awesomest mr potato head ever!!!

he comes with a ghost costume...fangs? Alien ears... Glow in the dark eyes..a pumpkin.. And the standard hat, nose, and feet... Just awesome.

My first tomato soup...

it's good!! Not as 'tomatoy' as I would have liked, but very tasty. I had to add and extra can of tomatoes halfway though... Because I added too much milk... And praise the lord for my Thunderstick Pro!

The Webcam Part III

Well, there are issues.
I think the issues are with my web hosting company. I've had issues with them for a while with doing rapid FTP uploads, or having multiple attempts at downloading e-mail lock up. And after using 3 different web cam programs, that use ftp of course, to see what the issue could be, I determined it is not the software, but either the web host, or my somewhat flakey internet connection.

Given the fact I can still web surf even when the FTPs are failing, I tend to believe it is the web hosting computer freaking out from having a log in every 1 minute. Yea.. don't ask.. it's a really cheap hosting company, and you get what you pay for. The upside is that they are nice people.. at least the 4 times I required tech support from them, in the last 6-7 years.

So I set out to find a free web host with unlimited transfer to act as the back end for the web cam images. Yes, this is a little hokey to have my images hosted, on a different machine than the main server, but maybe I can find one that can deal with getting FTP'd to every 60 seconds. This is a practice known as hotlinking. Most places HATE hotlinking as it uses their bandwidth, with no compensation... more on that in a moment.

So far I found a list of them at http://www.free-webspace.org/ and the first expressly prohibits exactly what I want to do in its terms and conditions, I moved to the second one which seems okay, it didn't even seem to have terms and conditions... odd... maybe they figure that there is not much you can do with only 50mb of web space, and a file size limit of 200k.. well 200k is plenty for a webcam picture! ha! fools to them! I might even set up a real camera with better resolution... with 200k I could do something around... say 1.5 megapixels with a not too bad amount of jpeg compression. Also I don't know if the 200K size limit applies to ftp transfer, or only to their web interface transfer. I'll have to push that one, and give it a try.

oh... I could also just adjust the jpeg image compression on the fly to get it to 200k... so images with highly compressible areas, will have better resolution than those with less compressible regions... hmm interesting concept: on the fly compression to allow for fixed file size, with maximum resolution... Not sure anyone has ever done that. It seems rather novel. I doubt I'll find web cam software with that built in. so I'm probably going to have to start hacking up an open source one, or roll my own. I vote for hacking up a free source one... or maybe... maybe I can find a standalone image compressor to my specs, then just pipe the image from the capture software to the image compressor, then to the ftp server. I would definitely need a program to coble together those three parts, but it shouldn't be too hard.

Well... maybe later... but to the issue at hand. Hotlinking. Apparently the web service I am going with now, does not like images to be hotlinked. The main issue of hotlinking I think is theft of intellectual property, and copyright violations, but since I am not doing that, I figure I should be able to. Well, they have a techno way of defeating hotlinking images.. I'm guessing it's a simple .htaccess file on their apache server.

So I come up with a somewhat brilliant idea, of hotlinking a whole page in a frame, so that the requester for the image is local, and it get around their hotlinking restriction. This works. But I don't like the fact that I have to download other crap that is not my image... that actually uses more bandwidth. Granted, it's less than 1k, but it's still something.

So, option 3. I ran a little test where the webcam software stores the image with a non-standard extension. First I tried html, as I know that should work, and it did! So I went with something a little more descriptive. I called it a ".image" file. I believe my assumption of their using a .htaccess file is correct, based on this test and ultimate solution, as in a .htaccess file one would make rules regarding extensions, and how they are to be treated. Since they can't redirect ALL extensions to their "You suck, you hotlinker" page, I just needed to pick
one that wasn't in the filter.

-AllenKll

Welcome...

Back to the Rock!!! It's Hockey time people!!!!

the webcam...

Grr. just set the bastard up, and am relizing there are issues with keeping a constant internet connection to my media pc. I blame the wifi repeater. But it could very well be the wireless PCIE card. I've never had problems with the card before, but then again, I never tried to keep up a constant internet connection before either...

Maybe I could write a little program/script that pings google every 5 minutes, and if it doesn't work, disable and re enable the wireless card, and renew the IP address. Seems a lot of work... well not really, but it does seem unnecessarily complicated.

Such is my life.
-Allen