thats true, I bought a new Dell Dimension 5150 about a year ago and to my surprise now Dell re-installation CD. I did a clean install of Ubuntu right away, but still wanted the XP disc in case I ever wanted to reinstall and sell or give away PC someday.
So I called dell tech support and they shipped me a disc, no charge.
I always take a look at Dell's PCs, especially in the Small Business section (only SSN needed) because they have very good deals that must be subsidized heavily by crap ware that I remove anyway. I got a good deal on the PC + 19 inch LCD.
I want to give the City of Seattle time to react since most of the press about this was published over the weekend. If I implement the "work around" on my site right away, it doesn't help the majority of people who go directly to the source, and don't use my site.
I hope that the city will reverse their original knee-jerk decision and put up the text feed again. We all need to get practical with our security concerns.
I actually contacted the SFD about my site when I first put it together and they liked it. They had no problem with it, but were unwilling to link directly to seattle911.com because they could not ensure the integrity of the data. I responded that I totally understund their viewpoint.
I grabbed their data every X minutes and some people visited my site. So, every visitor to my site used my bandwidth that I paid for, not the governments. (It makes you wonder why I wasted money on this).
Now, the city would like to prevent sites like mine and the visually impaired by providing a jpeg instead of text. Well, this doesn't prevent me from using the data (curl/gocr, etc) and it requires 8 times more bandwidth to serve the jpegs. Not to mention the time for the developers and the software expense (I sure hope they didn't buy software to convert jpeg to text, but I wouldn't be surprised). All of which, must be paid by the taxpayers of Seattle.
I personally wish they would spend more money on firemen salary and equipment and less of paper-pushers.
I use it to stay away from the seen. I heard a lot of sirens in my area 3 months ago, checked my site and saw that is was a major gas leak (12" natural gas line ruptured). I called my girlfriend and sister who were on their way home and told them to stay at work/school.
Seattle911.com guy, John Eberly
by the way here is the one line way to get the data.
curl "www2.cityofseattle.net/fire/realTime911/sfdIncide ntList.jpg" | djpeg -pnm -gray | gocr -
Just for everyone information, my server was down earlier due to a rogue node on my VPS server (great timing by my host), not slashdotting.
Here is my blog post on this issue that started some of this
http://blog.eberly.org/2006/10/12/worlds-worst-use -of-a-jpeg
Here are the comments at Reddit.
http://reddit.com/info/lxbt/comments
Reddit sent over 30k hits in a short period to my server and it handled it fine, it just seems every Saturday somebody on my server gobbles up all the resources. I really will never recommend VPS from this host to anyone.
First of all, I am John Eberly (I read slashdot, but have never posted) and I hosted this site for free with no advertisements. I grabbed their data every 2 minutes via cron/perl and posted it on my site. I am sure I "saved" them bandwith. Real time police and fire data is nothing new, NYC has both Police and Fire data here... http://gothamist.com/labs/map. Where do they get their data you ask? They subsribe to a server for a $100/year over the internet. I am sure glad the terrorist can't figure that out.
Once I had figured out they switched their data feed to a jpeg, I did a quick 30 second google search, apt-get install gocr, etc. and I had the feed again... It was actually even slightly easier than before, not tags and extra junk to strip, just fixed width text. I am a little tired of government crying "terrorism" and implementing worthless security measures. You don't need a "fancy software program" to get the Police/Fire resources tied up, just place about 3-4 bogus phone calls.
By the way, my blog has been up/down today, because have some "runaway process on a separate node" according to my VPS. My server easily withstood the 20,000 hits in 12 hours from reddit.
Slashdot Mirror
thats true, I bought a new Dell Dimension 5150 about a year ago and to my surprise now Dell re-installation CD. I did a clean install of Ubuntu right away, but still wanted the XP disc in case I ever wanted to reinstall and sell or give away PC someday.
So I called dell tech support and they shipped me a disc, no charge.
I always take a look at Dell's PCs, especially in the Small Business section (only SSN needed) because they have very good deals that must be subsidized heavily by crap ware that I remove anyway. I got a good deal on the PC + 19 inch LCD.
Good question.
I want to give the City of Seattle time to react since most of the press about this was published over the weekend. If I implement the "work around" on my site right away, it doesn't help the majority of people who go directly to the source, and don't use my site.
I hope that the city will reverse their original knee-jerk decision and put up the text feed again. We all need to get practical with our security concerns.
perfect.
I actually contacted the SFD about my site when I first put it together and they liked it. They had no problem with it, but were unwilling to link directly to seattle911.com because they could not ensure the integrity of the data. I responded that I totally understund their viewpoint. I grabbed their data every X minutes and some people visited my site. So, every visitor to my site used my bandwidth that I paid for, not the governments. (It makes you wonder why I wasted money on this). Now, the city would like to prevent sites like mine and the visually impaired by providing a jpeg instead of text. Well, this doesn't prevent me from using the data (curl/gocr, etc) and it requires 8 times more bandwidth to serve the jpegs. Not to mention the time for the developers and the software expense (I sure hope they didn't buy software to convert jpeg to text, but I wouldn't be surprised). All of which, must be paid by the taxpayers of Seattle. I personally wish they would spend more money on firemen salary and equipment and less of paper-pushers.
I didn't have any ads on seattle911.com. I lost money on the site, I just published it for others benefit.
it should have been "scene", not "seen."
I use it to stay away from the seen. I heard a lot of sirens in my area 3 months ago, checked my site and saw that is was a major gas leak (12" natural gas line ruptured). I called my girlfriend and sister who were on their way home and told them to stay at work/school. Seattle911.com guy, John Eberly by the way here is the one line way to get the data. curl "www2.cityofseattle.net/fire/realTime911/sfdIncide ntList.jpg" | djpeg -pnm -gray | gocr -
Just for everyone information, my server was down earlier due to a rogue node on my VPS server (great timing by my host), not slashdotting. Here is my blog post on this issue that started some of this http://blog.eberly.org/2006/10/12/worlds-worst-use -of-a-jpeg
Here are the comments at Reddit.
http://reddit.com/info/lxbt/comments
Reddit sent over 30k hits in a short period to my server and it handled it fine, it just seems every Saturday somebody on my server gobbles up all the resources. I really will never recommend VPS from this host to anyone.
First of all, I am John Eberly (I read slashdot, but have never posted) and I hosted this site for free with no advertisements. I grabbed their data every 2 minutes via cron/perl and posted it on my site. I am sure I "saved" them bandwith. Real time police and fire data is nothing new, NYC has both Police and Fire data here... http://gothamist.com/labs/map. Where do they get their data you ask? They subsribe to a server for a $100/year over the internet. I am sure glad the terrorist can't figure that out. Once I had figured out they switched their data feed to a jpeg, I did a quick 30 second google search, apt-get install gocr, etc. and I had the feed again... It was actually even slightly easier than before, not tags and extra junk to strip, just fixed width text. I am a little tired of government crying "terrorism" and implementing worthless security measures. You don't need a "fancy software program" to get the Police/Fire resources tied up, just place about 3-4 bogus phone calls. By the way, my blog has been up/down today, because have some "runaway process on a separate node" according to my VPS. My server easily withstood the 20,000 hits in 12 hours from reddit.