The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Thursday, February 10, 2000

“I'm fooling you and you don't like it!”

So, I'm searching through the www.spc.org website when I come to this lovely page with one of those stereograms. I have no problem in seeing the item inside the picture, but I don't think I see it “correctly” so to speak. I say that because while the object (in this case, a jack) does pop out, the parts that pop out are popped inward, not outward. For example, if the object is supposed to be a ball floating off the page, I see the object floating, but I see it as a bowl, not a ball. It's definitely a wierd experience.

I suspect that I see these objects “inside-out” (for lack of a better term) because my left eye is dominant (I'm lefthanded, by the way) wereas most people are right-eye dominant.

You can easily test this by holding your hands out in front of you, at arm's length, using your fingers to make a hole to view through. Focus on an object that's about 20 feet away (or further). Now, close one eye. If you can still see the object, that is your dominant eye (or conversely, if you can't see it, then your other eye is dominant).


Cheeeeeeeeese!

Well, Mark finally got his webcam going, completely under Linux.

Earlier today we talked and he was wondering how to get the images up to the server. He didn't want to use FTP as it seems that no one can actually write a version that isn't Swiss Cheese, nor did he want to use scp as that would require him manually typing in a password, or leaving one around in a script on his box.

I offered to write some programs, a client on his end, a server on the server end here that does nothing but copy the image up. Simple enough in theory.

But the details get pretty gory pretty quickly.

But then it hit me—he's running a webserver on his end. Easy enough to have the camera software dump the picture into a web-accessable place on his box, then have the server here use wget to download the image.

The hard part came in configuring Apache.

Problem one: restrict access on his side. Seems to be broken somewhat on his side. Might be a 1.3.3 problem. We're still working on this.

Problem two: Content expiry on the server side. Fixed after some experimentation. In the webpage he has:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="60">

And in an .htaccess file he has:

ExpiresActive	On
ExpiresDefault	A60
ExpiresByType	image/jpg	A60

And that seems to do the proper job.

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[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]

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