Take a peek on the cams if ye dare! :)

First of all, it's way too damn hot here. It's actually got a 30% chance of rain here this afternoon it's been so hot (which is totally unheard of in the summer). Our place was 95F/35C yesterday, which is not a temperature that's fun to sit at a computer in. How do I know this? I scored a wireless weather station ($21.99 at Fry's, killer deal!) with the intention of posting the info online, except the damn thing won't do the "wireless" part... soooo I just have a fancy thermometer :)

I ecstatically got the whole new cam system up and running at stephthegeek.tv, but have since realized that a significant percentage of people can't hit my local cam server for some reason. Like can't ping it or anything. So if you're one of the ones seeing the thumbnails, but the large image in the popup isn't refreshing... yeah, I'll get to the bottom of that asap. And if there's anyone out there good at troubleshooting these things, please do let me know. It was working fine when it was pointing to my IP here but at port 9999. Bleh.

Big deadlines on Amnesty International's site looming, as well as other project crunchiness, and then going to Barcelona in a little over a week.

Still haven't had time for GRE prep. Getting a little freaked out about that. Damn country and its damn standardized testing :P

Okay, so my Linux knowledge has skyrocketed in the past week.

I now have Motion (most annoying software name to google for ever) running on a repurposed Dell Dimension 8200. By the way, if anyone has any RAM for one of these kicking around, you're sitting on a gold mine. I wanted to pick up 2x512s for it and it uses some bloody obscure and expensive RDRAM. At least it is significantly quieter than the box I have running the cams now. On which webcamXP hangs often.

Anyway. Motion is like the swiss army knife of webcams. I am SO excited that I can finally have something stable that does what I want it to. I've ditched the last two USB cameras I was relying on and have all network cameras now. But yeah, going from Windows to a command-line-only Linux program where you have to roll your own FTPing? Small learning curve.

And... dun dun dun... wrote my first shell script! Well, with a little help :) It's rather nice to be surrounded by Linux-y friends.

The most exciting news is that it actually does motion detection. So the cams are only updating when there's activity on a particular cam. It can also write events to a mysql db, so I will be able to use this for much more advanced tracking and home automation. It also creates timelapse videos at any interval. Have I mentioned how much I love Motion? I'm serving up the currently live camera at about 1FPS over Apache, and the others are FTPed (if changed) to the webserver at a more reasonable interval.

Gotta actually mount the new cams, tweak a couple of scripts, and the new (much more stable) system should be up in a few days on stephthegeek.tv!

PS. Anyone tried LinuxMCE? I watched the demo video and I'm totally in love. It even uses Motion itself for the automation stuff. And supports ZWave.

I don't know if it's the act of admitting/posting itself, or just that I usually take a while to get to the state where I'd post something, but I always seem to put up these emotional rants and feel significantly better the next day :P

I decided to take matters into my own hands, and after about ten hours of solid concentration, I've got a new StG.TV on my hands. It was turning into a total catch-22... didn't wanna work on grad school stuff until I had a site I wasn't totally miserable about, didn't want to work on the site because I had this huge, perfect vision of what it had to be, yadda yadda. Well, there. Ten hours to deploy something incomplete, yet inflicting infinitely less emotional torture and way more on the right track than what was there before (don't believe me? Check the timestamp. Toldja I'm a Drupal whiz now ;)

Got a few major things to do yet (like, uh, cam refreshing and copying and pasting most of the static content), but I'm tracking more over there already than I was before.

Go me!

I'm really psyched about StG.TV right now.  We went to the iSchool Master's project showcase yesterday, and although there weren't many projects directly related to things I want to do, most were at least interesting.  Even the paper on the history of trademarks was intriguing.  I found that the things that were more like what I did in undergrad, ie. implementing systems in business, much less interesting.

This was my first actual interaction with the school/people in the program I really want to get into.  I talked with the team who did their project on managing multiple online identities, which was interesting, although not exactly revolutionary, technologically speaking.  But they gave me some good comments on the program (very multidisciplinary, need to know what you want to do and be self-motivated) and also pointed me at their advisor, who looks like the person I really want to be talking with about what I want to do.  I mean, hello, this guy has a grant for a "Large-Scale Analysis of Computer-Mediated Social Relationships"! 

Funny how this whole journey started off in 2000 on a whim ("hey look, a free webcam!") then turned into technological masturbation ("mmmm CMSes and integration") and is now arriving at much more of a sociological perspective.  I realized yesterday that what I really need to do is stop focusing on the pieces of technology and look at the human side.  Of course, Chris laughed when I turned to him yesterday as we were walking back from the presentations and said, "What I think I really need is a sociologist!".  Chris nearly having his PhD in sociology and all :P

My blessing and curse is having always arrived at things as an intuitive.  I have no idea why the hell I want to pursue something, or even what it means, just that I want to.  So when I get all up in arms about needing a way to have my own little real-life Sims-esque indicators for things like Hunger and Availability, I don't think about the deep ramifications of being able to widely broadcast personal state in a quantitative way.  But that is starting to change and now I am getting very excited about the big picture as I begin to see it for the first time...

Playing around with some ideas for StephTheGeek.TV. Click for Flickr link with embedded notes.

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