Alek's Christmas Lights Webcam is Back

millert writes "Alek's Christmas Lights Webcam is back again which allows you to: 'pan/zoom the webcam and control the 17,000 christmas lights - yep, turn 'em on and off and annoy my understanding) neighbors! ;-)' For those who like a lot of links, check out his christmas lights summary, christmas FAQ (answers quite a bit), what's new for Christmas 2004 (optimization of analog controls and mod_perl on the web server -- he says "I might stand a chance against Slashdot" ... we'll see about that!), real-time Christmas stats (including browser percentage -- go Firefox, currently at 13%), and his analysis of the Slashdot effect." Read on for more.

millert continues "You can Email Santa page and he does respond to Email inquiries. Alek is already thinking ahead for Christmas 2005 ...

The picture quality on his cool webcam pictures seems much better than a run-of-the-mill webcam; the image quality under low-light conditions is surprisingly good. In question D-5 of his FAQ, he says he has it under non-disclosure and all he can say is that it is a "640x480 pixel image using 1/2.7" sensor - size matters when it comes to pixels" and he is right about that -- this is one of the reasons the pictures of Mars from the Spirit Rover were so good. Even more interesting is the info in the jpegs' EXIF header (as displayed by ImageMagick's identify utility. There's quite a bit of information in there, including a reference to a company that provided IP-based video security for the 2004 Olympics and a comment saying 'do NOT release to marketing droids' Fortunately, this is Slashdot.

Slashdot crushed it in 2002 and 2003 -- will the 3rd time be the charm for Alek?"

Comments

Subscribers killed it

[Anonymous Coward]

Dead before it even got out of the mysterious future.

Re:Drive me insane.

[Restil]

Actually, I'm gonna get all that stuff working again once I move into the new house. I'm just horribly limited right now at my temporary location with only 128kbps of upstream and limited places to put stuff.

-Restil

Re:MOD PARENT up FUNNY!

[xmas2003]

Unfortunately, Apache1.x ... so the threading stuff doesn't apply, and 256 (my limit w/o a recompile) appears to be keeping a fairly constant load in the teens (so I wouldn't want to go much higher than this) ... but it's actually fairly snappy right now, especially for static content ... and even the CGI (mod_perl DOES help!) seems to be moving along.

Re:MOD PARENT up FUNNY!

[IO ERROR]

Using Apache 2.0 you can up this by upping the ServerLimit value. Then you can up the MaxClients value. Example:

ServerLimit 768
MaxClients 768

Re:Subscribers killed it - Alek comments on that!

[xmas2003]

Allright - you guys kicked my *ss when the story first posted, but things are hanging in there now. In response to some of the posts above:

1. I was using the same web interface as everyone else (and reloading Slashdot.org to see when the story would hit) and it was fairly responsive after it showed up in the Mysterious Future ... until 1749 ... and then BAMMM ... welcome to /. ;-)
2. Per the Christmas FAQ, the Web Server run Linux/Apache/Perl - IIS on Windoze 2003 - yea, right!
3. Main stats page is here - yea, big JUMP ... and as of 2100, Firefox is > 50% browser percentage.
4. I'd like to see AC#11069825 put HIS web server on Slashdot, especially with dynamic content. I had turned the webcam on early this evening at 1712, but then disabled it shortly after the story hit at 1749, but turned it back on 1930 and (except for a few Apache restarts for tuning purposes), the web site is semi (!) responsive and the machine was never rebooted ... plus (knock on wood), I haven't blown any fuses ... yet! ;-)

alek

Re:MOD PARENT up FUNNY!

[xmas2003]

After fiddling with various other parameters, I finally engaged my brain and realized why you recommended setting "KeepAlive OFF" - you are basically trading some "horsepower" (since connections have to be re-estabilished each time instead of persistant with HTTP1.1) in order to free up more slots - maybe it's because the crowd has slowed down a bit, but pretty darn snappy now and I shoulda done this earlier in the evening - thanx!

alek

P.S. The Timeout was/is set to 20 seconds - yea, a little agressive, but I figure by time 20 seconds has elapsed, it's all over anyway. And back the the KeepAlive, I don't have a lotta graphics, images, frame, etc. so there isn't a lot stuff to be sent down the same pipe.

Re:Light Control

[abborren]

Spectrum analyzer