art taylor

There seems to be a progression one goes through after every purchase of a computer-connected camera.

1. Hey, I can video conference people!

This started at least as early as Doug Englebart's demo, and received another boost with the Intardweeb and cuseeme (which is now commercial, surprisingly enough), before reaching ubiquity with the current crop of instant messaging systems and iChat/AV, Yahoo!, along with free or nearly-free USB cameras.

2. Hey, I can strap this thing to my head!

3. Hey, I can point this camera at something and people from all over the world can come watch it!

From coffee pots to the child care area at Cisco, thousands of USB- and Firewire-connected cameras are pointing at areas of varying interest.

I have hit this spot before, sometime in the late 90s, when the Linux QuickCam drivers became solid and I actually had a view. After a couple moves, the idea was no longer worth the effort, and I didn't bother. Of course, I later had an iSight sitting around, but I didn't use it for much other than video capture to snag some shots of a lightning storm.

The place we moved to in December has an OK view of downtown San Francisco, the Bay Bridge, and a big chunk of I-80, among other things. My office occupies part of the second floor, with a window that has a peek-a-boo view over our lower deck and over to tall buildings with lights. No Transamerica Building unless I hid my older Powerbook in the corner of the bedroom, but that's for stage #4 below.

I was looking for simple software that would capture a single frame from my iSight and upload it to my webserver. I could call it the "random buildings and weather in San Francisco webcam," but basically, I had a useless iSight sitting on my desk, calling for me to make its life meaningful again.

At one point this would have involved a lot of scripting and pain, taking the better part of the day. Now that I'm a Mac person, and Mac users are Shiny Happy People, there is a load of software for uploading still pictures, streaming movies, podcasts, and vidcasts. (I want the trademark for this, so I can suppress it forever.)

I went looking for the "leader" in the field, based on most glowing reviews, lists of competitors, etc., and EvoCam seemed to be providing people with a lot of love. I downloaded it, and it seemed ideal. I could set a timer, and every 10 minutes, not only would it take a snapshot and upload it to my website, it would also make a thumbnail and upload that as well. This was very close to precisely what I wanted -- a tiny picture in the right hand navbar, and a full-sized picture in case someone actually cared enough to click on it. After all, a 160x120ish picture, unless it's reeses-crotch-cam.com, isn't going to tell anyone much.

There were some problems with EvoCam from the beginning, though, so I never bothered registering the software. I'll register just about anything, but this software really doesn't meet the needs of anyone hoping to take pictures using their iSight under low-light conditions. Had I been testing this out at noon, I probably would have bought it, but since I was trying it right at sunset, EvoCam didn't make the cut. See, it's made to be used with lots of cameras, local or remote, and as apps of this type often do, it fell into that valley of "greatest common denominator". As soon as it got dark out, the iSight couldn't see anything, and there was no way to adjust it. I looked through the support forum, and it appeared that EvoCam was a brittle piece of software anyway, often crashing after a week of use.

Next, I tried my old buddy, Quicktime Broadcaster, to see if it had any still-image-capture support, but it's almost strictly a streaming-video package, and there's no way I'm streaming Kat's and my fights to the Intardweeb-at-large. Mil Millington already has a corner on that sort of thing.

What I finally ended up buying was ImageCaster, a $30 applet that does, more or less, precisely what I want. I can create multiple items that have different timers, different sources, different upload destinations, and all the same sort of features that EvoCam had, while actually letting the iSight's auto-adjust functionality work correctly.

So, now, you can see what the weather looks like over Market Street in San Francisco, all thanks to my diligent efforts.

Before I forget, I should round out the list to relieve the suspense.

4. Hey, I can get naked, or offer the promise of maybe getting naked, and people will pay to watch me!

This site will become a paid subscription site soon, I swear to it. I've already started doing situps, and a wishlist will be coming soon.

p.s., I love that I got you to click on a stileproject link at work. I wonder how fast you closed that window.

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9:30 PM: Start Parallels and create a pre-configured instance for Windows XP, modifying RAM allotment to 512MB, relocating the data files to an external FireWire Drive, and changing the CDROM from an ISO file to the Mac's SuperDrive DL.

9:35 PM: Put Windows XP disk in drive, start VM.

9:46 PM: Windows XP installer says,"39 minutes left to install," as it copies files, probes hardware (probably especially easy with a virtual machine with constrained virtualised hardware), and tells me how much better life will be with XP. On my last install (on a PC), 39 became 23 which lasted for FOUR HOURS.

10:01 PM: Installer asks for configuration information.

10:02 PM: Installer finishes and reboots.

10:04 PM: I'm logged in and ready to go, looking at what I swear is Palouse country.

I installed the "Parallels Tools", (similar to the VMWare tools and the Virtual PC tools) which make the mousing smoother if nothing else. However, window movement is still a little flaky (I resized the window to 1200x800 or so, so it might be fine at 10x7 or another "natural" resolution.), but everything worked as it should. Surprisingly so, and so, so much faster than Virtual PC did on my G4, which is no surprise.

Again, much to my surprise, it used about 510M RSS and 1.25GB VSS to manage this, much less than I expected. Of course, I'm running IE right now and not Outlook, Office, Visio, and streaming video.

On the other hand, I thought I'd try a simple test tonight, and went to http://www.dslreports.com to try the speed tests, using the SF-based Megapath server. I expected there to be some cost to the virtual bridging in Parallels.

Captive Windows using IE and the latest Java 5 JRE plugin:

dslreports.com speed test result on 2006-04-07 01:42:14 EST:

4887 / 503

Your download speed : 4887 kbps or 610.9 KB/sec.

That is 197% better than an average user on pacbell.net



Your upload speed : 503 kbps or 62.9 KB/sec.

That is 38.5% better than an average user on pacbell.net

Host Mac OS X using Camino 1.0 and the craptacular Apple Java 5 JRE plugin:

dslreports.com speed test result on 2006-04-07 01:54:00 EST:

4896 / 499

Your download speed : 4896 kbps or 612 KB/sec.

That is 197% better than an average user on pacbell.net



Your upload speed : 499 kbps or 62.4 KB/sec.

That is 37.4% better than an average user on pacbell.net

Not much difference, and what difference there was, the Mac came out behind. So much for BSD networking! (Yes, that's a joke.)

I'll continue testing later this weekend with two of the PC games I keep my T40 around for: Scrabble and Age of Kings II: Age of Empires: Conquerors Expansion: Can we add more colons?

Regardless, at $49.95, I can't wait until they get out of Beta so I can buy the Intel Mac version. Based on what I've seen so far, I'd buy it in its present state.

(This is what is known as "foreshadowing". Be prepared for a raft of "Bloody hell this sucks!" posts in the near future.)

Edit: Wow, that was quick. Attempting to eject the Windows XP CD from inside the Windows VM caused a nice kernel panic in OS X. As my pappy used to say, when life gives you poop, make poop juice! So I used the forced reboot as an opportunity to install 10.4.6.

Oh, and I can't upgrade to SP2 because I don't have enough disk space (I went with the default disk size) and I can't find the resizing tool they talk about in the control panel.

Beta. Now I get it.

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