Which "Evening in Paradise" is best?
Here are several possible photos for "An Evening in Paradise". Do you have a favorite?
Photo 1
Photo 2
Photo 3
Photo 4
Photo 5
February 28, 2006
February 2, 2006
Time-Lapse Construction Sequence
I have previously written about a construction camera that I had set up at my son's school.
I also said that I was looking forward to doing a time-lapse movie of the construction process. Since we're (i.e., me and several other people) in the process of raising money for this new facility (which we call the Athletic and Convocation Center), I have taken the opportuntity to do a "so far" time lapse movie. Check it out. Make sure your speakers are turned on...and enjoy!
December 17, 2005
Gym Construction Camera
Watch the construction of the new gymnasium at Princeton Academy of the Sacred Heart.
I installed a wireless network camera that FTP's images to the school's web server every 10 minutes between 7am and 5pm. One of the options for the image filename is a "base name" followed by a string representing the current date and time. I then wrote a PHP script that, when the page is requested by a browser, walks through the files in the image directory and displays the one with the latest timestamp on the file.
What I'm looking forward to is creating the time-lapse movie of all the images once the building is complete. Quicktime has a very simple mechanism for doing this. All you do is choose "Open Image Sequence..." under the File menu and point it to the first image in the sequence. It then imports the files, using the increasing sequence number in each filename, to create a movie. You have complete control over the rate at which the images are presented too.
I'll probably create the first sequence once the outer shell of the building is complete and post it on the school web site (and perhaps here as well).
October 18, 2005
And Google calls this "Public Service"
Google has this wonderful service they call "Public Service Search". It's meant for web sites like the private school site that I built. Here's the blurb on what it's about:
Google is pleased to offer educational institutions and non-profit organizations worldwide free SiteSearch, which enables users to search your website, and free WebSearch, which enables users to search the Internet.
It works great. It lets me put a search box on the site and generates site-specific search results. It even lets me fit the results into a template that makes it all still look like the school site.
One of the very nice features is, er..., was that you could login to the Google public search site and get reports on the search terms used on your site. The reports were by day and it was a great way to see if site visitors were not getting what they wanted with the navigational elements presented.
It was a great feature, as I say, until it stopped letting me access the reports, generating the following, less-than-pretty error page. I sent an email to their support address about a week ago and have heard nothing back (caveat: I use spamsieve and it would not surprise me if their reply got caught up in the filter; it has been working so well, that I have increased my eyeball skim speed of my junk email box as it rarely catches a "good" email).
Sad to see Google "Public Service" go the way of most other "Public Services".
September 4, 2005
Looking at web-based calendaring products
I am starting an evaluation of web-based calendaring products. The ones that I've most recently come across are:
My need centers around maintaining a calendar for the board of trustees of an independent school. What we had been doing was using Apple's iCal in combination with phpicalendar to post the board's calendar to a web site. I used .htaccess to password protect the calendar. All that worked great. We had one person, the headmaster's assistant, handling all the calendar change requests and she would use the phpicalendar publish.php script to transparently publish the web-based calendar. Board members could login to the calendar page and see all of the board's activities.
What has since happened is that we installed a web-filtering box, called SecureSchool to keep the middle school boys from going to inappropriate web sites (middle school boys being middle school boys). Unfortunately, the filtering box acts as a proxy server and the publish script can't talk through it. I have not yet explored the idea of opening up the necessary port on the proxy server to have our current solution continue to work.
In the meantime, I am exploring other alternatives, including those listed above. For anyone reading this (if there are any of you, that is) who has experience with any of the three solutions I've listed, please feel free to comment.