Slashdot Mirror
Alek's Christmas Lights Webcam is Back
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?"
Dead before it even got out of the mysterious future.
We'll see how well everything works tonight - expect things to be nuts and we'll see if mod_perl can save the day on the web server - fortunately, the analog stuff is throttled at one/second! ;-)
I actually turned things on early tonight, but
I may need to disable if the load gets too high. For those
interested in data, I'll be updating my Christmas 2004 Slashdot Effect Analysis and
I'll provide some followup here.
P.S. WRT JPEG/EXIF stuff: ummmmmm ... let me get back to you on that one!
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
till some creative troll figures out how to make goatse out of Christmas lights?
Monstar L
not for long...
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
Is drivemeinsane.com still up and about? I always wanted to play on his remote controlled car, but it was never on. Boo, I say.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Merry christmas
hahah, he said he might stand a chance. no comments yet and its already dead. i hope his server isnt near the xmas tree cause its gonna catch on fire.
is blinking on and off..
- Too laggy
- Not the right time
- Server not responding
So this was actually the first time I've done it, and I think it is very cool. Thank you for this experienceFor what good it did him.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Not only can we pan/zoom the webcam and control the 17,000 christmas lights - NO! We can also burn his house down by letting his web server die a horrible heat death.
Talk about an arsonist's dream.
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
"Yikes. Incoming Slashdot'er. Full power to the web server!"
She cannae take anymore Jim!
Survive the slashdot effect? I think not...
I don't see the "Chevy Chase" button... :(
"and annoy my understanding) neighbors! "
Dude, you just put this link on Slashdot? Understanding undershmanding, you had better hope they have strobe-induced seizure insurance.
Nice website, and I like the pop-up, but I can see the possibility for people to /. this guy's entire Christmas light set-up. Either the constant turning it on/off will burn out more than quite a few bulbs (hope they aren't the kind where if one goes, they all go).
But yeah.. I'm sure what with all the slashdotters there that the neighbors are probably going to be seeing a nice strobelight-like effect. Scare the hell out of anyone who's driving by because of the chaotic patterns of the lights turning on and off. Whee.. slashdotting fun.
Ah, you found me!
an entire flock of Colorado geese are completely disoriented tonight. They have been waddling around bumping into garbage bins and parked cars without rhyme or reason.
This odd sighting is being reported only blocks away from the residence of the woman who was inadvertently hypnotized by her electricity meter earlier today.
*blinking cursor*
For a geek-oriented site (his, not /.) that's not a very good showing, unless the other 87% is lynx.
A good friend of mine recently completed work on a 6 thousand light computer controlled light display.
His website has all the details on how it was built. Along with pictures.Custom built all the electronics, and wrote a number of custom programs to control the lights.
Best thing is? Being able to sit on the street with a laptop and terminal service into his light controlling computer and control the lights :D
Great fun for the neighbourhood.All the Slashdotters down in Slashdotterville liked Christmas a lot, but the AC, who lived just north of Slashdotterville, did not. The AC hated Christmas -- the whole Christmas season. Oh, please don't ask why, no one quite knows the reason. It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight. Or maybe his head wasn't screwed on just right. But I think that the best reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes too small.
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me:
24 million dollars from Nigeria
On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me:
Two Rolex watches
On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me:
One penis enlargement
On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me:
Three better orgasms
On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me:
18 Viagara pills
On the sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me:
Two bottles of Cialis
On the seventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me:
25 weight loss pills
On the eighth day of Christmas my true love gave to me:
A better home mortgage
On the ninth day of Christmas my true love gave to me:
Two breast implants
On the tenth day of Christmas my true love gave to me:
28 million email addresses
On the eleventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me:
A new bank account password
On the twelveth day of Christmas my true love gave to me:
A bundle of Discount Windows software
Phone messages for Alek:
"Please prepare your server for a slashdotting."
"You have 10 minutes to prepare your server for slashdotting"
"You have 5 minutes to prepare your server for slashdotting"
"You have 1 minute to prepare your server for slashdotting"
"Please extinguish your server".
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
I tried going to mirrordot, but they didn't have his house mirrored.
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.
As in:
/dev/null & /dev/null &
#!/bin/bash
while [1]
do
lynx -dump (Whatever GET request to turn lights on) >
lynx -dump (Whatever GET request to turn lights off) >
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!
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
I wonder why he doesn't say what type of webcam it is. My only thought is that he's possibly afraid someone will find where it is hidden and steal it because its nice. Some form of security through obscurity I suppose.
ok.. so heads you lose tails I win. right?
When I go to that page, I get "connection refused." Yep, his analysis is right on the money.
You can even do this at home, if your site isn't cool enough, with the slashdot simulator.
What will he do if we turn all lights off? I call on slashdot to turn off all nights tonight! Can we do it?
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
It's been a while since we did a good slashdotting, and I was starting to lose faith in our ability to exert domination over any thing with an electrical circuit.
We've slashdotted NASA, gameboys, and entire countries, but is this the first time we've slashdotted a house?!
The geeks strike again from their hidden rebel basements!
What do you think caused that big blackout last year?
Ways Geeks Celebrate Christmas
11. Mountain Dew-nog
10. Printing out "One Year of Free Computer Service" certificates to give to the family.
9. Designing elf-killing levels for your favorite FPS.
8. Explaining to children how it would be physically impossible for Santa to deliver all the presents.
7. Wear mistletoe hat and keep fingers crossed.
6. Devise a computer-controlled system to detect and prevent household members from trying to peek into their presents before Christmas.
5. Put a santa hat on your avatar.
4. Change the blue neon lights in the case to flashing red and green.
3. Decorating the tree with SDRAM and CPUs burned out from your last overclocking experiment.
2. Rewriting Christmas carols in Tolkien's Elvish.
1. Programming the christmas lights to flash out "I hate this holiday of unbridled consumerism" in binary.
-------
Support Indy Music. Buy
His page explaining the Slashdot Effect appears to have been slashdotted. Oh, the irony.
"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it." - G.B. Shaw
I know just what to do!" The Grinch Laughed in his throat.
And he made a quick Slashdot link and a post.
And he chuckled, and clucked, "What a great Grinchy trick!
"With this link and this post, I'll Slashdot Saint Nick!"
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
If you're reading this Alek, I just thought that you could make a little bit of money off your lights, enough to pay for better or more hosting bandwidth and have some fun at the same time: Each year, when you're about to set up your web-controllable lights, why don't you organise a light party at your house at the same time the story gets posted to slashdot and other sites, say over a weekend when people have time.
If you organised the lights so that some kinds of funky patterns could be made via the web, you could make some good money with music, drinks and a grill outside for people who turn up to watch the show.
- 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 /. ;-)
- Per the Christmas FAQ, the Web Server run Linux/Apache/Perl - IIS on Windoze 2003 - yea, right!
- Main stats page is here - yea, big JUMP
... and as of 2100, Firefox is > 50% browser percentage.
- 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! ;-)
alekHulk SMASH Celiac Disease
If 87% of slashdot readers are trying to use lynx to view a site with a webcam feed, we've got bigger problems.
Please help metamoderate.
Spectrum analyzer
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