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

Getting my Geek on: Snow

Originally from MySpace

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Getting my Geek on: Snow Current mood: thoughtful Category: Art and Photography It snowed today. Not a lot of snow, maybe half an inch to an inch. Just enought to cover the grass mostly. You can still see a fair amount of blades. Here is the Crux of the blog: Snow is a Low Pass Filter. As I crunched along, I began to think about the tranquility that the snow brings. why? why does the snow induce tranquility? The lack of color? perhaps. The dampened sounds? perhaps. I think those things play a part. But what is it that ties it all together? Softening. The world has a lot of harshness to it. Hashness is expressed as high frequency. Not necessarily high frequency sound, but the high frequency of objects and colors too. Leading me to the conclusion that snow is nature's low pass filter. On a graph, a sharp edge or corner is composed of the highest frequencies. In fact it is said that a square wave, has it's frequency at infinity at the moment it changes from low to high or high to low. Extrapolating this into the 3d world, all corners and edges are composed of infinately high frequencies. Snow rounds these corners, thereby eliminating the high frequencies, and thus is a low pass filter. Snow also dampens sound. High frequency noises are easily absorbed by the fluffy substance. A change from one color to another, also represents a high frequency response, and so the snow, by changing all to white, removes that high frequency. The general lack of high frequencies, or at least a severely reduced amount of them, as compared to non-snow covered life, induces that scerene feeling. There you have it. The tranquility of snow reduced to a mathematical theorem. In truth, I'd rather just watch it fall while snuggling by a fire, than to work out all the details on a chalkboard. Geek: off -allenkll 8:57 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos

Feisty Jackson

I am not being facetious at all when I say that there is not ONE thing I didn't like about this entry. I like when you get your geek on. Also, as I don't feel like leaving another comment on your main page I will say: 1) I love that your heroes are the Devils. GO DEVILS. (that game... was so awesome) 2) I took that inkblot quiz. I am an evil genius... I get that a lot, actually. 3) Motorcycle jacket? MEOW. 4) When I think about you, pedantic is the last word I think of. I was actually thinking about you while I was crocheting today and getting my groove on at the coffee shop while you were chatting up all the knitting ladies... and all I was thinking was... WOW, Allen is so INTERESTING. It's true. See you Sunday I hope! Posted by Feisty Jackson on Apr 19, 2007 2:42 AM