Into the Summer Break

The Leeds Met Headingley Campus has become quiet now. The final year students had their Graduation Ceremonies last week and have now left the university. Many members of staff are taking their holidays now in summer, so the buzzing in front of the James Graham Building has come to a halt. Instead, the dismantling crews have begun to take the white Marquee apart which stood here on the Acre the past few weeks.

In September, the annual Staff Development Festival will be mostly in the new Rose Bowl, so there is no need anymore for the Marquee.

The Headingley Caedmon Webcam which I set up, has been featured on the Latest News page, and I have recorded for every day a set of image sequences which could be made into a time-lapse video. Now the camera will record an image series of the dismantling and the following recultivation of the Acre.

I am making the executable of the image capture software freely available for download/installation. In addition to the image capture, I have written a small utility for automatically placing an image from a webserver onto the Windows Desktop - is also available online. In the future I will release the source code of these projects as OpenSource, but I have to do a bit of code cleaning before.

Webcam Accelerated

I have modified our Leeds Met Headingley webcam: the ftp upload now happens every 5 seconds, and the web page with the camera image is refreshed automatically also every 5 seconds. I want to try if the server can handle the increased load. Seems ok so far.

The reason: on Saturday, 10.May, 10:00 GMT, there will be the Carnegie Great Student Run. As it happens, the web cam is directly looking at the Start/Finish. It would be a pity if the web cam would only "stream" once per minute, as it did before...

The camera image is now more "live". For someone who has included the webcam code in their web site, the update will happen automatically, as the loaded IFRAME code will handle the refresh within the loaded document.

One note of caution: on one computer, have only ONE page with the live image open. The IFRAME uses a cookie that stores the name of the image - so that it can be deleted after being shown. If two of windows are open, they will store the cookie information in the same cookie - and naturally the image of one web page will be deleted by the other.

I am working on a tracking system which would use mobile phones carried by some of the runners to "live" track their position on the web. Seems to work ok so far, but I have not yet tested the system under "stress". The web site where some of the runners wil be shown is here: creativetech.inn.leedsmet.ac.uk/_StudentRun. The positions are currently just simulated. I will post news and updates here in this blog as the system becomes more mature.

New Webcam Interface - ready to embed in your site!

Finally I implemented a modification in the way how the the Leeds Met Headingley Webcam picture is shown. In the original version, a full 640x480 image has been sent each minute to the sites displaying it, even if the display was then resized in the <img> tag. This meant that more data were transmitted than were required.

I now utilised the hidden capabilities of PHP and the GD2 graphics package to actually resize the image before it is being sent out. Works fine!

For anyone who wants to embed the live updated web cam picture onto their own web page, here is the code:

<!----------------------------------------------------------------------->
<iframe
scrolling="no"
width="100%"
height="250"
frameborder="0"
src="http://creativetech.inn.leedsmet.ac.uk/_LiveCam/index.php?w=280&h=210&t=Leeds Met: Headingley Campus" >
<!-- parameters: w=imagewidth, h=imageheight, t=captiontext -->
</iframe>
<!----------------------------------------------------------------------->

And this is the picture, resulting from the above code:

New Webcam Software

Until now I had run our webcam through two pieces of software: the Easycam software would connect to the USB webcam and display the stream on the monitor. Every 60 seconds it would write a JPG file onto the disc drive. In parallel, my own ftp client software would FTP this file every 60 seconds to the web server. For some strange reason, Easycam did not work, nor did any other webcam software that I had tried: each of them got stuck at the ftp-ing the file out. Some firewall problem... I have no idea.

But now I have combined the image capture with the ftp upload into one piece of software. It runs since Monday afternoon satisfactory. One can recognise if the image is from Easycam or from my own capture: Easycam puts a time stamp onto the image, while my software just shows the plain image without any overlay. I used my old knowledge of VideoForWindows to write a quick capture routine, with preview. The software is not yet easy to use, but I intend to modify it so that I can give it away as freeware. But before I can release the code, I need to "clean" it - is a mess as usual.