AltME groups: search

We wanted ti patent our CCD camera ethernet interface, but we were 
adiced to not to do so, because even if there would be some patent 
violation, you have to start court case in the given country, and 
we would have to be really rich, to affort that ...

There are soooooooooooooo many subtle issues with the web.  I'm playing 
with an internet camera right now, I get such odd results from it.

Here's a bug, at least in the Linux version of the new AltME. I tried 
to upload some photos from a camera application, with names like 
DSC0123.JPG. Instead, AltME created extra files DSC0123.jpg with 
zero length and uploaded those

Look.. here's  what I'm trying to build with Rebol   http://www.uniformserver.com/
 

a fully powered webserver you can take with you on a USB Stick or 
even your camera's flash drive.

there are three button mice, but they are seldom used by non-3d artists. 
 in 3d XYZ,  Scare RotateTranslate, camera Tilt -Orient-Pan  all 
map so cleanly to 3 buttons.

In dialects, it is possible to order things as you wish.  In filtered-import.r, 
a rule can be followed by a condition message:

foo: integer! else "Not an integer!"


But that is limited to dialects.  In Rebol proper, you'd be limited 
to:

while [camera/memory-available?][capture-image]
or
until [capture-image camera/memory-full?]

until [capture-image camera/memory-full?] -- is an awkward construct.

REBOL: while [camera/memory-available?][capture-image]

RUBY:    def go_crazy capture_image until @camera.memory_card_full? 
end

To be fair:

REBOL: while [camera/memory-available?][capture-image]
RUBY:     capture_image until @camera.memory_card_full?

Or:

REBOL: while [not camera/memory-card-full?][capture-image]
RUBY:   capture_image until @camera.memory_card_full?

Yes, I was thinking I'd try filming it with my camera next.  (--> 
Dinner time)

On my laptop .... I would gues about 5 frames a second ..... depending 
on how near the surface is to the camera.

Hi ... I have following task to acomplish ..... my friend who is 
doing college in archeology, is working on her thesis. Part of the 
thesis are images of various ancient goods. So we've got photos from 
our digital camera. I will produce small View script, which will 
allow her to enter comments for each image. Now I want to do a template 
(table?), with various layouts, mainly two images per A4 page plus 
comments under each of those images. Can I influence table cell size? 
My past experience was, that the cell got resized according to image. 
Are there also various methods, how to "stretch" the image in cell? 
thanks a lot for pointers ...

Many of the problems arise, because designers/developers/programmers 
try to make html do, what it wasn't supposed to do in the first place.


When making a movie, one might start out by drawing a storyboard. 
Later in the process, a camera is used to shoot some film, and in 
the end a story is told, that may or may not be close to the original 
storyboard. But it works, because the final output (images within 
a frame) is the same kind of thoughts that goes into creating the 
storyboard (images within a frame).


Designers think in the line of the final output, but html isn't wysiwyg, 
and the html technology might not be well suited for the ideas, the 
designer has. So problems arise. ... Or something. ;-)

i wanted to record to tape too, however that would mean changing 
the tape every 60 min, i.e. stopping the stream every 60 mins. if 
we manage to have two cameras this time, we won't have this problem. 
i'll record to tape and another camera will be used for the stream.

also, while the stream camera would mainly point to the screen, the 
recording camera would point mainly to the speaker, since with minimal 
editing you can just make a screenshot of the slides and insert them 
in the video at the appropriate places.

As I said the problems we have last time were not related to our 
broadcasting or encoding format. It was due to our physical instruments 
(camaras, mics, and camera man).

I'm for sure not the best camera man. Setting the QT stuff was straight 
forward, but the decision goes to Gabriele. He may have access to 
more PCs than Macs. But I know *Will* has offer to setup the QT broadcasting 
stuff.

we had two problems with QT last year: first one, on the first speech 
the audio codec was not set up correctly. this was fixed later on. 
second, we had to resort using the mic on the camera (which is a 
cheap camera after all...), and of course the lighting in the room 
was not good at all for a camera (it was dark to allow us to see 
the slides)

if Jaime can bring his laptop this year too, i think we can still 
use QT as it was already proven to work. also, if we manage to have 
a second camera, i'd like to have a high quality recording (on tape 
maybe) that can be encoded later for best quality.

I only brought 1 tripod, and I should have brought 2.  So the camera 
I had, I had to hand-hold, and with the Hotel coffee, my hands were 
shakey...;-)

battery is discharging on the camera. need to attach it to power 
line.

from a DV (firewire camera) source the only thing working out of 
the box is QT on MacOS

Try focusing the camera on the poster. From far it should reflect 
what people will see when focusing on the projector.

yeksoon: yes there will, i plan to have it "public" as soon as the 
conference start. i will continue doing tests in the next few days. 
i also found a P2P video streaming solution (SopCast), but it is 
only available on windows and i haven't had any chance to test it 
with my camera yet.

nope, same camera.

except for sound and camera, this could be done easily in REBOL

But that's the point, we need sound and camera, and better platform 
integration

Then I got also 3 quicktimes from the QA round after the devcon before 
the banquet, question is whether somebody is interested in them, 
so they might be uploaded somewhere as well. Just to note, that they're 
not especially good (just from my digital camera) and don't contain 
directly a lot of footage to be able to understand what has been 
talked about. More or less my girlfriend taking some videos from 
the people. ?!

cheap digital camera (samsung vp-d101), Apple's iMovie for editing 
and encoding.

The camera man whas drunk ? ;-) Reichart it whas realy cool, i can't 
watched all the videos today but i'will download them later

you know, when we originally developed high-end astronomy CCD camera, 
it returns you per-pixel value of 1 to 65535, according of how much 
current counts in the individual pixels ... you ten need to convert 
it to image, so you have to get minimu,maximum, and divide it into 
256 zones .... when I did it using plain rebol, it was painfully 
slow. Imagine having lucrative in-camera ethernet + ip, downloading 
image using rebol in 1 sec or so, and then waiting 19 secs tojust 
view the image :-) If we would do this device nowadays, with Rebcode, 
I believe I would not hesistate to use rebol for all operations ....

even big SBIG used parallel port back in the time we used ethernet. 
The sad thing is - no money, no music ... 4 ppl working part-time 
can't beat 80 full-time workers. But we did, for ourselves - I have 
our camera in my table ;-) And we build quite a few telescopes - 
REBOL is COOL for astronomy - dialects etc. wow ... the thing is, 
if it would be adopted ....

Cool: IMHO the priority should be on moving camera now. And some 
support for collisions, maybe only in 2d-space. Idea: some kind of 
3d-icons. I can live with colored pyramids and some text, but i need 
to move.

Volker: there's camera code, but there's probably bug in invert matrix 
function so the camera does not work right now. I'm trying to find 
some informations on that topic and to fix it.

Just a small update: I've fixed matrix inversion so it's possible 
to move camera now. It's not possible to rotate camera but I'm working 
on it.

I am not sure it is true anymore, but we noticed it developing our 
ccd camera few years ago ... OS simply waits with ACK defined period 
of time or simply to receive second packet, then it confirm both 
.... Ethereal will give you an answer :-)

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/<--- very interesting 
camera: take a picture, then choose the focus you want in the image.

Of note, about 20 years ago I wrote up a paper to build a camera 
with a 100x100 CCD that could capture huge images by vibrating the 
aperture (which would be small than a standard pin hole).  The speed 
of your CPU would control the time it took, thus faster computers 
= higher ISO values, that simple.


You would also be able to point it at something far away, and tell 
it to focus on that region, thus getting a clear image even at a 
very far distance.


This is still worth building today.  A $10 camera that takes 10Kx10K 
image in about 1 second, not bad.  Through software you could remove 
things that moved as well, for example cars that park over night, 
people walking around, etc.  Over several days you would end up with 
a crystal clear image of anything that was not moving.

Yes, death of kodachrome is terrible. I've just ordered the last 
5 Kodachrome 64 films from the danish Kodak company. I hope, they 
get more before end of year, where it's finito. I plan to take a 
lot of time off to go and take photos with this film in the autumn. 
Next year I may end up selling my film camera and go with digital. 
Nah, probably not. ;-)

then you could use a combination of motion, pressure, touch points, 
camera input, mic input to invoke all kinds of complex actions with 
combination "hotkeys"

I would think that you could do some pretty accurate distance measurements 
using a combination motion tracking and camera

it does not seem powerful enough to replacy typing... but, it would 
be interesting to have that device on while you type / user the mouse 
and let the computer "learn" and see how much it can predict. if 
you also process what's coming from the camera and microphone maybe 
we can get something useful. probably needs much faster computers 
to do all that though.

It is interesting watching someone REALLY use a tablet for "work". 
 One of my lawyers has had an iPad for a while.  I have been telling 
him he can use it with Qtask in a really powerful way, and he finally 
took the 3 minutes that was required to make his life easier.  We 
installed http://readdle.com/(I have been talking to the lead programmer 
for about a year now), and signed into Qtask with it.


Now he can see all his matters, download (and they made it about 
x4 faster than Windows), and now mark up docs, save to Qtask through 
WebDAV.

I personally sitll have no use for a tablet, and I have an iPad which 
I'm about to sell because I simply don't use it.


For me to really use a Tablet I want forward/backwards camera,  10+ 
battery life, G3 and G4 wireless,  an OS that allows me to get to 
the files and Flash.  

(in fact, I''m reminded of how much I hate the iPad and my iPhone 
again LOL).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GhNXHCQGsM

An open source camera based object tracking system.

lol, we should ask carl to keep a video camera in is studio maybe 
;)

yess I did, but in this case, the goal is to do interactive AGG manipulation 
of one image at a time and stamp it on a layered composition.  by 
the time I load the third image (from a digital camera at 7.1 MPixel), 
rebol crashes  :-(

the image there was loaded off a camera

i think i will be bringing my camera, and i can shoot some videos, 
not sure i'll have the time to edit and publish them immediately 
though. i hope the organization didn't forget about creating videos 
:)

Camera's on it's side.. that nice.. can lie on the couch and watch 
;) (after midnight here)

downloading my video from the camera...

I have a really cool Logitech camera that tracks faces, all seemed 
good (and I use it all the time), but this time it all froze up.

Have them turn the video camera towards the room (people)

camera wobblies

Choppy video plus someones hand infront of camera = scary image ;)

Is that the camera ?

it looks like camera is trying to focus?

there was a camera this morning so the morning sessions are recorded

nenad is telling me there is a camera for recordinng

That one camera pan is shorting out a cable...

could the camera be kept on the screen and whiteboard?

Yes, camera on the screen/whiteboard is better than viewing that 
white jet engine at the right. Please! :-)

Could we have the camera on the screen/whiteboard, please!?

the camera operator is not on altme :)

Cannon fodder? camera hit?^^

hey, I just eat too, so carefull with the camera :-)

Sunanda - OK ... you know, we are eager for more info. I really thought 
Carl's slides will be released ;-) The camera is fine, but maybe 
I would prefer it zoomed on the slides to be able to read it, and 
to "just" hear Carl's voice in the background ...

See correct....I have not connected teh camera

Yeah, point the camera correclty.

ah, camera refocusing once again ...

camera is trying to focus

that must be some cheap shitty camera - we need Axis :-)

camera left plese

Why isn't the camera on the screen??

graham, AFAIK the show is being recorded with another camera right 
next to this one

dockimbel, right. there's no room for a camera crane in there

btw. did anyone bring a camera to take pictures at the devcon? would 
make good press stuff.

Time to point the camera at teh screen a littel.

sadly camera man not on altme so cannot respond to requests.

camera man says it won't focus

How about Max stand next to the screen ... and the camera can focus 
on Max and capture the screen as well??

I guess you can't focus a camera on Glass

Can someone try and get the camera to work in the lunch break guys???

Graham, the camera guy does not speak english and is not online on 
AltME. I don't even know whether he is communicating with the rest 
of the team :-)

someone slip in and focus the camera for them

ladislav, sorry to hear that. it was a bit difficult to make out 
what you said, and it didn't help that the camera hardly ever pointed 
at the screen.

somebodydaid there was an iSight (apple) camera next to the stream 
camera.

maxim, here's a good camera to use: http://www.red.com/

my god that camera is a BEAST !!!  12 MPx  at 60 fps (60 FULL frames 
and in 12 bit RAW / per channel )

yes, it's a pretty crazy camera. digital cinema photography is finally 
growing up.

I mean the camera's POV should alway be pointing outward of the planet.

I'll second that Peter Wood chair an in camera session.

I invite all members of user.r to an in-camera meeting of user.r 
to be held in the private group "user.r in camera"

I suspect in exchange of a REAL devcon, most of us would be apt for 
a virtual one.  We need a GOOD way to allow one person to control 
a camera, and voice, and for others to be able to ask questions. 
 THen pass the cam on.

Hi James,


I've got 20 rooms set up already that I use to do live online music 
lessons on a daily basis.  I think the existing format of those rooms 
could work very well as they stand.  I'll create a special room just 
for Rebol Devcon.  I'd like to show you what I've got, to see if 
it'd work for your needs.  The audio/video conference software works 
on PC/Mac/Linux, in any browser that has a fairly recent version 
of the flash plugin installed (I believe version 6 onward will work 
- 8+ will definitely work).  Aside from flash, there's no installation 
required to use the system - just go to the designated web page. 
 It will allow anyone in the room to take turns jumping onto the 
mic/camera to speak (admin can ban unwanted users), there's a text 
chat, and I've got a really simple way of sharing screen shots already 
installed in the existing room setup.  It should take only a minute 
or 2 to show presenters how it works...


I've being doing daily live online music lessons as a part of my 
commercial music lesson business for the past 4.5 years, and this 
system is the most stable and simple that I'm aware of.  It'll work 
through just about any router/firewall configuration, and it's dead 
simple to use - visitors just go the url, and they'll hear and see 
the speaker.  If they want to be seen on camera and speak, they just 
need to have a web cam and microphone installed and working.  If 
flash is running in the browser, it'll work immediately, no download 
or installs to do.


There's a video that I send to students which explains a little about 
it:  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sx5qI0GWig


The online lesson page for my business, which has basic info about 
web cams, microphones, and headphones, is here:

http://rockfactory.us/OnlineLessons.html

Please let me know if you have any questions :)


> If someone will email me personally, I can start putting together 
some 

> suggestions about how to organize and manage the presentation. 
 I need

> to get an idea of what sort of software components will be needed: 

> white board, text chat, file sharing, 1-to-many/many-to-many video 

> conferencing, etc...  I'd also need to get a close estimate beforehand

> of the number of people attending, to make sure I prepare enough 

> bandwidth and available connections for the live event (If you'd 
like,

> I've got a little Rebol sign-up script that I use in my business 
to 

> let people sign up for events, you're welcome to use that if you'd 

> like, to help organize things).  Please let me know whenever you 
get a 
> chance!
>
> - Nick Antonaccoio

Good to see him on camera today.

Thanks to everyone who made DevCon2008 a reality.
****
A couple of follow-up points:


-- How about doing an eDevCon twice a year, whether or not there 
is a physical one too.

-- And plenty more notice so some Devolunteers can help with with 
set-up and promotion.


-- Chris's presentation would have seriously benefited from some 
sort of screen reader / whiteboard system....A camera pointing at 
the screen was not ideal.

May have slipped off on the 'Live' group, but Nick suggested a screen-capture-as-a-camera-source 
product for Linux and Windows (though I used a Mac for my presentation...)

Sunanda, agreed...

Basically there are for stream techs we need:

- Camera
- Computer screen
- Text
- Audio.

All of this needs to be captured.


Text is still BEST in AltME, it was designed for this, this is also 
a way to bring people into the fold.


Computer and Camera are not the same concept, since video is fine 
at 320x250 (even if stretched), while Computer needs to be exact. 
 


We still have some tweaking to do here, but this is coming together....

it seems the word "closed" is too closely coupled to souce in CS.... 
by "closed system" I do put the emphasis on "system"  as in a chaotic 
system, like a complex frequency modulation patchbay or a closed-circuit 
video system where a monitor is in the view of the camera.