David Gessel
Gatorland video
Back in January of 2007, Carolyn and I visited the premiere 1/2 day attraction in Florida, the amazing Gatorland, home of the gator jump. Unfortunately, in January, the water is a bit cold for Gators and they don’t jump as enthusiastically as they apparently do in warmer months.
{vidavee id=”1842″ w=”320″ }
1U Fill-in Panel
Home-made 1U fill in panel – all salvaged fasteners.
Magnet tape holds it to the rack, so it is easy to move. Clear so you can see inside. A few more U to make…
The third accident this weekend…
Why are these kids so reluctant to chat with the police after an accident? Hmmm… The only time these accidents aren’t hit and run, is when the kids are hurt enough they can’t run. Unfortunately, modern cars are way too safe.
I offered to help my neighbor, Bila, change the tire in the morning. This morning at 9:00, when he was done baking, he rang my bell and we changed the tire. From the glass on the street, it looked like the perps’ car was far worse off. Bila’s axle might have been a bit tweaked though.
Don’t park on the street
The second major accident I’ve seen in as many days…
Both green, late model sporty cars. The last wrapped the front end around a tree on an exit ramp and apparently made it only about 100 yards before collapsing, I think, into someone’s driveway. They were being tended to by paramedics when I came by.
This time the driver apparently tried to pass, lost control, hit some parked cars and endoed the car. The driver and passenger got out and walked away. Probably not their car, probably on something or other. Not likely to be found again, unless the next thing they hit is a lot harder. Airbags cheat evolution.
Oh well, at least it provided amusement for the neighbors.
Go dick go
Huh… go figure, he sounds sane here….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YENbElb5-xY
Linux 342
An IBM 342 with a ServeRAID 4lx is a fine machine, but getting Linux to install is less the effortless. Emacs!
I’m trying to get zoneminder to work on this very nice IBM 342 with a serve raid card and some good drives and 3 video capture cards. The thing should be able to capture 12 streams of video simultaneously, or 6 at full 30FPS. But getting Linux variants to properly recognize the serveraid card is a challenge.
The Mandrake LiveCD install works great on IDE systems, no problem at all. But it doesn’t see the serveraid, so that one was out. Gentoo saw the serveraid card, and since video capture and real time analysis is one of those things that would be good to do fast, the gentoo optimization scheme seemed promising, but it wasn’t. Just a miserable series of failed compiles and fixes that went on endlessly.
So from there to Debian, which is very nice and since it is the parent of Ubuntu and there’s an Ubuntu package and Carolyn loves Ubuntu, that seemed worth a shot. It does see the Serveraid, but there seems to be a bug in the IPS.o driver which reared it’s irritating head during package installs causing hangs, even after I updated the firmware to 7.12.12.
So that was out. On to a distro officially supported by IBM: Suse. That installed great, easy no problem, detected all the ADCs on the capture cards and everything. Very easy to install, but there are some weird bugs with ffmpeg that hung the compile of Zoneminder. It descended into another endless series of patch and edit and retry effort to get through the compile….
Then I saw that Fedora 7 has an RPM in the main distro for ZoneMinder. It is officially supported by IBM and seems rock solid. So far the network install has gone well – the install CD is only 7.71 MB (!) and it seems tentatively promising… it’s on the “Starting install process” screen, which is supposed to take several minutes. As it may need a few GB of data, I’ll give it some time. Unfortunately Fedora doesn’t support CD installs and the 342 has a laptop style CD-ROM drive, so doing a DVD install is out of the question. Network installs are efficient if you only have to do them once, but the retry is all penalty download.
big fire plume from the air
someone else got a nice picture on the same day of probably the same plume here.