Slashdot Mirror
Real-Time Penguin Cam
Dave Coombs writes "Montreal's Biodome has a
webcam aimed at a bunch of penguins, 24 hours a day! "
See! the penguins walk around! Behold! the
excitement of them standing there.
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I would like to point out, for the record, that penguins rule. The Montreal penguins are no exception.
apparently this runs on linux :)
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Finally, since I can't have penguins living in my walk-in freezer, I get to have some virtual pets!
Not only are they rather sluggish little critters, the caption in the corner is misleading - "Animated Gif"? How?
(Hey, look... a content based first reply).
Poor birds, robbed of their privacy...
Free NUGGET!
- Adam Schumacher
cybershoe@mindless.com
N.A.R.T. #009
P.W.T.T.K.S.S.S.T.H.U. #001
We need to find some creative way using videos of the penguins to further our cause! ... Kind of like the Coca-Cola commercials with the polar bears. Then, the people at RedHat, Caldera, etc. could put the videos on CD, so we could show potential Linux converts how cool it really is. :)
ummm, never mind
I can't believe we're Slashdot-effecting a zoo. They'll probably never understand the huge influx of sudden interest in their penguin exhibit.
But perhaps some things are better left unexplained.
Rob Carlson
- and send him a link to this! I think he'd get a big blast out of seeing his beloved bird...
-> I dislike sigs...
Linus really made a good choice by choosing penguin as Linux mascotte. They are really cute animal ... Clumsy on ground but swift undersea :)
I'll get one as pet if I'd live north of the polar circle !
As awesome as penguins are, and as cool a place as the Montreal Biodome is (seriously; if you've never been there it's a big indoor zoo shaped like a giant insect when viewed from the Olympic Stadium above it), I find it interesting that they haven't used more elegant tactics than "press reload every 20 seconds" in their layout. There's a Java applet that will do this for you as well as a technique involving meta tags that reloads the page. Perhaps they wanted to stay in tune with those who don't have fast connections and the latest browser technology, but I still find it interesting.
~Dan
"World domination, of course. And scantily clad females. Who cares if it's twenty below?"-Linus Torvalds wizard@twcny.
>Clumsy on ground but swift undersea
Now the mascott makes even more sense. You could say Linux is clumsy on the desktop but swift in the closet(server).
*cute*
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
With the bear mentioned, the picture came complete:
Linux/penguin has been swift undersea, but clumsy on the ground. Now let's say the bear represents Microsoft. They dominate the ground (mainstream desktop). Bears cant do much underwater, (see WinNT in the server area?). So now the penguin wants to ramble along the ground surrouned by bears? What the penguin needs is some wings and features. forget the ground, let's go for the sky. Bears cant fly, never will. Penguins are flightless birds, that's more than the bear is. Let's get this bird flying, let's not fight the bear.
Taking a look at the image URL, it appears to be a series of cameras looking around Montreal. The URL is:
http://www.montrealcam.com/cgi/cam.cgi?p=cam10
Replace those last two digits with numbers 1 through 11, and you get other views. Neat.
JT
I'm not sure if this is a subtle joke or you're merely an idiot, but assuming the latter, I'd say it's because polar bears are from northern Canada and penguins are from Antarctica and other places down south. Too far away for regular dining by our polar bears (seals and inuit on the other hand -- mmm, mmm!)
Canadian AC
Hey, now I'm able to see online the hard work of the kernel development group :-)
Linux is FREE, Penguins are FREE to walk the ice.
The world is good and will be better when MICROSOFT IS EXTINCT!!
Hm, penguins live in the Antarctic, not north of the polar circle :>
pedantic me
...that there was acually a penguin at a zoo somewhere that had been adopted by somebody (LI, RedHat, etc.) and name Tux. Is this true?
If Linux succeeds in achieving world domination, and thw world as currently domainated continues in its present course, we face the sobering prospect that our children may grow up loving the Linux pengiun while the actual bird will be extinct, at least in the wild.
But they're not as cute as wombats!
http://www.mistral.co.uk/ghira/wombats.html
-- You've got to get a hat if you want to get ahead.
For all you americans:
Yes Canada is and arctic country. Snow, Ice everywhere... polar bears and penguins just wander the streets all the time.
All the heat from my computers is melting my igloo
ahhhhh
j/k Canada is not all snow and ice (well most of it)
hehehehe
The page loads (thus no Slashdot effect) but the image is black. Looks like the cam is dead.
Someone turned out the lights... or maybe its night... or maybe the penguins are so smart they disconnected the camera!!!
Let's see... i think it _might_ be dark seeing as how it is evening in Montreal, and winter...
post 6pm + post Oct 23, but previous to ~ March 20 = dark.
the amazing bc
just another guy doing IT
webnaut, music junkie, holes-in-head
your post went up at 8:27. By that time, it's very dark in Montreal. In January, it gets dark at about 4-4:30 (local) in Seattle. Montreal, being farther north, must get dark sooner. The cam isnt broken, there just isnt enough light.
0 1 - just my two bits
instead why penguins never hunt polar bears. While the polar bears love the arctic, the penguins have an iron fist over the antarctic. While it has been proposed many times that an invasion might occur where the penguins anhailate the bears for control it has never happened. This question has been asked over the centuries and noone has been able to conclusively give reason. Myself I think that the penguins are running mines with slaves that they have captured through the ages. After all the surface of Antarctica may be -60 C but 1000 m below it will be 50 C (given that they are mining the earth rather than a big sheet of ice). In fact I believe that the penguins are stacking up arms. When the time is right the penguins will issue forth and enslave everyone on Earth. This will be just punishement, they feel, because we have been fishing near Antarctica and taking away fish that they would normally get. This, of course, causes the penguins to become very discontent! Unlike Ol' Tux these penguins mean war.... I suggest that we nuke the poles before its too late! Sure, the water level will rise 300 m and half the world will need quick lessons on having to tread water, at least we won't be enslaved to work in mines for 20 hrs a day by birds! Its time to do something and if we don't it'll be our extinction. Nuke em!
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
whee! that made my day... :)
Awwwww.. how adorable... well.. that is one of the sweetest webcams out there.. minus my puppycam of course
Victoria Palmer - I brake for unix.boys, Windows just breaks. - http://www.escape.com/~juliet
(Okay, so I'm easily amused...)
Zontar
(somewhere in tenn.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
He's maybe the one who installed the physical cam, but I'm the one who wrote the software for it and still maintaining it. The machine is actually a Pentium 133 with 16MB of RAM, a Matrox Meteor framegrabber and RedHat 5.0 (or 5.1, depending on the machine). The software grabs a picture every 15 to 20 seconds, compress it in JPEG and send it via a simple, but new "protocol" to a server machine which runs the montrealcam.com website. That machine is a Digital Alpha running Digital UNIX 4.0B.
He's just using the fact that he installed the physical cam to plug his new company. What a shame.
I was the one to send the previous story, last year. Just check it out.
at least there standing in front of the cam now..
geez i've REALLY got nothing to say
[slammer56]
You've obviously never seen a polar bear swim -- their very capable swimmers! This is not surprising, considering that they spend almost as much time in the water hunting seals, etc. as they do on land. Whether they'd be able to catch penguins is an open question though -- I guess we should send a few up north and find out...
(oh no -- I just had a thought. Maybe all of OUR penguins were eaten a long time ago by polar bears, and that's why we don't have any. I no longer like the direction this analogy is going -- please stop!)
Canadian AC
You mean, the "laces" (or shoelaces) in english.
Nice job with the cam & website, btw.
Yeah, we should see about a tie-in with Budweiser: a Bill Gates lookalike running around with a winNT CD under one arm and a six pack under the other and (of course) that creepy penguin following him.
doobie-doobie-doo...
As a matter of fact, they are not dead and this site is NOT outdoor, but inside the biodome. It's just that they have to duplicate the polar seasons, so some part of the year, they turn the lights off up to 18 hours a day, down to 4 hours some other parts of the year.
:))
It's not like they are shy, or they're up programming some kernel routines, but rather that the biodome people are kind enough to duplicate their native environment.
...David (the guy who wrote the software that captures their little faces
The page loads
but the image is black.
The cam may be dead.
groovy!
Tiberius Megadyptes
yak@yeti.com
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