I‘m trying out the three-column format I mentioned earlier. You may also have noticed the new headline graphic I hacked together in Fireworks. It’s based on my DeviantArt ID, since we all know that recycling ideas is an efficient way to go.
Oh yeah, I’m supposed to say that it’s really about maintaining a consistent look and feel, or some gobbledygook along those lines. Take your pick.
My DeviantArt page
You’ll note that in my “Fun with Webcams” entry I bounce gracelessly from tense to tense. I suppose I could go back and edit the entry to fix it, but that seems a bit dishonest given that I didn’t notice my mistake before a full day had passed.
Ordinarily I’d submit myself to a jolly round of self-recrimination, but I think I’m getting too old for that kind of childishness, don’t you?
Because what could be better than putting eight people into a pile of scrap and turning them loose to build zany machinery? You can read about Junkyard Wars, the original UK version called Scrapheap Challenge, and visit the website of the New England Rubbish Deconstruction Society, or NERDS.
Oh yes, and you simply must read the ten reasons why being on “Junkyard Wars” is better than being on “Survivor”.
Junkyard Wars site
Scrapheap Challenge
The NERDS
This is lovely. At just after 5:00pm Pacific Time, our email server simply stopped communicating over the network. TCP/IP and IPX connectivity simply vanished, though the Groupwise NLMs continued to chug along, oblivious to their castaway status.
Over half an hour later, and I’m still waiting for the “DOWN” command to complete so I can reboot the thing. And no, I’m not terribly inclined to hard-reset this box. It’s ornery enough as it is without throwing graceless drive dismounts into the equation.
And even when/if I get it running again, there are two more worrries: Restarting the voicemail server, and wondering what the hell went wrong… and if it’s likely to happen again.
Gee, couldn’t be that corporate-mandated Service Pack install, could it? Nah. That couldn’t possibly be it. No way.
Here’s a little story about a cam named Jed…
Or something like that. Anyway, yesterday afternoon I decided to take a stab at bringing a webcam online. Any webcam at all. First I went to that wonderfully-supported but broken-thanks-to-DLink DSB-C300. Still broken, in that the kernel module sees it just fine but it hoses the entire USB system within mere seconds of use.
Fine, we’ll try the Logitech cheap-o-cam. Yes, the latest CVS drivers can indeed talk V4L to it, and it still provides the yellowest, grainiest image known to camkind.
After a frustrating hour spent on each of those devices, I went online in the faint hope that support might be emerging for the Intel PC Camera Pro attached to Ryoko. What do you know, there is such a project. Too bad it’s in such miserable beta that the best I could get from the cam was a really washed out greyscale image.
And then the jackpot: A userspace app that snags raw image data from my prized 3Com Homeconnect! But wait, that’s at home…
I dragged the little black beauty into the office this morning, and after recompiling the kernel so I could get the USB /proc stuff to work I was able to snap images. Yay!
As an extra bit of fun, I hacked up a little script and an fcron job that takes snapshots every minute and saves them to a specific file on the test server I’m using.
Another couple hours of puttering around with this thing, and I may even be able to put up a webcam link again. I’m probably going to spend time trying to make the image a little bit prettier and making a proper web interface to it.
And up from the Web comes a bubblin’ crude…
This from a discussion of the possibility of transparent/translucent concrete:
It’s a conspiracy I tell you!!!
Microsoft have been developing transparent concrete for a while now..
fine aggregate = Windows CE
course aggregate = Windows ME
binding agent = Windows NT
Mix them all together and you get
Microsoft CE-ME-NT
/. – Transparent Concrete
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