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

Energy bill

[owlstead]

Though I applaud the effort, I weep for the amount of energy that is used by people just to show off their house to their neighbours. This has nothing to do with a romantic christmas in my view. The amount of lights is going up here (the Netherlands) as well, probably due to the fact that we have too much money (or energy is too cheap). Some people still think its interesting to copy the USA for some reason...

Now, let's see if I can turn these lights off.

MOD PARENT up FUNNY!

[xmas2003]

I just about fell outa my chair reading this post when I got to the last line - well done! ;-)

Actually, ssh is quite responsive - it's just the darn MaxClients limit of 256 I'm bumping into - plus I restarted httpd twice. I think if folks would not open up every link in the article, it would help - every time I've check, Apache Status is showing all 256 requests - I just bumped the TIMEOUT numbers down a bit, so people may see timeouts sooner, but this should release some child process slots for folks.

HECK - this is looking good - lets turn it on!