John Flinchbaugh's Weblog

My Work Showing at Lancaster Museum of Art

john — 2012-01-24T17:52:07Z

The Lancaster Lens photography exhibit is going on right now at the Lancaster Museum of Art. I'm one of the featured artists there showing 6 of my toy images.

It's an incredible opportunity for me, and I still can't quite believe I have working showing in a museum, so stop by and support photography and the arts in Lancaster, PA.

First Friday at Mulberry and Smith LaVia

john — 2011-12-02T14:45:13Z

This First Friday, I have 2 places to be at once, so instead I'm splitting my night:

5pm–8pm: I'll be showing some fine-art work, framed and ready to buy at Mulberry Art Studios with the rest of the Lancaster Camera Club.
8pm–whenever:I expect to head up to Smith LaVia (329 N Queen St) to shoot holiday images or whatever comes around and just hang out with friends.

Hopefully, I'll see everyone at Mulberry and/or at Smith LaVia. Lancaster City is a great place, and there's lots to see every First Friday.

Desktop Luddite

john — 2011-10-27T14:44:39Z

I've been happily kicking along in Gnome 2.x-whatever on my Debian and Ubuntu machines for quite sometime. When Ubuntu tried to push me over into Unity back in April, I gave it half a day, then reverted back to Gnome 2 for familiarity and more workspaces.

Well, it's October now, and Ubuntu made the push again, but this time, it also pushed Gnome up to 3.2, which is drastically different as well. With no solace in Gnome, I've had to just sort of try to figure out the Unity-way with no controls and their "it's for your own good" mentality. (It feels a lot like that other OS that I wiped off a Mac Book Pro.)

A couple more days passed, and my Debian unstable machine upgraded to Gnome 3.0, and my good ol' Gnome 2.x was gone. So I'm trying Unity on my Ubuntu netbook, and I'm trying Gnome 3.0 on my photo workstation/server. They're similar enough, but it's still disorienting bouncing between the 2 environments -- while Unity hasn't offered any absolute show-stoppers, I may land on Gnome for consistency. It might also be time to look into KDE or XFCE -- somehow, I think they probably still offer me all the knobs and buttons I've used previously to customize my desktop.

If I wanted to give up my choices, I could just run a Mac -- they have nice hardware and a Unixy OS.

2011-10-07: Smith LaVia Studio Grand Opening

john — 2011-09-30T15:27:51Z

Smith LaVia studio will have their grand opening on October's First Friday in Lancaster! I'm one of the resident photographers, so I'll be showing some work and hanging out for the night along with the 4 other photographers (and a painter). It's sure to be a good time, so stop by and say "Hello".

The studio is located at:

Suite 210
329 N Queen St
Lancaster, PA
Map

I'll be using the studio to show work, to shoot, and to host workshops.

Little Justice League

john — 2011-07-19T12:33:45Z

As the local Peter Parker, I got to photograph the recent meeting of the household superheroes.

Camille and John Are Getting Married

john — 2011-07-04T03:42:54Z

Camille and John will be getting married next year. As they've only been engaged less than a month, they've not set a date yet.

Quick and Easy Groovy for the Web

john — 2011-06-22T16:35:56Z

Groovy can be used pretty easily to spin up some simple web pages in almost the same way one would hack out some PHP or JSP without going to the trouble to do an all-out Grails project.

The Groovy Servlet allows you to pack up the groovy-all-*.jar, a simple web.xml, and whatever *.groovy scripts you want and deploy it right into Tomcat as a plain WAR file. The Groovy Servlet page

Here's a bit of a script I put together to jump start a simple Groovlet project by packaging a WAR file from a directory of scripts. This isn't Groovy Servlet code itself, but just a command-line tool. (The Groovy Servlet page linked previously has examples for writing your own servlets.) This script will copy in the Groovy JAR and generate the basic web.xml to wire up the GroovyServlet to dynamically execute your scripts. I also have a downloadable copy of package_groovlet.groovy.

#!/usr/bin/env groovy

if (args.size() < 1) {
    print """\
        |Usage: package_groovlet.groovy <war-name>
        |Package the current directory into a Groovy Servlet war.
        |""".stripMargin()
    return
}

def war = args[0]
def embed = "${System.getenv()['GROOVY_HOME']}/embeddable"

def ant = new AntBuilder()

ant.sequential {
    delete(dir: 'build')
    mkdir(dir: 'build/WEB-INF/lib')
    copy(toDir: 'build/WEB-INF/lib') {
        fileset(dir: embed) {
            include(name: 'groovy-all-*.jar')
        }
    }
    copy(toDir: 'build') {
        fileset(dir: '.') {
            exclude(name: 'build/**')
        }
    }
}

new FileOutputStream('build/WEB-INF/web.xml').withWriter { webxml ->
    webxml.print """\
        <!DOCTYPE web-app PUBLIC
          "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN"
          "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd" >
        <web-app>
            <servlet>
                <servlet-name>Groovy</servlet-name>
                <servlet-class>groovy.servlet.GroovyServlet</servlet-class>
            </servlet>
            <servlet-mapping>
                <servlet-name>Groovy</servlet-name>
                <url-pattern>*.groovy</url-pattern>
            </servlet-mapping>
         </web-app>
     """.stripIndent()
}

ant.jar(destfile: "build/${war}", basedir: 'build')
println "Created build/${war}"

Dustin at Lock 12

john — 2011-06-22T13:32:26Z

One rainy Sunday in May, Dustin, his family, and I hurried down to Lock 12 in York County to get some last-minute senior portraits even as it rained. The rain stopped when we got there, and the overcast skies treated us well for a two-hour portrait session around the lock and the creek trail above the lock.

Briana's interested in studying photography, so she volunteered to hold the lights most the time, and I even held the lights for her for a shot or two — you can see one of her shots at the end of the whole gallery.

I cycled through my normal lighting modifiers for the shoot, like the umbrella and the grid spot, but my favorite for the shoot was the little Fotodiox 8"x12" softbox. It was small and light, so it could be stuck on the end of the monopod and placed close anywhere in a scene. It's smaller size cast a more masculine hard light than my larger modifiers.

Tiniest USB Stick

john — 2010-12-14T00:40:46Z

I made the tiniest USB drive for my car using the elago microSD card reader and a 16G microSD card—it's more of USB nub than a stick, but it's big enough to hold my entire music collection I've collected over the years. The USB port on the new Fiesta is in the middle console out in the open, so I wanted the smallest device for it, so it wouldn't be damaged.

Matt and Jenn

john — 2010-12-11T04:37:07Z

I like to enjoy many events with a camera in hand. When my brother and new sister-in-law, Matt and Jenn, asked me to photograph their wedding in the summer, I was very happy to do my part.

The rest of the photos are in the gallery, and they have been....for months.