One life in recursive eval of transubstantiation_by_successive_approximation(self),
observations and commentary, at work, at home, and everywhere else.
"Building Commercial Scale ISP/ASP Infrastructure for Dummies"
meets "Tales of the City". Whatever. 
Strata Rose Chalup
strata_@_virtual_._net
Whiteboard Photo - The Digital Camera Whiteboard Capture Software"Whiteboard Photo lets you take snapshots of your dry-erase board, flipchart, chalkboard or document with your digital camera and convert them into crisp, perfect images in seconds. Whiteboard Photo uses proprietary image processing algorithms to compensate for the geometry of your photograph, correct the colors, and clip the borders so that you get a perfect printout of your board every time. You don't need to worry about the angle of the camera, the lighting, reflections, or even small print."
I would have scoffed at this before seeing the before and after pictures. Very compelling! Unfortunately not something one could use to automagically filter the images coming in from a webcam, unless one is a badass ActiveX scripter, since this is a Windows product. Still, might be useful in cleaning up pix of public art that I take with my digital camera. I like to capture building murals, since I have seen so many wonderful ones lost to fire, vandals, or just new owners with no sense of style.
_SRC
posted by Strata Chalup 8/15/2000 1:17:57 PM
Looking for WebCams in all the Wrong Places
Nope, not a foray into net.smut, merely an attempt to find a viable as-zero-as-possible administration webcam for a couple of remote offices. I recalled a nice standalone webcam that we had on the net back at the workplace in the mid-90's and assumed the technology would have gotten faster, cheaper, and more useful since. Hah. Searching for phrases like "standalone webcam" and "webcam howto" was even more disappointing.
Axis webcams come in various flavors, including several standalone webcams that you just put on the net and query for pages. Naturally, given the short memory (or willful ignorance) of the e-commerce side of "the net" in general, they claim theirs is the first. Heh. I found them while looking for the standalone cam that we had at Synopsys in 1996, sigh. Their Axis 2100+ goes for $469 - $544 online and is a standalone model. They also have an outdoor-hardened one that goes for about $800 - $1100 online (yeesh!).
Video Blaster WebCam $41 - $75 online
Various options from Intel, list prices from $79 - $149 I like their "PC Camera Pack", especially the privacy shutter and the tilt/swivel base, which lets you turn the thing easily to capture the whiteboard. We did set out to capture the whiteboard, remember?
Kodak DVC325, $81 - $99 online
Note that there are earlier, discontinued versions, a DVC 323 and a DVC 300
Never heard of Winnov, but they have some cameras, boards, and PCMCIA cards that claim to be optimized for videoconferencing.
Some good info on setting up a webcam in general, from the author of a book called "The Little Web Cam Book".
Also a pointer to yet another webcam, Logitech QuickCam and related products. One of, if not THE most poorly designed website I have ever encountered-- perhaps my mistake was having JavaScript on, and triggering the "idiot" setting thereby. You have to mouse over the camera pictures to see the descriptions-- UGH. One of their cams seems to use a 3rd party service to publish (?!) data.
A somewhat more useful (less useless?) page details the OS versions supported by each of their cameras, and has a link to each camera's product page, a better format.
We have Eddy's Live Webcam HOWTO, a friendly but terse summary: "The image is captured at my home using a Creative Videoblaster Webcam and ISpy WebCam Software on a 486dx40 PC running Windows95.
The ISpy program captures the WebCam image, converts it to JPEG
(adjustable compression) and writes the file directly on
my home Linux box's filesystem, via an NFS mount." Etc.This is becoming rather disappointing. There were quite a number of nice standalone webcams out there in 1996/1997, but they seem to have gone the way of the dinosaur.
Cheers,
_SRC
posted by Strata Chalup 8/14/2000 9:08:31 PM
Just found this, and it's interesting. I've been saying the same thing for years, albeit using more specialized terminology-- namely, all technology has certain affordances built into it, which may or may not include an idealized usage model and/or deployment model. Anyway. Worth checking out! They have lots more princples, I just included the first one. :-)PRINCIPLES OF TECHNOREALISM
1. Technologies are not neutral.
A great misconception of our time is the idea that technologies are completely free of bias -- that because they are inanimate artifacts, they don't
promote certain kinds of behaviors over others. In truth, technologies come loaded with both intended and unintended social, political, and economic
leanings. Every tool provides its users with a particular manner of seeing the world and specific ways of interacting with others. It is important for each
of us to consider the biases of various technologies and to seek out those that reflect our values and aspirations.
posted by Strata Chalup 8/13/2000 8:53:40 PM
I'm in a strange way doing end-user support again, as Director of Networking Operations in an 8 person company. Yes, I know-- I swore "never again" when I left MIT Center for Cognitive Science in 1990 and moved to California.Those of you who know me better have probably heard the T-shirt story. The summary form: I realized that I should leave when I was tempted to go to one of those "custom lettering while you wait" T-shirt places and get identical shirts printed up, one for every day of the workweek, saying in huge block letters, "I don't care why you can't print."
That was a clue. I went back into consulting and made sure that the closest I ever got to a user was another sysadmin who needed infrastructure support. But, here I am. And it's okay, as we grow this will become someone else's problem and I can leave the world of recalcitrant PCI cards and odd .h file nested link dependencies and go back to building huge kick-ass scalable service clusters. But I digress...
Given that I have not dealt with Actual Users in many years and that many folks in the company come out of academia, it seemed useful to come up with some guidelines to remind the user community of its half of the social and professional obligation. It was also a good quick test of StarOffice. :-) Someone recently sent a list of "work rules" to an employee alumni list, and it inspired me to create the one included below.
The list I received was very funny, but in general was too insulting to actually use at work-- "I see the stupidity fairy has visited us again" is a typical quote. Rule 5 below is the only one taken from that list-- wish I had an attribution for it.
Feel free to borrow my list, just include my email addr on it if you do. It's somewhat optimized for working under many hats in a tiny startup in a large bull-pen like office in a warehouse, at a desk which is only a few feet from the main conference table and whiteboard space. Was I digressing again? Nah, just background. :-)
Strata's Rules to Live By
1) I'm not being rude, I'm just pretending that this is an actual workplace, and trying to get something done.2) Moral and technical support cheerfully offered, especially if you stand still long enough to describe the problem.
3) Telepathic requests for technical assistance and/or bugfixes will be ignored. Ditto for loud grumblings. "Oh by the way..." is marginal. SMTP traffic happily accepted.
4) Intelligibility may be inversely proportional to genius and/or artistic talent, not must be. Please re-read the spec.
5) No, my powers must only be used for good.
Thanks for visiting Networking Operations!
Have a nominal, non-marginal day!_SRC
PS- I prefer the smiley gif, but that's not Lynx-compatible!
posted by Strata Chalup 8/13/2000 7:59:12 PM
