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DMI News |
Previous Entry.. Next Entry.. The Weekend So Far
September 04, 2006 00:01 Yes, I know, it's been far more than a weekend since the last update. But we'll get to that later. It's been a busy weekend. On Saturday, we loaded everyone up in the car and drove to Arbuckle Wilderness in Oklahoma. Spent the day driving around having various creatures drool, peck, and bite at the car in hopes of obtaining a token morsel. Most of them were successful. The giraffes got special attention. Here are some pics for you to enjoy. Camera #1 and Camera #2. Then today we went and bought the cheapest handheld gps unit we could find and tried out Geocaching. It turned out to be as much fun as we expected and maybe more so. The kids are already planning and expecting to go do it some more tomorrow. Despite what might appear to be an obvious lack of progress on the site, there just so happens to be an obvious lack of progress on the site, at least if you consider things you can see and do. I've actually put quite a bit of work in reprogramming some of it to make it load faster and put less load on the server. That way, should I get hits from a moderately large website, I'll actually be able to handle it. I've also been developing a multipurpose phone interface circuit. I expect to put some prototypes into effect this week. Among some of the features on the first run will include the ability to automatically start recording phone calls when a call comes in, and once I get caller ID integrated, depending on the source of the call, choose to stream it to the world. I could also use this to automatically block known telemarketer/creditor/unwanted people #'s. If I really get motivated, I'll have it control which phones in the house ring depending on incoming calls, and certain phones will go dead after a certain hour on weeknights... can't imagine who those will belong to.. :) I'm planning to do a moderately substantial Christmas display this year, controllable of course. I'd like to sync it to music, and that CAN be done, but it'll be difficult to observe it realtime online due to the difference in video and audio streams, and streaming live video/audio in a package like wmv has proven to be both problematic, and very bandwidth intensive. To view it, I'll be setting up a mailbox out at the street and it will contain a camera looking back at the house. I've been playing with ajax, enough anyway to incorporate it into the main page and replace all the functions that the hidden frame now serves, most of which don't work correctly anyway. This will include the lamp icons turning on and off, popup message and windows, and a redesign of the camera code to handle broken images and such.
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