...the radio star. Yeah. Anyway, I have a linksys WVC54GCA Network/IP camera that I've been playing around with. This camera is convenient because it's wireless so I can put it almost anywhere I want... or I could if the fucking piece of shit didn't lose it's wireless connection every ~24 hours and require a reset to get back online. So I have to run cat5 to the fucker instead. And it doesn't support PoE. Annoying, but it seems to work OK with power and UTP stuck up it's ass. Whatever. Remind me not to buy linksys again.

I've also been playing around with ZoneMinder and trying to get it grabbing video from the camera. That worked fine at 320x240 (jpeg) but not at 640x480 (jpeg or mjpeg). I finally figured out that it was a memory allocation problem. Even though I had followed a tip I found somewhere on upping the limit to 134217728, apparently that wasn't enough to grab high res from the camera. Finally I found this tip and I raised the limit to 268424446. Now it works fine at 640x480.

The most difficult part of the process was finding the URL's for grabbing video/stills directly. Through googling and experimentation this is what I came up with:

Linksys WVC54GCA - firmware 1.00r24

320x240 jpeg:
http://camera_ip_address/img/snapshot.cgi

640x480 jpeg:
http://camera_ip_address/img/snapshot.cgi?a
(I first tried ?res=640x480, which worked, but then I discovered that passing any argument at all gives you the larger jpeg)

640x480 mjpeg:
http://camera_ip_address/img/mjpeg.jpg
http://camera_ip_address/img/mjpeg.cgi
http://camera_ip_address/img/video.mjpeg
(I don't know whether there is any difference between these. I didn't notice any.)

640x680 mpeg:
http://camera_ip_address/img/video.asf
(VLC 0.9.4 plays this perfectly, including audio)

Posted by ra at 00:38 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

Why is unannounced scheduled maintenance so ridiculously fucking common these days?

I tried to login to Citibank's website just now to pay my bill. No go. I get some random "General Error" with an even more vague definition of what is (or isn't) happening when I try to log in. Last time something like this happened I told them about it after the fact and they denied that there had been any problem, so this time I called them up right away. I'm told that they might be doing scheduled maintenance until 03:00, but they don't know whether they are doing maintenance tonight or not. OK...... They can however confirm that if they are indeed doing maintenance, I will not be able to login until it is complete. Hmmm... homepage says nothing about maintenance, neither does the error message. Finally, they suggest I try to reset my password. If there is a chance you're doing maintenance now, is this really an ideal time to fuck around with resetting my password?? Morons.

Dear Citibank: I made the following just for you. Please feel free to copy and paste it to the top of your website as appropriate:

------------
WE'RE BUSY DOING PREVENTATIVE DEVASTATION RIGHT NOW. FEEL FREE TO RESET YOUR PASSWORD IF YOU CAN'T LOGIN, BUT KEEP IN MIND THAT IT'S NOT GOING TO FUCKING WORK AT ALL UNTIL WE'RE DONE.

LOVE,
CITIBANK
------------

Posted by ra at 00:44 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)