Tuesday September 6, 2005
I found myself making a list on my whiteboard a few days ago. This is what I do when I have lots of things I want to do, any one of which may distract me from remembering other possibly more presssing items and some of which can wait or not and, especially, when some of these are so much more fun than the others.
Some of the ways I prioritize these wouldn't make sense to most people, but the crossing off of items when they are finished (half-crossed if started :-) is objective evidence of progress in the face of subjective feelings of drowning in still "undone" things. Hint: you have to leave the crossed off things up or this doesn't work so well.
One of the fun, but sort of pressing things was getting a webcam and setting it up to provide surveillance of my apartment for some good reasons that will be explained to those who wish to know such things. (Honestly -- that's on the list too -- under migrating this blog space to Nucleus) It's a landlord thing and no, I'm not being silly about this.
I'm pleased to announce that I've gotten this working under Windows XP. I'll be working on getting it operational on RedHat but the software the camera came with was for XP. At $30 it was way too reasonable to be passed up because of religious differences. So, first was seeing if I could get it up and running and it would do what I wanted - activate on motion detection. I haven't quite got that far because I also wanted to know if I could figure out how to get the images on the web in real time. The useless instructions in the webcam package (Labtec's Webcam) told me to find a streaming video hosting service and follow their instructions. Already have a web space so I found a free application called Yawcam. It's cool enough even with some confusing documentation about setting up the streaming web part.
Got it all figured out yesterday. At least it works for me and Steph (my beta test group). Right now there are two views: updated stills and streaming live. The streaming view is limited by time per viewer session (5 min max) and number of viewers (3) for the time being. I need to figure out if this is going to blow through the ceiling of my upload quota on my ISP before I go any further.
Don't get all excited - the view right now is of Dixie's dining area.
If you go there, I'd appreciate your letting me know of any problems and what OS and browser you were using. It does require java enabled browsers so don't complain if you don't have that - okay?
Cool.
0) { ?>