Nature, science, photography and other things that interest me.

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Pluteus plautus as Art

Being a mycophile and recently beginning my hobby as a photographer I thought I would experiment with mushrooms as my subject. This photo was taken May 15th on my property. I thought the lighting and texture of the photo would make a pleasing black and white. I have identified the mushroom as Plutieus plautus. Not a particularly interesting species but beautiful nontheless.

Tumbling Creek Cave Restoration – Ozark Underground Laboratory

This article featured in Subterranean Journeys – a publication by Springfield Plateau Grotto

In the beautiful Ozark hills of Southwest Missouri lays a hidden gem of spectacular beauty, rare wildlife and immeasurable speleological importance. Surrounded by thousands of acres of rugged land and national forest is Tumbling Creek Cave at the Ozark Underground Laboratory. Described as the most biologically diverse cave west of the Mississippi River, over 130 different species of cave life have been recorded so far. Besides the diversity of life, this cave contains miles of almost perfectly preserved cave formations. A visit to the cave is an educational experience not found anywhere else. The organization provides short courses, field trips and educational tours for college groups, biologists, hydrologists, geologists, and engineers. These courses and programs have educated a large number on the importance of protecting

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Honey Locust

The Honey locust, Gleditsia triacanthos, is a deciduous tree native to eastern North America. It is mostly found in the moist soil near rivers and streams. A notable characteristic is the large ominous looking thorns.

Scarlet Cup Fungus

I found this specimen in late May near Springfield, MO. These are fairly common in spring, but are one of my favorites to photograph.

According to Michael Kuo of mushroomexpert.com:

Field guides typically treat this mushroom as “Sarcoscypha coccinea,” though that species is actually found only in the Pacific Northwest. Sarcoscypha dudleyi and Sarcoscypha austriaca are the eastern species–but separating them, unfortunately, requires a microscope. See the gory details below, under “Microscopic Features.”

Regal Moth

The beautiful Regal Moth (Citheronia regalis), is found throughout the deciduous forest areas of the eastern U.S. from Missouri to Massachusetts and southward to Texas and central Florida. It is more common in the southern part of its distribution. Common among walnut and hickory trees, the larva is typically called hickory horned devil. The color and pattern of male and female regal moths are identical, however the males are slightly smaller in size and have wings that are more narrow. Although these moths are mostly nocturnal, this one was photographed early afternoon.

Virtualbox Host Interface Networking – Windows host, Ubuntu guest

So I needed a way of running a couple test servers. Each needed to accept connections from the network including the host operating system. The connections needed to also be static for server testing. As a reminder to myself, here is a brief rundown on how to do it. Read the rest of this page »

Ruby On Rails acts_as_tree select menu

This time I would like to share a helper I wrote for rails. I was trying to write a form to add categories and I wanted to present a neatly formatted select box of existing categories to select as the parent category. It also needed infinite nested subcategories. I could not find a tutorial or example code anywhere for what I was trying to do. So I wrote this little snippet. Read the rest of this page »

Latest World Wind Java Release

I downloaded and ran the latest released version of the WWJ SDK available for download at the World Wind Java site – 20070817. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the 2D location map and the distance meter added to the window by default. Cool less that I have to do. I was thinking of doing a tutorial on how to add those things.

Also, I should add that if you want to find even later releases and release announcements head over to the forum http://forum.worldwindcentral.com/forumdisplay.php?f=43. This will have the latest releases for you to try out. Read the rest of this page »

My Contribution on the NetBeans Welcome Screen

So, I was having a rough day today. I won’t get into that, but my spirits where cheered a little when I saw the article I contributed to the NetBeans Wiki, on the NetBeans Welcome Screen. Read the rest of this page »

Access MySQL Through SSH Tunnel in a Windows .NET Application

In this tutorial I will explain how I managed to access MySQL through SSH tunnel in my .NET application. This could come in handy for many reasons and is not limited to just MySQL. You could potentially tunnel almost any remote server daemon running behind a firewall. I originally created this technique for a Windows Desktop application so I could sync our company website inventory with the ERP software. For security reasons I only left the SSH and Apache ports open when I originally setup the web server. Read the rest of this page »