hacker class

Organic Black Beans

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 20:24:00 +0000

With salsa, garlic, and a tomato mixed in. Steamed green beans on the side.

Nice video summary of the MaiTai Kite Camp 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 17:02:00 +0000

2011 MaiTai Highlights from Susi Mai on Vimeo.

I didn't make the video, but it brings back great memories....

Foscam Night Vision

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 11:14:00 +0000

Daytime shot.

The Foscam FI8905W is an inexpensive outdoor IP camera with night vision. These shots were taken vi the Sensr.net site. You can learn how to use this Foscam with Sensr.net, (a cloud based IP camera monitoring service) by reading How To Configure a Foscam FI8905w. The drawback to this camera is that the colors are slightly off when viewing it in the daytime.

Pitch dark shot.

Blush Yogurt Camera

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 01:04:00 +0000

The Blush Organic Yogurt shop around the corner from the Sensr.net office in Burlingame now has a camera. This is a D-Link DCS-930L, which is pretty easy to setup.

Miami Beach Camera

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 22:25:00 +0000

We had a nice trip to Miami Beach over Spring Break. I took a DCS-932L with me and set it up near the water. One of the fun clips I found was this one. Ah, fond memories!

Gestures for Gmail

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 14:49:00 +0000

I've blogged about gestures before. Here's the latest news from the Gmail team where they are integrating gestures with gmail.

These guys seem to announce really cool stuff at the beginning of April. Go Google!

Ant Farm Embed

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 21:56:00 +0000

Here's a live view of Jared's Ant Farm. The guys have been busy!

Innovator: Adam Beguelin

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 02:40:00 +0000

Business Week just did a really nice article on me. We have a lot of cameras around the office, so some of the more interesting ones made it into the photo shoot.

If you have an IP camera, check out sensr.net for all your camera monitoring and socializing needs.

Capistrano and awk

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 17:21:00 +0000

I was trying to use the cap invoke pattern and couldn't get it to work with awk.

$ cap HOSTS=user@server invoke COMMAND="awk '/PORT/ {print $8}' /var/log/ftp.log"

Turns out you need to escape the $8. The correct form is:

$ cap HOSTS=user@server invoke COMMAND="awk '/PORT/ {print \$8}' /var/log/ftp.log"

Note the backslash before the dollar sign. Even though there are quotes, the $8 get's lost somewhere along the line.

In the first case cap output looks like this:
* executing "awk '/PORT/ {print }' /var/log/ftpd.log "

and in the second case:
* executing "awk '/PORT/ {print $8}' /var/log/ftpd.log "

Hope this helps!

Tesla Plug Won't Work

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 01:17:00 +0000

Ran into this plug in the public garage recently.

git broken after snow leopard upgrade

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 14:56:00 +0000

I was trying to check in some code after upgrading my MacBook Pro to Snow Leopard and realized git wasn't working.

Here's how I fixed it:

Download MacPorts for Snow Leopard and install it.

Use MacPorts to install it


$ sudo port selfupdate
$ sudo port install git-core +svn

For more installing git on OSX see http://help.github.com/mac-git-installation/

View Sensr Cams with iPhone App

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 19:10:00 +0000

A friend of mine showed me the Live Cams app for iPhone and iPad today. It let's you view live webcams from your iPhone. There are a few other apps out there that let you watch cameras, but Live Cams seems to be unique in that it also lets you view your private IP cameras as well. When I saw this I realized that there should be a way to view Sensr cameras with this app.

Warning: Complicated setup ahead.

Basically Live Cams will view any motion JPEG stream. On the Sensr site we also generate motion JPEG streams for cameras. It's a bit hidden, but we could easily expose this in the future to make this easier. For now, go to the "View Live Stream" link for a camera. This pops up a window and sends a motion JPEG stream. If you right-click on that window and select View Source, you'll be able to find the stream url. In this example it looks like this:

http://f2.sensr.net/stream/8fdab6c1ea27828b5185704622b7b0838bcbb7ce

If you grab the stream URL from the source, you can then use that URL to add a private camera in Live Cams, allowing you to get a live view of your Sensr camera on the iPhone. Since the URL is difficult to type, you might want to email it to yourself so you can cut and paste it on the iPhone. (I warned you that it was complicated!)

This is a hack right now, but there are things we can do make this easier in the future.

Expose the stream urls in the web page
Convince Live Cams to use our API, letting the user add Sensr cameras easily

The advantage of using Sensr is that the user doesn't need to punch holes in their firewall. The user also gets archiving, sharing, and alerting on the Sensr site. Eventually it would be nice to integrate those into an iPhone app as well at some point.

Two Blue Tesla Roadsters

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 22:13:00 +0000

Cheap Wireless Network Camera

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 20:56:00 +0000

I've been using this wireless network camera for about a year now. It's a Planex CS-W04G

At about $51 on Amazon, it's the cheapest wireless network camera that I've been able to find. For some reason the tag line is Designed in Japan, which I find cute.

It also works great with sensr.net via the built in FTP functionality.

Here's a sample image from mine under relatively low light conditions, about an hour before sunset with east facing windows.

Recursive Live View

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 18:43:00 +0000

I added a sensr.net camera at the Sunfire Offices yesterday. One of my enterprising office mates thought it would be fun to feed the live view of the camera back into the camera.

Nice.

Motion Sensitivity for sensr.net

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 18:22:00 +0000

When adding a camera to sensr.net you can adjust the sensitivity of the motion detection on a scale of 1-10, where 10 is most sensitive. This value defaults to 5, which works pretty well for most cameras. If you change the setting to make the motion detection more sensitive, then it you may end up storing a lot of redundant images.

Let's think about this for a second. At first you might think that more sensitive is better. After all, you don't want to miss that motion. However, most cameras have some degree of noise in the image. This means that at even if nothing is going on, the images may still differ significantly from one frame to the next. Most motion detection, including ours, deals with this kind of randomness. However, if you crank up the sensitivity, you'll still run into this issue.

Ideally, you'll want the motion detection to trigger when there is significant motion. In other words, when something interesting is going on. After all, you don't want to spend hours looking to lots of boring images. What you really want is to know when something interesting is happening or has happened.

There is another issue to keep in mind, we do impose quotas on the number of images that we'll store per hour. Right now we limit it to about 600 per hour. (It's a soft limit, so sometimes you'll get more...) This means that if your camera setting is too sensitive, you'll waste your quota on lots of almost identical images, and when that raccoon walks through the office, you might miss it.

If you're getting too many images (also known as false positives) from your sensr.net camera, click on the edit tab and adjust the senstitivy settings under advanced settings. I've found that for cheap cameras under low light conditions, the setting of 3 works pretty well.

sensr.net cameras from 31 timezones

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:21:00 +0000

I noticed we got a new camera from Jakarta recently. This made me curious as to where our cameras are located. When a user adds a camera to sensr.net, they can set the timezone. This allows us to show nice daily views of what's happening on their camera, as shown above.

I ran the following SQL command and you can see that we currently cover 31 time zones, including our new friend in Jakarta. Nice!


mysql> select distinct( time_zone ) from cameras 
              order by time_zone;
+-----------------------------+
| time_zone                   |
+-----------------------------+
| Abu Dhabi                   |
| Alaska                      |
| Amsterdam                   |
| Arizona                     |
| Bangkok                     |
| Berlin                      |
| Bern                        |
| Brasilia                    |
| Canberra                    |
| Casablanca                  |
| Central Time (US & Canada)  |
| Chennai                     |
| Eastern Time (US & Canada)  |
| Hanoi                       |
| Harare                      |
| Hawaii                      |
| Jakarta                     |
| Krasnoyarsk                 |
| Kuala Lumpur                |
| Kyev                        |
| Lisbon                      |
| London                      |
| Minsk                       |
| Mountain Time (US & Canada) |
| Pacific Time (US & Canada)  |
| Paris                       |
| Riyadh                      |
| Rome                        |
| Singapore                   |
| St. Petersburg              |
| UTC                         |
+-----------------------------+
31 rows in set (0.00 sec)

$1 Billion DIY Video Surveillance Camera Market

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:56:00 +0000

These guys are predicting a $1 Billion market for DIY network cameras by 2012. That works out to about 10 million cameras per year, if you assume the cameras cost about $100 each.

Gosh, sure would be nice if someone built a cloud based service that would leverage all those cameras. Wait, that's what sensr.net is about.

Got a network camera? Try sensr.net. We provide sharing, archiving, and alerting for your network camera. We support almost any brand of network camera. As long as the camera has FTP, it will work with our cloud based service.

Configuring the Cisco WVC80N on Sensr

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 00:13:00 +0000

[Note: an updated version of this blog with more details can be found on the sensr.net blog.]

I recently found the Cisco WVC80N for sale at Best Buy. I was visiting my relatives in the Midwest and hoping to buy a camera that I could configure for them with sensr.net. To use network cameras with Sensr, you need one that supports FTP. I was disappointed to find that FTP was not listed on the side of the box. Since this was the only network camera they had, and the store was closing in 10 minutes, I did a quick search from my iPhone and found this FAQ, indicating that indeed the camera will support FTP.

I went ahead and bought the camera. It was a bit pricey at $150 but I figured that if it didn't work, I could return it the next day. Best Buy has a pretty decent return policy. In this case that worked in their favor, as I'm sure it does many times.

As with many of these network cameras, the setup software only works on Windows. If you have a Mac or Linux, you'll have to forgo the software install, which in my opinion is probably a good thing. There is no reason you should need to install software on your PC to setup or use a network camera.

So a couple of things I learned. First, by default, the camera will grab an IP address over the ethernet using DHCP. This is pretty standard. The trick with these cameras is to find the IP address that your router gives out. The above mentioned FAQ also says the default IP is 192.168.1.100. This is NOT the case if your network has DHCP, which is probably the case. I found the IP address by looking at the clients table on the home network's router.

The second thing I learned was that the camera doesn't support timed FTP. This means you can't simply have the camera FTP images every second, which is the way I like to setup cameras on sensr.net. As a work around, I turned on Motion Detection for the camera and told it to FTP the images to sensr.net. I then set the motion detection level as sensitive as possible. Unfortunately to set the overall sensitivity, you need to use Internet Explorer, since that configuration is set using an Active X control. Yuck!

The advantage of having Sensr, rather than the camera, do the motion detection, is that the live views are much more interesting. If your camera only sends images to Sensr when there is motion, the Live Preview links from the sensr.net site won't be very interesting.

Sensr does support camera based motion detection. Basically this means motion detection on the sensr.net site is turned off, and we'll assume every image coming from your camera should be saved. (We still have limits on the number of images we'll save, currently 600 per hour.)

Overall I would not recommend the WVC80N. My main gripes are:

Lack of timed FTP uploads
Active X is required for the web configuration
Too expensive

You would be better off buying the Dlink DCS-920 which works well with Sensr and is considerably cheaper.

Barbie Cam

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:31:00 +0000

Looks like you can now get Barbie with a built in camera. The camera isn't connected to the net and it only stores about 30 minutes of web quality video. This means we don't support it on sensr.net.

There is a USB connector so maybe you can hack it to be a live webcam, which we do support. :-)

Can't FTP from IP Camera

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 02:42:00 +0000

At sensr.net we provide free FTP logins for people with network cameras. A common problem is that IP cameras, like the DCS-920, can't always do DNS. This means that the camera can have problems reaching our servers, say f3.sensr.net, since it can't find the IP address for the FTP server.

The best way to fix this is to set a DNS server in your camera's network settings page. You can either dig out the DNS settings for your ISP, or you can simply use 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. These servers are the DNS servers from OpenDNS, another favorite startup of mine.

Eventually we'll have better realtime support to help you debug your FTP server settings. In the meantime, check those DNS server settings!

Wow, 10 years of beguelin.com

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 01:58:00 +0000

Back in 2000 I registered the domain name beguelin.com for 10 years. It expired this month and I had to renew it again. Network Solutions sent me a letter in the mail since the old Yahoo email address they had on file for me didn't work anymore.

A lot has changed in the last 10 years. It almost hurts my brain to think about it. In fact most of it is so personal, I don't feel right blogging about it.

I do remember getting a call back in 2000 from the folks at Henry Beguelin, they wanted to buy the domain. Frankly, I might have been willing to sell it to them. I told them to make me an offer, but they decided to go with henrybeguelin.com instead. I still haven't gotten around to buying a pair of Henry Beguelin shoes. It would be nice to have a pair.

The domain renewal went through, even though I accidentally let it expire. Email that was stuck in limbo has started coming through and the blog is back online. Apparently all is well in domain registration land.

I decided to renew the domain for 20 years this time. I can't even imagine what I'll be blogging about in 2030. Maybe I'll be concerned about social security. Either that or where to park my nuclear powered flying electric car.

sensr.net now supporting kyivstar sms

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 22:36:00 +0000

At sensr.net we received a request from one of our Ukrainian users asking us to support SMS for his local phone carrier. Luckily we're using a package called sms-fu that makes adding carriers very easy.

Our sms_fu.yml file now has these additional lines, which means our users can select the appropriate Kyivstar email to SMS gateway.

kyivstar-contract:
 name: Kyivstar (contract)
 value: @sms.kyivstar.net
kyivstar-prepaid:
 name: Kyivstar (prepaid)
 value: @2sms.kyivstar.net

Of course nothing is as simple as you might expect. We were checking numbers on the user's settings page to make sure the number was legit. Unfortunately, the site was enforcing a US centric format, 212-555-1234. I tried to add a Ukrainian format number and our site rejected it. After changing the model verifier to be more liberal, we then ran our unit tests and found that a few of them failed. We then modified the tests to match the new more liberal phone number format and all is well.

Give sensr.net a try. You can use us to archive, alert, and share your network cameras. Now even from the Ukraine!

Quicktime Screen Recording

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 16:30:00 +0000

Quicktime (version 10.0) on Snow Leopard makes it crazy easy to create screencasts. I was playing with the experimental DVR view on sensr.net this morning and thought it would be cool to be able to screencast it.

If you have a Mac running Snow Leopard (aka 10.6), just run Quicktime and select New Screen Recording from the menu. It will even directly upload the video to YouTube for you.

Here's the screencast I made. It shows the DVR view. You can select a time period and then play all the images from that time period. Go to sensr.net and try it out for yourself. More on sensr.net later.

Tahoe Rim Trail

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 22:52:00 +0000

8,791 feet and 4.9 miles south of Spooner Summit. First time ride for
me.