was on the other side of them and me. I drove up and down along the river and got out at a couple of places to take shots. Below are some of the keepers from the day, the misses have gone to the bit bucket at this point. Just wanted to capture some things that I need to do better and need to be more cognizant.
I parked at the Yorba Regional Park and paid the 5 bucks for it. There are some nice ponds in here that the birds will stay at so it made for a nice place to start the trek, it also provides convenient bathrooms and other luxuries, vs the rest of the places I went.
Bolsa Chica Reserve
Went to the Bolsa Chica Reserve a couple of weeks ago and was able to shoot some of the birds that were in the Reserve. Had a good time and these were some of the more successful shots that I had.
Giving up my 100 days of code
So I am 20 days into my 100 days of code and I am going to stop going through the class I was taking on Udemy. I have finally gotten to a point where a lot of the modules they are trying to have me use aren’t working and I am spending more time troubleshooting their stuff than I am actually learning. So now I am going to start my own exercises and continue my learning on my own. I am going to try and cherry pick some of the courses in the class that still work, but will end up refining my code with what I have already learned and trying to put some the practices into place to improve my code. I will also work on automating more of the functions that need to be automated in my environment. In all I am frustrated by the fact that I could complete the Udemy course, but thankful for the few things that I have learned.
Script to update Address entries in Fortigate
With our VPN being over utilized I had to implement split tunneling on our vpn. However there are some web services that require a known IP address to access. Unfortunately these services are on AWS which the IP address changes often. I built this script to lookup the addresses and then update the Fortigate firewalls VPN Routing list to make sure that the traffic goes over the vpn tunnel and through our known IP address to access the service.
#!/usr/bin/python3
#Update Epsilon on the Fortigate Firewall VPNs
from nslookup import Nslookup
from netmiko import ConnectHandler
import cred
device1 = {
“host”: cred.hostname,
“username”: cred.rancid_username,
“password”: cred.rancid_password,
“device_type”: “fortinet”,
“secret”: cred.rancid_password,
}
#Connect to the Fortinet
net_connect = ConnectHandler(**device1)
#Listing of the domains to query
DOMAIN_FILE = open(“domains.txt”, “r”)
#DNS Server to query
DNS_SERVER = [‘x.x.x.x’]
def LOOKUP_DOMAIN():
#queries the specified dns server to get the info for the urls and writes the data to a config file
dns_query = Nslookup(dns_servers=(DNS_SERVER))
ips_record = dns_query.dns_lookup(line)
ORDERNUMBER = 1
for x in ips_record.answer:
FILE_CONFIG.write(“edit ” + line + “_” + str(ORDERNUMBER) + ‘\n’)
FILE_CONFIG.write(“set subnet ” + x + ” 255.255.255.255″ +’\n’)
FILE_CONFIG.write(“next” +’\n’)
ORDERNUMBER = (ORDERNUMBER + 1)
FILE_CONFIG = open(‘config.txt’,’w’)
FILE_CONFIG.write(“config firewall address” +’\n’)
for line in DOMAIN_FILE:
line = line.rstrip(‘\n’)
LOOKUP_DOMAIN()
FILE_CONFIG.write(“end” +’\n’)
FILE_CONFIG.close()
# write to the Fortigate
output2 = net_connect.send_config_from_file(config_file=”config.txt”)
