For those of you familiar with my recent Bank of Amerika issues, you can skip to today’s (this week’s?) events.

To give some pre-historic background on this, I used to bank at Capitol Federal (CapFed), a Kansas only bank that only deals with personal accounts. I emphasis Kansas because while some loans (like possibly car loans) they may give out to anyone, they only do home loans as long as the house is in Kansas. Local Investigative News didn’t bother to do any research a couple of years ago and gave them a bad rap because they gave a home loan to a white family, but not a black family. Um, the 1 home was in Kansas and the other was in Missouri… Anyways, I hadn’t had any issues with them other than an ATM & 3 checks in 1 deposit.

A friend of mine, Eric Gometz, had been trying to get me to try out Bank of America’s online banking for a number of years, but I’d resisted. CapFed did what I needed it to for the most part. Then I moved to Eric’s home town, Pittsburg, KS… apparently the only college town in Kansas that CapFed does not have a local branch in. Bank of America does and I needed someplace I could deposit checks from work until I was able to get things set up for direct deposit. Bank of America also made it easy for me to transfer money to Eric for a car loan.

I think it was around 2005 that I opened my personal account with Bank of America (BoA). I’ve not had any problems with BoA, but like many big companies apparently lots of people have had issues with them. The online banking has been great and is so easy to deal with I rarely even go to the bank… usually it’s only to withdraw cash from the ATM for the few rare things I can’t pay with credit card or can’t easily do bill pay for.

With my recent gig I’ve made enough to actually get an incorporated business and try to get a business banking account set up… This is where the real fun begins…

I went to BoA and set up a business account. The account manager didn’t say much about me having all the paper work, but it made everything go smoothly. He was a nice guy and remembered they were having a promotion for new business accounts - whatever, but extra is nice I guess.

I then had him deposit a check (greather than $10k USD) from a client as the initial deposit. This is probably where I went wrong, but considering what transpired later I’m not sure it would have mattered.

The client is a new start up with 2 partners. There must have been some miscommunication as 1 had written a couple other checks to pay some employees and forgot to add more money. A week later (always have to wait a week before seeing if it went through, right?) and boing! Check bounced.

Considering all of the businesses BoA does business with I can’t believe they’d have a cow over a measley $10k. Oh well, they had a cow (to bad it wasn’t an angus), charged me a $6 return fee, marked my business EIN as a risky business, and shut down my account.

I’m in the next day (too late to do anything the day I discovered it) to see why I can’t add money to it. The same guy that helped me set it up the week before is helping me and he runs into a problem. He tries something else and still can’t fix it. After a couple more tries he gives up and calls the 800 number. He went round and round with whoever he was talking to (yes, a BoA employee trying to be helpful - they do exist!). He’s trying to explain that it was the client’s check that was bad. Trying to explain I’m here to take money from my personal BoA account and put into this business account. Doesn’t matter… maybe he’s talking to 1 of the BoA employees who really doesn’t care? He’s left with no authority and can’t do anything to help other than refund me the $6 charge. I’m thankful for him trying, but I’m frustrated… And now wondering what the rest of the banking world will look like.

After calling Eric and talking with him and Carol, getting a different perspective on it… Eric and Carol also being baffled at why a client’s check bouncing means BoA doesn’t want my money, suggesting I call the 800 number to see what I can do…

I call the 800 number while being frustrated, angry, and depressed - I just want this to get fixed and go away… I didn’t even think about asking to talk to a supervisor. I get the same baffling we don’t want your business that the guy who helped me earlier at the bank got. I asked if they were sure they didn’t want any of my business because I’ll take all my accounts elsewhere and be sure to tell my friends. Oh, we’re happy to take care of your personal accounts. We just can’t do business with your business.… Which means I’ll be taking all of my business elsewhere and everybody will hear about this. Fine, whatever.

Asking around somebody suggested 1st National Bank (of Kansas, not of Missouri, Olathe, or the billion other 1st Nationals). I called USAA Savings Bank (I have my car insurance, renter’s insurance, and a credit card through them as well) and set up a personal bank account after reading Why USAA Is The Greatest Bank Ever and discovered #3 - using a scanner to scan and upload a check in order to deposit it. Although USAA is the greatest ever (see #2 for why mentioning USAA shuts up any insurance salesman), they don’t handle commercial bank accounts.

So I went to CapFed and that’s when I discovered they don’t handle commercial bank accounts either… But the lady that helped me stated her and her husband opened their business bank account at Metcalf Bank and it was a great bank. Ok, whatever.

I went over to 1st National Bank of Kansas, walked in, and looked completely confused. A nice lady came over and asked if I needed help. After informing her that I needed to set up a business account she asked if I had an appointment (I need an appointment to bank?). She let me know that the business account manager had a couple of appointments, but he’d be available later… She also made sure I had all of the paperwork I needed for a commercial account.

I went home, worked on some stuff, got a phone call from 1st National, drove back over, and when I walked in the lady was there to greet me and ushered me over to meet with the business account manager. He was impressed that I had everything organized in a nifty binder and I even had every piece of necessary paperwork to open the business account (it pays to pay a good accountant). A couple hours (eons?) later, a photocopy of my drivers license and a credit card, lots of typing, and a $100 deposit (making sure there’s at least something in it this time) everything is set up. I head home, jump on the computer to sign up for online banking, go grab my paperwork from the other room, get halfway through filling out the 1st page of the form when the page reloads and Due to inactivity your session has timed out for your safety!… I was logged in? Am I missing something?

Not only did it push me off the form page it didn’t bother to save any of my information. Fine, maybe they got the kid down the street to write this part. I go back to the 1st page, click my way back to the form, & this time I’m typing all the crap into a text editor, copy & paste it into the browser, and then click continue… page 2, ugh! I continue the text editor, copy & paste game until I get through all of the pages of the form…

It then asks me to download this PDF, print it out, and mail it in. I’ll repeat that - they want me to snail mail a printed on paper PDF. Green?

I get a new check from the client that night with the information that the 1 partner just deposited almost 3x as much as the check is for into the account so there wouldn’t be a problem… I notice that the check is not from 1st National Bank, it’s from Metcalf Bank.

I don’t want to be sitting on this for yet another entire week before I can get moving on dumping my current hate relationship with BoA. Next day I head over to Metcalf Bank, and go through the process to open a business account. Less than an eon later (an eon in these instances is the time it takes for me to go from hot or comfortable to frozen to the bone), a trip out to my car to get auto insurance (yay, made me remember to print out my latest auto insurance card from USAA - the card I had expired in Feb *whistles innocently*), photocopies of that and drivers license, another $100 deposit to start it off, and I was almost done… I also had her deposit the check I got from the client, which she informed me she was able to transfer the money directly to my account because the account was also with the bank.

Yay! I have money!

When I got home I couldn’t log into the online banking even though it had been set up. Next day I try to login and still can’t. I call customer service and discover I’m using the wrong login (you know, the 1 that’s not written/printed in any of the paper work I got). I hang up thinking that’s all I need, successfully get through the signup/login screens, and I can’t see any account information. Unfortunately it’s already past 5pm and nobody’s home… Yay for 24 hour banking =)

Next day I login, click the chat link, and ask for help via a nifty Java applet. I get disconnected, but apparently the person was able to get enough information to do something as I got an email stating everything has been fixed and my login (the original 1 that’s in the paper work) and secret word should be all I need…

Eureka! I can see my account details! It’s now 2 days later I don’t have money and the initial $100 deposit is $95…

I keep clicking through all sorts of stuff, but the only info I’m able to get on the check is the scanned image. I click the chat link again and ask for help. I explain I’d like any information possible on why the check was removed from my account. After a couple of minutes the helpful person replies that the only information is that there was an irregular signature probably meaning that the person who signed it was not authorized.

ROFLMAO. I have to or else I’d go postal The person who signed the check is the primary partner and the primary on the bank account… If anybody is authorized, it’s him.

I call my contact up and let him know. He’s ticked off cause he still can’t pay me. I laughed cause he’s more upset than I am about it. I send him account information for a wire transfer or direct deposit and go on with my day.

A day or 2 later I get a cashier’s check from the client… Made out personally to me. I’m hoping it’s not a problem and send an email to my accountant. He replies that I just need to endorse it over to my corporation, deposit it directly to the business account, and make sure the client fixes their paperwork.

I deposited the cashier’s check on Tuesday. The teller asked for ID to make sure I was the initial receiver of it and made sure each and every letter matched. So there shouldn’t be any problems with the check this time around.

So today I figure I’ll work on messing around with trying to get some external bank accounts set up so I can transfer money from my business account to my personal accounts… I need to reimburse myself for all the business expenses I’ve been putting on the credit card while trying to get this check deposited. I knew it would at least be slightly annoying because when I asked via the online chat yesterday they responded that I’d need to call customer service to do that.

I went in to work at the client’s office today as we were going to have a work night. I left for lunch and figured I’d be gone for an hour… it ended up being 2 hours (a 3 hour tour?)

After picking up lunch I called thinking I just needed to talk to customer service. They informed me I needed to download and fillout the forms available online. I asked where they were at and they asked if I was near a computer. When I said no, they said they couldn’t help. So, I drove home (it was nearer than the office at this point) and called again. They then transferred me to the person that could help me find the documents I needed online. He promptly informed me that I would need to go in to an office branch to fill out the forms, any branch should have the needed forms available…

Oh, like that branch I drove past on my way home? /me smacks forehead

I ended up driving over to the branch and figured I’d just go ahead and get a cashier’s check to deal with the BoA account and try to get set up to do a transfer, direct deposit, bill pay, whatever to my USAA account. I did get the cashier’s check, but was informed the receiving bank is supposed to initiate the direct deposit (this sounds weird, but I was informed by another person that this is correct) so apparently I didn’t need those forms I drove over there for…

Since I had the cashier’s check and I was driving by a BoA on my way back to the client’s office I figured I’d stop by and drop off the cashier’s check. I was hoping this would go quick as rush hour was nearing and the past 2 weeks. It. Took. Too. Long… And not only that, but then she states she noticed I’m using their super duper platinum credit card, but wanted to know if I wanted to upgrade to their super duper uber platinum super saver credit card. I just wanted to yell out that I’m closing my accounts next week, but I figured I’d have to sit an extra hour of grilling about why I wanted to leave, are you really sure you want to leave, are you really really sure you want to leave… Which I know I’ll have to sit through next week when I close the account anyways >.<

I’m planning to completely drop reliance on the X Library. I had toyed with the idea of doing some sort of flash based thing, but I’m thinking of using jQuery, YUI, or both instead.

I’m keeping the server side code PHP based and thinking of using Symfony, the Zend Framework, or something with user handling already built in - like Drupal (unlikely). Part of the reason for user logins is so people can submit/maintain color schemes.

I’m thinking of making it open source so people can host their own server full of color schemes. I’ll pull out the Firewheel Design ColorBurn feed and make the color feed section pluggable so people could write their own plugins for other services or completely random color schemes.

I’m hoping to make the color schemes more dynamic, but I’m not quite sure how to go about wrapping color swatches. From what I remember v1 requires 4 colors (that’s how many is in the ColorBurn widget). Most of the code is dynamic and simply loops through the array of color swatches, but the current floating & such will more than likely break if it doesn’t have exactly 4 colors.

I’m wanting to set it up so that there will be more choices than just the 3 of default color order, light to dark, & dark to light. I’d like to set it up so that the color feed could specify which color belonged to which class category (i.e. page text, page background, etc) by default. Maybe even define a default reverse order. I will still have the light to dark & dark to light. I may include a default color order based on the order the colors are first added to an array in order to have yet another possible way of viewing the colors.

I’m wanting to add drag & drop as well as color wheel / RGB / hex color selector for each class.

I’d like to make it a full page view with a draggable/clickable icon to pop open the color picker app.

That last brings me to something I was thinking about, but considering all of the various possibilities I’m not sure how viable it would be. Call me crazy, but I think it’d be cool if people could include the color app js file and whatever external js libs were needed to their own site page. It would then scan through all of the html elements; make a list of elements, classes, and id’s; and present them for possibly color changing/styling. The other possibility which might be better is for it to scan through the attached css files and only add the given css selectors to the list - thus giving the end user more control over what they were able to style.

This does cause problems with trying to automatically display color sets on a page. The end user would have to manually set all of the elements/classes/id’s or css selectors and their resulting color set may be near completely useless to somebody else who’s using different classes & id’s.

Considering all I do with my adobe groups account is RSVP for these & considering I only sign up for them on *my* computer… Does adobe really need to go to this annoying extent to chase me away?

Yay for greasemonkey.

I found a dreadfully simple greasemonkey script to do the trick, but it wouldn’t really handle a range of forms and didn’t have any validation checks (does the form really exist? does that form element really let you set an attribute?).

The way greasemonkey for firefox is set up it only works on the sites you specify anyways… So if you do want it on certain other sites (like your banking site), don’t add the URL to the list…

Please note that this will go through all forms on the given page & check to see if either the form or any of the form elements have the autocomplete attribute set - if so it should turn the attribute back on.

The name I gave this was Enable Login Forms.

The namespace http://blog.whitelionsoft.com/.

And currently the only page to include this script on is https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=ca&returnUrl=http://groups.adobe.com/groups/4b06154553/summary.

for ( var i in document.forms ) {
	var frm = document.forms[i];
	if ( frm.autocomplete && frm.setAttribute ) {
		frm.setAttribute( 'autocomplete', 'on' );
	}
	for ( var j in frm.elements ) {
		var ele = frm.elements[j];
		if ( ele.autocomplete && ele.setAttribute ) {
			ele.setAttribute( 'autocomplete', 'on' );
		}
	}
}

http://lavalantern.org/wwfm_blog/?p=272

Also, Paul Reinheimer has video up from the Dutch PHP Conference at http://blog.preinheimer.com/.

Pirate Bay has recently been dealing with several lawyers (yet again). More details can be found in the blog post Pirate Bay IP Addresses Assigned to Prosecution Lawyers.

For those that don’t understand why this is so funny, let me try to explain. Every domain can be looked up in a ‘whois’ database that will provide information for the domain. Typically it’s contact information in order to contact the owner of the domain. However, information is not guaranteed to be accurate.

These lawyers presented information based on these ‘whois’ records as fact. As this information is unreliable you can’t possibly represent the ‘whois’ records alone as fact… Maybe, possibly, but probably not as supplemental to some other more accurate data. Definitely by no means as fact.

To show the court (and everybody else in the world) how little the prosecuting lawyers know, Pirate Bay changed their ‘whois’ records to state that they were owned by the prosecuting lawyers and listed the lawyers’ email addresses as contact information. So if the prosecuting lawyers were to continue to insist that these records are fact they would need to start prosecuting themselves. Oops.

Considering the prevalence of spam bots in this day and age I’m pretty sure they scrape email information from these ‘whois’ records as well…

I think with just this much people should understand the hilarity of the situation.

This is in no way an endorsement of using Pirate Bay for illegal distribution of software. Some people have used it to distribute home made video capture of online game tournaments that youtube would have turned into pixelated junk and other legal (as defined by US law) activities.

Recently I was able to talk to an old high school friend of mine. We discussed what we’d been up to since the last time we’d talked and while it lasted longer than it should have (got to love questions for detail and then complaints about the discussion lasting too long ;)) we discovered that both of us had been going through some crap at about the same time. He thought my ordeal was worse, but on the flip side I wouldn’t want his troubles.

The question he asked of me though was, did you ask God why you were going through all of that. As Phillipe [Matthew Broderick] said in Ladyhawke, …the truth is I talk to God all the time…. On the other side of that I never asked about my ordeal - the part that bothered me wasn’t necessarily getting fired, it was that someone I trusted stabbed me in the back due to their insecurity about their job. Either it was my fault for being too trusting (this isn’t the first time something similar has happened) or God was simply reminding me that people are human.

However, I think what my friend was more worried about has been my erratic career. I think the best thing my consulting career has taught me thus far is that no job is permanent. And looking back to several times when my dad was worried about his own job, even government jobs are not secure. Plus, I’m not sure that my goal has ever been to have a safe, secure, permanent job so it’s not been something I’ve worried about.

We should all be familiar with the basic principal of the circle of life. We’re born, we consume, we die, and are consumed. Everything in nature has it’s part to play in the circle of life.

Let me diverge somewhat and bring another ray of light to bear on my thought process here. This is greatly generalized in order to take in the history of mankind as well as, on a separate level, each human.

At a young age baby’s seem to have no perception of things not within their field of vision. In this way it is seen that the baby is the center of the universe and all things revolve around the baby.

As humanity grew older it realized (or at least some of us realize) that the world does not revolve around us. But we, as the gods’ chosen, the divine, or that it’s just plain obvious… The rest of the galaxy must revolve around our planet. While we as individuals are not as important to have everything revolve around us, our planet must be overly important and therefore this reasoning - it still made us feel as though the galaxy still sort of revolved around us.

Growing even older we realized this falsehood and recognized that our planet is just 1 of several planets that revolve around the same sun. Oh well, perhaps we were trying to be too self important. Everything doesn’t revolve around our planet, but at least the rest of the galaxy revolves around our sun. Surely our solar system is the center of the galaxy.

And then as we grew even older still we come to find out how insignificant we truly are. Not only is our solar system not the center of the galaxy, but we’re way out in the fringe of a flailing arm of a whirlpool as the milky way galaxy spirals through it’s life. Oh well, at least ours is the only galaxy in the universe.

Oh, we’re not the only galaxy in the universe? Well, at least ours is the only universe…

Space and time continuum, multiple universes, multiple dimensions, etc.

Our dimension is supposedly just an accident that occurred when 2 other dimensions collided. And yet in this dimension, even with the few galaxies we’ve already discovered in our universe, I’m quite sure there are several more galaxies we’ve yet to discover and most probably several universes each with it’s own multiple galaxies within this sliver of a dimension.

Our sliver of a dimension is part of the circle of life and has meaning. It was born, it is consuming, it will die, and it will be consumed.

What people forget however is that the circle of life is also cyclical. Life requires the cycles of spring, summer, fall, and winter. Each year forms a circle and we’re back to where we started the year before. This cyclical is easy to see because it happens in a short enough period of time that our short lived memories can remember that this cycle does exist.

However, there are larger cycles that we don’t see or aren’t normally aware of. 100 year floods and 1,000 year floods are larger cycles, are very general approximations, and most of us may only live to see 1 of these. Halley’s Comet I saw when I was 11 years old (1986) and hope to see again when I’m 86 in 2061, a cycle of 75-76 years, which I will be very lucky if I’m able to share it again with my parents.

There are yet other cycles to our lives, some of which we don’t necessarily see as a complete circle, but may refer to as pendulums. There is still a cycle to these as they repeat and can be predicted. Some of these cycles are overly drastic to a point where they require a complete paradigm shift.

We are currently experiencing a drastic economic paradigm shift. People are panicking because their jobs, divinely handed to them by overly large corporations, are in jeopardy. When the age of Kings and Queens, who divinely handed out parcels of land and protected the peasants, came to an end people were panicking and rightly so. Such chaos and paranoia would follow in the wake of deposing a ruler (or the attempted deposing) that people would be killed simply because they were assumed to be associated in some way.

We’ve been living fat off the hog for the past 15 years (honestly, the dot bust was just a blip on the radar compared to the ’80s and what’s coming) that we’ve forgotten that we survived the ’80s. Many of us, me included, were still just kids and didn’t realize or understand the worries of the work force.

What will make this worse is that not only is this a cyclical down turn of the economy, but we are also facing a paradigm shift. And this will be a much larger paradigm shift than any we as humankind have seen in quite a while. As we’re already seeing there will be consolidation of giant corporations and many will collapse. What makes this frightening is that it will be on a massive scale and without government intervention will happen lightening fast. I’m guessing that the paradigm shift (or pendulum swing) that we are facing will be similar to the paradigm shift to industrialization.

On the downside, the longer we prolong this painful paradigm shift the more we bankrupt the very financiers that will help us get through this. Also, many of those whose companies would have closed down in the early days of this painful shift (rather than being postponed until the middle of it) will realize the shift is needed early and be able to act. Early innovation will make the paradigm shift shorter and less painful.

If we prolong these dying companies by trying to prop them up they will eventually close anyways. At which point we will have such a large influx of unemployed in the middle of this painful process causing an even larger drain on an artificially created situation of limited resources (money). The economic trickle will make it even harder, but never impossible, to get funding causing innovation to stagnate and the creation of new jobs will slow.

I hope you do not gather that I am predicting yet another Great Depression as I hope we do not fall that far. Where as with the Great Depression I see that giant corporations were few and far between as compared to today. During the Great Depression the average person had a mom and pop company - typically farming. The issue that made the Great Depression even more of a problem was a combination of famine causing farmers to be unable to pay bank loans followed by the banks foreclosing on these small business farms putting willing workers out of work. Thousands of these unemployed small business owners would converge on a single location that promised work for a small few.

Today the average person seems to work for a large over sized conglomeration or a medium to large sized business. I see this as an opportunity for all of those people who’ve been debating, thinking about, or wanting to start their own business, but didn’t think they were ready. They will now be put in a position of necessity and many will see no other option than to make the leap of faith in themselves and produce. We will be lucky in that what we are facing isn’t a famine of food, but a famine of money. This has been coming, we’ve seen the increase in start up home based businesses, and this has been predicted by several people.

The economic cycles are just yet another aspect of the circle of life.

• The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. by Albert Einstein - on quotedb.com
• PhilosophersNotes - Albert Einstein Quotes
• Quote Details: Plato: Necessity, who is the… - The Quotations Page

Many people were worried about Sun’s purchase of MySQL and what that would mean. MySQL is an open source database and is in use all over the internet. I was somewhat worried about where they might decide to push the commercial product as that somewhat leads the open source project.

I’m thinking Oracle is primarily purchasing Sun for their hardware, not for MySQL - MySQL is just a bonus. However, as someone else pointed out, Oracle hasn’t really been making anything new. Oracle has been buying out companies that make great 3rd party apps for Oracle, repackaging it with the Oracle brand, and selling as is - bugs and all.

<MinceR> maybe Oracle will beat some sense into Sun management

<MinceR> and i think it’s certainly better than IBM, Novell or m$ buying them

<Dot> that’s what i’m hoping too, oracle makes very professional programs… they are really worth

<Dot> even the free version of oracle 9.11g is impressive

<MinceR> afaik oracle makes crap

<Dot> why?

<MinceR> but then sun will be in good company

<MinceR> afaict all they were doing lately was buying third-parties developing new management tools for oracle and just bundling the new stuff

<MinceR> without integrating them in any way

<MinceR> so oracle is a mess

<Dot> apart MySQL and PostgreSQL, i don’t see any other good db system apart from oracle

There’s 3 ways I can see this going. The worst still doesn’t make MySQL go away simply because it’s open source and it’s license makes it impossible for it not to be branched and continued by the FOSS community.

1. Oracle takes Oracle off the market (at some point, probably not immediately), fully embraces MySQL, buys up companies making management software and resells that for MySQL - just like they’ve been doing with Oracle. I highly doubt this will happen, but it is possible.
2. Oracle accepts MySQL as it’s new red-headed step child and only offers it as a last resort. As it now also owns the commercial license for MySQL it will probably also cannibalize any useful parts of MySQL, that it legally can without having to worry about legal ramifications from the license, for use in Oracle.
3. Oracle continues to see MySQL as a competitor and does everything it can to squash it’s (Oracle’s) new product line. Oracle will refuse to give up the MySQL commercial license, refuse official support for clients, try to move existing commercial clients to Oracle, and generally be as much of a nuisance as possible to try to chase people away from using MySQL. While Oracle can’t kill MySQL outright, Oracle will do as much as possible to prevent anybody else from pushing MySQL forward.

Considering the current economy, Sun’s current position, and Oracle’s current position I think if Oracle decides to squash MySQL will be a good indicator as to when Oracle is going under.

While I’m not anti-Oracle (I am anti-Microsoft software and willing to admit it) I am somewhat worried about Oracle acquiring MySQL. Competition between database companies has been greatly beneficial to where databases are today and will be in the next couple of years. With 1 company owning 2 (not the only 2) of the most popular databases I’m worried that the innovation will slow.

My friend, Craig Fowler (aka ToreadorVampire), recently ran me through the process rather quickly… I didn’t have much time and he didn’t have anything really written up… It was a last minute discussion over IM and I thought it could help to at least get people pointed in the right direction.

There is some documentation up at videolan.org (Streaming HowTo/VLM - VideoLAN Wiki) that shows how to set VLC up to do the streaming, talks about the HTTP interface, etc, but isn’t an instant answer.

Here’s what Craig set up for /etc/init.d/vlc (modified slightly to fit the blog):

#!/bin/sh
STARTUP_COMMAND=/usr/local/bin/cvlc
PID_LOCATION=/var/run/vlc/vlc.pid
LOG_LOCATION=/var/log/vlc.log
CONFIG_LOCATION=/etc/vlc/vlm.conf

case $1 in
    start)
        if [ ! -f $PID_LOCATION  ]; then
            start-stop-daemon --pidfile $PID_LOCATION \
                --chuid vlc --exec $STARTUP_COMMAND \
                --start -- --vlm-conf $CONFIG_LOCATION \
                --file-logging --logfile $LOG_LOCATION \
                --quiet --daemon --pidfile $PID_LOCATION
        fi
        ;;
    stop)
        if [ -f $PID_LOCATION ]; then
            start-stop-daemon --pidfile $PID_LOCATION \
                --stop --signal 15
        fi
        ;;
    restart)
        if [ -f $PID_LOCATION ]; then
            start-stop-daemon --pidfile $PID_LOCATION \
                --stop
        fi
        start-stop-daemon --pidfile $PID_LOCATION \
            --chuid vlc --exec $STARTUP_COMMAND \
            --start -- --vlm-conf $CONFIG_LOCATION \
            --file-logging --logfile $LOG_LOCATION \
            --quiet --daemon --pidfile $PID_LOCATION
        ;;
esac

Here’s what he set up for /etc/vlc/vlm.conf (also slightly modified for blog):

# VLM Config file, used to configure automated streams

# ====================================================================
# Someone's webcams

# --------------------------------------------------------------------
# Camera 2

# For reference, the original VLC command to stream from this camera
# vlc "http://username:pass@webcam.example.com/nphMotionJpeg?Resolution=320x240&Quality=Standard"
# --sout "#transcode{vcodec=FLV1,acodec=mp3,sameplerate=44100}:std{access=http{mime=video/x-flv},mux=ffmpeg{mux=flv},dst=0.0.0.0:8081/stream.flv}" --noaudio

new camNumber2 broadcast enabled
setup camNumber2 input http://username:pass@webcam.example.com/nphMotionJpeg?Resolution=320x240&Quality=Standard
setup camNumber2 output #transcode{vcodec=FLV1}:std{access=http{mime=video/x-flv},mux=ffmpeg{mux=flv},dst=127.0.0.1:8081/directory/camera2.flv}
setup camNumber2 loop
control camNumber2 play
# --------------------------------------------------------------------
# ====================================================================

The URLs /nphMotionJpeg etc are just specific to the HTTP stream I was connecting to (in that instance motion JPEG)

The “setup camNumber2 loop” line tells VLC that if the origin stream goes down or it loses its connection, it should just keep trying to reconnect

The output line is obviously telling it to convert to FLV, and make the result stream available at http://127.0.0.1:8081/directory/camera2.flv

I then used some mod_rewrite magic to proxy http://bsgc.co.uk/webcam-streams/ to http://127.0.0.1:8081/directory/

If this is missing anything I’ll try to get more info up later, but for now it should get anybody interested in this a good start.

Sure, growing up we went through a couple of VW Vanagons and we’d get a wave every once in a while when we were out on vacation… In almost any car driving down back roads running into the occasional farmer will yield a wave or a hat off. The only other recognition I think I’ve gotten from other people as I’m driving down the road is when I had my really sad and pathetic ‘95 Saturn S-1 - people had a tendancy to give me the finger <sarcasm>telling me I was #1</sarcasm>.

I think about 80% of the other Mini Cooper drivers I’ve come across have waved or nodded at me… After realizing it wasn’t because they thought they knew me, I’ve started waving back. I’ve not waved at people since… well, as a kid in the back of the Vanagon when I’d also pump my arm at tractor trailer rigs to get them to blow their horns.

This is the first time my sister has stated she wanted to get a car like what I bought (even though she also got a Cavalier after I had had 1).

This is the first time I’ve had people at work and at parties say they’ve been looking at the kind of car I have and want a test drive.

While not the first time I’ve had multiple conversations with the person in the drive-thru window it is the first time I’ve had them about a car.

It’s the first time the mechanics at the garage I’ve taken all my cars to have been overly excited at looking at a new car and had yet to do maintenance on any.

It’s the first time I keep getting asked by people I see fairly regularly if I still like my new car… Which is funny, because…

This is the first car I’ve had where the more I drive it the more I like… Let’s do that again!

For testing a car’s reflexes I like driving it southbound through Meyer’s Circle (Meyer Circle Fountain - flickr | kcphotos.com | Google Maps). It’s a non-normal traffic circle as traffic entering the circle from a street other than Ward Parkway must stop before it can enter the circle. Ward Parkway has 3 northbound through lanes and 3 southbound through lanes - and so it has quite the curve to the traffic circle. Ward Parkway has a posted speed limit of 35mph and the circle has a warning speed of 25mph, but I think rush hour is lucky to get through it at 20mph. During good weather conditions the best test is to start at a complete stop at 63rd Street (the block just north of the circle) and when the light turns green floor the gas pedal, take a hard cut to the right into the turn so the turn back to the left and straightening out is much easier… I’ve been able to do this at at least 40mph in every car I’ve had (the ‘85 Chevy Blazer was the hardest and the 2-door ‘97 Chevy Cavalier & ‘98 Honda Civic I could get up to 45mph)… This is the first time I’ve hit 50mph easily and I actually feel bad about it because I’m worried the cops will pull me over.

This is the first time I’ve even looked at joining a car group of some kind (I’ve been looking on facebook and added Mini Coopers to my meetup interests).

Due to looking at the car groups and the members apparent need to name their cars… Not to be left out of the nutcase bunch I’m thinking I may need to name my car as well, but I’m not sure what to name it… Oh the peer pressure.

Also, I’ve yet to find another Mini Cooper, at least in the Kansas City area, that has the same color scheme as mine. There are plenty of grey Mini Coopers, but I’m not sure I’ve even seen any silver Mini Cooper… Not to mention a silver with 2 black racing stripes on both the engine hood and the roof… Oh and the racing stripes on mine are straight on the hood rather than curved or angled.

Keep waving o/

Somebody posted a link in IRC to this very long screenshot of the Bohemian Rhapsody with each user posting a single line… Geeze, the things that take talent and social engineering these days…

Shortly after seeing that I saw an email a friend of mine sent. I’m not sure which is more amusing… The video of the 7 year old boy after visiting the dentist or the Chad parody (as in Chad Vader)…

I was somewhat disappointed after having just seen the Bohemian Rhapsody lyrics… When the kid asks, is this real life?, I wanted to hear the rest of the song from both the kid and Chad. Oh well… at least it’s better than getting Rickrolled.