by ·0 Comments

Macbookglossydisplay20060516Am I the only one that thinks that the slogan for the newest Apple MacBooks is sounding really ridiculous?

Introducing the superfast, blogging, podcasting, do-everything-out-of-the-box MacBook.

In German it’s even far worth in my opinion:

Hier ist das superschnelle, Blog- und Podcasting f?hige, sofort startklare MacBook.

To me that sounds like: “Hey, we forgot something! The presentation is in two minutes, we still need a slogan – just write some random stuff underneath it that includes the latest buzzwords!”
I mean just the “do-everything-out-of-the-box MacBook” thats not even a word.

C’mon Apple, you can do better than that!

by ·0 Comments

No it wasn’t my fault but the stupid DNS provider’s.
They had a partial outage of their service for the whole weekend (even their own website wasn’t reachable) and didn’t answer ANY of our calls or email enquiries.

As a result all of the ~20 domains that I run on this server will be migrated to our own DNS servers.
HowtoForge has a good tutorial on MyDNS which we will try and most probably use.

Sorry again for the outage and I hope with taking the matter in our own hands, such things won’t happen again in the future.

by ·1 Comment

MotionI recently installed a simple video surveillance system at a facility I work.

The main goal is to know who (and when) entered our server room. Currently the setup features a tiny Philips USB cam connected to a Linux server (running Debian Sarge). At a later Stage this webcam will be replaced by a proper network camera (or even several cameras).

The software I used is called Motion – a relatively easy to set up video surveillance system that does motion detection (…and much, much more). Motion detection is ideal for my purpose because the room is normally completely dark unless somebody enters it and switches on the light.

Now every time somebody comes in, a short video is produced and saved on our server. I made a web accessible filesystem alias to the video directory, so I could check whether there was new footage available. This process was not automated enough for me, so I slapped together a short (und ugly) PHP script that takes the contents of the video directory and delivers it as a RSS feed that I can now subscribe to with my news reader.

The script is available at the Motion WIKI and can also be downloaded from there.

[Update:]
Some photos of the former chaos in our server room and it’s extinction can be viewed here.

special thanks to Herbert for having the idea 😉