SoylentNews

Chapter One
Previously...

Fire!
        "Shit!" I said. "A fire! Oh, hell!" I took off running toward the burning cabin. I heard screams as I approached the door. Horrible, blood-curdling screams of terrible pain. And then, even worse - the screams abruptly stopped.
        The door wouldn't open. "Computer," I said to the tablet. "Open that damned door, there's someone in there that's hurt."
        "Unable to comply," it said.
        "Reason?"
        "Danger to the ship and cargo, crew, and passenger."
        "GOD DAMN IT!" I yelled. "There's a woman dying in there."
        "Containment in approximately two minutes." This must be a bad one for the automatic suppression to take hold – but of course, since the cabin was occupied it couldn't just let all the air out like if the engine room had caught fire.
        "OPEN THAT GODDAMNED DOOR!" I screamed.
        "Unable to comply" the computer answered programitically. God damend piece of shit computer! God DAMN it!
        A cot rolled up behind me and the door opened, air rushing into the smoke-filled quarters, its pressure already lowered but not enough to harm a person. The cot lifted the woman, who I recognized as the Billie whore, on itself. It put an oxygen mask over her face and a needle in her arm and she and the cot left for the infirmary.
        I walked around and saw what caused the fire – the stupid whore was trying to make an ancient drug called "methamphetamine". Even on Earth making that shit is dangerous, in space it's a fucking crazy menace. I guessed that since she couldn't get angel tears she figured she'd make a substitute, as if all drugs were alike or something. Dumb whore.
        My fone buzzed; it was Destiny. "Is everything OK?"
        "Yeah, sugar, just one of those stupid whores trying to get high. Blew up her quarters and burned herself up pretty good."
        I went outside. As soon as I closed the door I could hear the smoky air being blown out to space. Maids were already waiting outside the door to clean up the mess. I started walking back home. A dozen whores were coming down the hallway towards me. "What's going on?"
        "Billie blew herself up trying to make drugs," I said. "I catch anybody else doing that and they're in deep shit. Now excuse me."
        Wait! Is she OK?"
        It was that one broad, the one that was fighting with Billie the first week. Apparently they'd not only made up, but were lovers. Lesbian hookers? That don't make no sense to me, but I ain't went to college. The bunch of them went on to the infirmary and I went back to drink some wine with Destiny.
        The robots would take care of Billie.
        As I walked back to my cabin I pulled out my fone and hailed the ship's communication stuff. "Attention, ladies," I said. "There has been a fire caused by someone really, really stupid. Pay attention, now. If I catch any open flames whatever, the lady with the fire is locked up 'til we get to Mars. So if you're going to try to make drugs, you damned well better not need fire to do it. And even if you don't use fire if I catch you with drugs you're alone until we get there. So be good."
        As I passed the commons there were two naked women having oral sex with each other. "Hey, you two. Get a room," I growled. What was wrong with these whores?
        They ignored me.
        "You wanna be locked up?"
        "Fuck off, Joe."
        "That's Captain Knoll to you," I said, and pulled out my taser.
        "You're an asshole."
        "Get. Both of you. You're alone the next twenty four hours."
        They weren't paying me enough for this shit. Fucking droppers!
        Well, Destiny would cheer me up, she always did. I was pretty cheerful when I got back.
        "Took you long enough," she said slyly.
        "Oh, them whores," I said. "I had to lock a couple up."
        "What did they do?"
        "They were eating each other, I told 'em to go somewhere else and they told me to fuck off. Look, hon, there's two hundred of them and they act like feral children. They'll take over if I let 'em."
        "Feral?" she grinned.
        "You're rubbing off on me, Brainiac!"
        She giggled. "Here, I got some cheese while you were gone."
        I picked up my glass. "To cheese!"
        She laughed. "I'll drink to that. Want to watch something?"
        "Nah, put on some music and we'll cuddle."
        "Cuddle?"
        "Well, I know where cuddling goes."

This is a crude, rough draft of an upcoming book that is less than 10% finished. Continues.

I posted reruns from fifteen years ago at my slashdot journal. New material will be posted here at Soylent first.

NOTE: This is just a draft copy of my post, likely still incomplete. Once edited and reviewed, I'll post to the main index.

Ok, so first, I want to apologize that this is a few days late. Due to real life insanity (involving, but not limited to, 30 hours of flying, horrible jetlag, and seasickness), I wasn't able to get this discussion started when I promised, so please accept my deepest apologizes. Anyway, here's the moderation discussion, as promised. I've made it clear multiple times that the current algo is something of a temporary hack. I've been reading comments on my journal, and on the articles we've had discussing in-depth.

Before we begin, there are a couple of things I'd like to go into first before we go into rewriting the algorithm. A lot of people have suggested alternative moderation systems (i.e., something Reddit like, or a tag-based system) instead of trying to "fix" slash's system. While I'm not inherently object to replacing moderation wholesale, it would require someone to actually implement a new system, get it setup somewhere, let people review it, and then perhaps roll it out to the site. As the saying goes, talk is cheap. I'm personally not going to replace what I see as a "good enough" system without the community deciding that they want it, and that requires that said system exists to be evaluated. If someone is seriously interested in still perusing this, I invite them to drop by #dev, and discuss it 1:1.

*big exhale*

Right, now that we got that out of the way, I'd like to address what I've seen the biggest concerns towards moderation. I recommend that people read my writeup about the current system before diving in, as I will be referring that post considerably.

I've got some pretty graphs here that show how points are being spread through the system, and that, for the most part moderation is mostly working as adversed.

*FIXME, put graphs here*

Point expiration: Oh boy, people really have let me know about this one. I've written a fair bit about this, but to sum-up, modpoints with a short half-life *are* a good thing. On Soylent, we post upwards of 10-20 articles a day, and once an article is no longer in the "top 10" so to speak, the number of new comments essentially drops into single digits. With a smaller userbase, we need lots of mod points in circulation to make the system work, and even then, generally half to 3/4th of all modpoints expire out without being used.

*graph to points expiration table*

That's not to say that the current four hour period isn't short. My largest concern at the moment is that any large increases of mod point expiration has something of a cascading effect. At any given moment, we have a specific number of slots of people who can be moderators, and if someone doesn't bother to moderate at all, that slot is effectively taken until the points go "POOF". I'm tentatively willing to increase the duration to six hours, to relief some of this pressure, and then see how moderation spreads are affected. Any large scale increases in the expiration however means making more of the userbase eligible to moderate at a given time. I'm open to thoughts on this one.

After posting my last journal entry, a reader informed me about cheap IP cameras available on Amazon, and had a few comments regarding using other methods to access the mjpeg stream. He also informed me about the openipcam.com website where one can find many of the commands that can be used to configure most IP cameras using nothing more than wget commands.

While his information was useful and I'll definitely look into it in more depth at a later date, at this time I'm intending to use the cameras to watch deer, therefore I don't need to access the mjpeg stream and only really need one picture every 5-10 seconds. Additionally, I want to add a timestamp to every picture so I know what time the deer show up and can plan my next bowhunt accordingly. Also, 1 of the IP cameras I happened to have lying around uses cookie-based authentication instead of basic authentication, and I'm not sure how I'd do that using wget (if there is a way, please let me know). For these reasons I'm going to continue writing about the perl code I wrote to grab the images.

When I'm done, I will certainly entertain suggestions and collaborate with any users who feel like my methods can be improved upon. If the Soylent community is anything like the /. user base, I'm quite certain there's a ton of readers out there who are more adept at this and can suggest better techniques to accomplish what I'm trying to do.

Now, onto the cameras I used. I had 2 old IP cameras lying around that I started with. Neither have WIFI or infrared. But, I wanted to use them to see if any of this was possible before I invested in additional cameras.

The first camera I tried was an old TrendNet IP501P. It's a POE (power-over-ethernet) model and has a low-profile design that would be perfect for an enclosure to use outside, but since it doesn't have infrared I decided to just put it in the window and point it at my barn. This camera is quite old (I don't remember when I bought it, perhaps 5 years ago?) and its firmware is not that great. Many times when the admin interface comes up it looks like it's having difficulty displaying all the images, links, etc. I made sure it had the latest firmware installed and it didn't fix the problem. No worries, though because I'll just be pulling a static image and that seems to work OK. The electrical tape covers the power and activity lights that cause a reflection when it's put near a window.

The 2nd old camera is an iGuard IP250e which is (was) touted to be the lighest and smallest IP camera on the market. The picture shows it mounted inside a Q-see outdoor enclosure. Unfortunately, the firmware of this camera is even worse than the IP501P. Many times when trying to grab an image it just returns "No image" instead of a jpeg. Additionally, it uses cookie-based authentication which makes accessing it from a script more cumbersome than basic authentication. Nevertheless, it was lying around and I used it.

After getting my code working and testing it for a couple of months, I invested in 2 WIFI infrared cameras. The TrendNet IP551WI cost about $60 from my wholesaler, and it uses basic authentication just like the IP501P. It has a wide-angle lens that can be focused, and the infrared illuminates a very dark area quite well. It also has an auto-sensor (at the top between the 2 IR lights) that toggles the IR off when the light is adequate and on when it's too dark.

I wanted to get an outdoor WIFI infrared camera next, and I couldn't find a cheap one at my wholesaler, so I bought a Security Labs SLW-164. I think it cost about $220. I don't recommend this camera for 2 reasons. First, it's infrared seems very weak. Second, the camera's lens is much more narrow angle than the TrendNet models. Compare these 2 pictures taken side-by-side in my pitch-black basement using the IP551WI and SLW-164. In the SLW pic you can barely make out the license plate of the car, but the IP551 brightly illuminates the entire half of my basement (the distance from the camera to the door in front of the car is about 40 feet). Notice the cat sitting on top of the car, eyes glowing. Not even visible in the SLW picture!

I called tech support at Security Labs and they told me there's no way to adjust the camera's settings to get a better low-light picture. They said I need to use it in conjunction with a regular light. BTW, both cameras are rated at 0 lux. When I eventually mount the SLW outside I'll put a motion detector on the spotlight where it'll be used to compensate for the poor IR illumination.

Coming up next, perl code.

I got slapped today for two point penalty for a simple joke here on S/N.... Why is humor concerning an irrelevant off-topic non-technical story on a technical site offtopic? Are you taking yourself so seriously so soon? Is it my fault that one possible reason for the Iranian Gas shortage is possibly due to an improper diet? Or is making a joke of same somehow a crime or suddenly not funny in a world of app stores filled with whoopie cushions and fart generators? Could it be our moderators have no sense of humor or is it something darker [and more hilarious]? Or did they forget to take their medication again?

Could it be they are trying to widen our audience to capture the same people DICE is trying to capture? Or those mega-millions concerned about a rogue state's "natural gas shortage'? Is it possible DICE gone belly up and the spirit of BETA has begun to suck SoylentNews' marrow?

I've been on /. since around the turn of the century and never had any post down modded like this... maybe having a smaller pool of geeks is the reason or maybe a moderator or so does not understand what moderation is? or maybe they don't have a sense of humor? Given the circumstances and the obvious lack of finesse I'd say it does not bode well for this "community".

So to my detractors may you eat and drink deeply of the can marked "Foreign Objects and Debris" [A White can with blue lettering marked FOAD on a SSME engine final assembly white room... ]... and having done drunk deep of the FOAD can may you get a clue that good moderation is knowing when to leave well enough the fuck alone. A moderator's job is to promote not detract or subtract unless it is SPAM or destructive of the community. Were your Beta Protest posts at /. off topic? Were they community destructive? Or were they intended to show how you felt... or to share your satirical take on how the "owner" were being abusive of the community?

You publish a stupid fucking story that does not belong on the front page and when some one makes light of it you punish the satire? I thought we were leaving /. and DICE tactics behind! The bottom line is somebody pissed me off for no good reason.

Alas.... Have a nice fucking day children.
 

Chapter One
Previously...

Confession
          I'd brought a bottle of wine from the storeroom and almost dropped it. "Destiny! Oh God, no! Not you!"
          "Huh?" she said with a concerned look on her face. "What's wrong, John?"
          "What's wrong? You're a dropper! Oh, God..." I was devastated.
          She looked at the dropper and laughed. "These aren't angel tears, silly, they're antibiotics."
          "Antibiotics? What, you got pinkeye?"
          She laughed. "Don't worry, I don't have any diseases. I had lens implants put in my eyes before we left. I have to put these in my eyes once a week for six months. It was three times a day for the first week and once a day for the first month. It's just to prevent infection."
          "Why did you have to get Implants?"
          "I was nearsighted, my vision was 20/40. I had a little astigmatism, too. These new lenses are great, they're like having strong binoculars and a built in microscope. I never would have believed how sharp and clear everything would be. I can see a blood cell, and the doctor said I should be able to see Earth's moon from Mars if the planets' orbits are close."
          "Wow. Did it hurt?"
          "Did what hurt?"
          "The surgery."
          "No, it's painless. You don't feel a thing."
          "Still," I said, "I'd have just worn contacts rather than let somebody stick needles in my eyes."
          "Well, I used to wear them but they said they'd get in the way on Mars. And I can see so good now... I'm really glad I had the procedure."
          Procedure. Folks who went to college talk like that. I thought of something... "You told me once you were planning on taking advantage of me. How and why?"
          "Oh, John, you're going to hate me."
          "Well, look, you already confessed."
          She sighed. "I work for the company. My job was supposed to keep the whores from taking over your ship. But I didn't expect to like you so much. Actually, at all. They told me you were an asshole."
          I laughed. "I am!"
          "Is that for me?" she said, looking at the wine.
          "It's for us. Got a screw and glasses?"
          "Robot, screw and glasses" she said. A square box with rounded corners wheeled across the room with two wine glasses sitting on top of it. I set the bottle on it and the thing opened and poured the wine. I started to take a sip.
          "You have to let it breathe," she said.
          "I gotta what?"
          She laughed. "Let it sit for a couple of minutes. It'll taste better."
          "You never did tell me why you were going to Mars," I said.
          "I'm an astronomer. There's too much light on Earth, there hasn't been a useful telescope there for a century. So it was the moon or Mars, and they have plenty of people on the moon. Mars isn't just short of women, it's short of everything. Almost everybody there is a scientist; there's no unemployment on Mars at all. It needs more robots, too. It needs more everything. It's a real frontier, I think it's really exciting, like an adventure."
          Adventure? It was old hat to me. I'd made the Mars trip lots of times. Now Saturn, that was an adventure. I'd been on my way back from Titan one trip and the damned engines quit and the robots couldn't fix them. I had to wait six damned months for a tow tug and I'd almost made it home when the boat crapped out on me.
          Mars was usually a six month trip, but it was on the opposite side of the sun and we were going to be gone a year and a half. That's a long time to put up with dropless whores.
          Destiny raised her glass. "To Mars!" she said.
          "Nah," I replied. "To us."
          She smiled. "I'll drink to that!"
          An alarm went off. It never fails. I grabbed my tablet.
          Shit! A fire!

This is a crude, rough draft of an upcoming book that is less than 10% finished. Continues...

Open filenameA which contains a list of filenames to be munged
Do Until eof(filenameA)

Read a line from the filenameA list and assign it to filenameB
open filenameB for input
create filenameC based upon modified filenameB
open output filenameC

Do Until eof(filenameb)

Input Line filenameB, somestring$
Write FilenameB, SomeString$

loop

Loop

It did not work. FreeBasic's string handling does not appear to work the way I thought it did. I tried many ways of doing this and I tripped over the undocumented features of String Arrays in freebasic. What I ended up with were "fragments of each element of filenameB".

I'm not sure if its the documentation, the compiler, or just a "1d10T error between the keyboard and chair". So I'm putting FB to the side and going to try to do this in freepascal... if all else fails I'll fall back on TP7 for DOS... where I know I can get it to work.

This is what I get for letting my skills get rusty.

Why do I want to use these antiquated languages? a 1d10T error: Because Perl, Python, and most OO languages are not 1d10T brain readable.

This ain't the geezer your looking for. Move along.

PS: formatting code in HTML in a S/N journal is time consuming / difficult. Too bad there is no WYSIWYG or even an [indent] [\indent]. I had to use block quotes to get a rough format that was readable.

...the Slashcott is released into the wild to do as it will.

Chapter One
Previously...

Drops
          I'd been with Destiny for a month and a half now. We were talking over coffee before I had to go to work.
          Yeah, my job is work. I have to go to the pilot room and make sure we weren't going the wrong way, then I have to inspect the whole ship, and I have a pretty big boat. You think the people part is big? It's tiny. Yeah, the cabins are like apartments but storage and machinery takes up ninety percent of boats.
          And I had to inspect all of it except the passenger quarters, and I only had one passenger. Twice a day. It's a lot of walking, believe me. Even though we only have three quarters gravity; we get the gravity from acceleration. When we get more than halfway there the boat will turn around and we'll have the same kind of weird gravity until we get there.
          Anyway, I asked her if she was really going to be a hooker. She giggled. "You're not going to turn me in to the company, are you?"
          Shit. "Uh, what? I mean, turn you in for what?"
          "You'll keep it a secret? If you can't we're done."
          Shit Shit Shit Shit Shit.
          "Yeah." Sweat was running down my cheek.
          "Ok, John, I have no intention of becoming a hooker. I just signed up because it was the cheapest way to get to Mars."
          "But your contract..."
          "Cheaper to break than buying passage. I have a pretty good lawyer, John. She teaches me stuff."
          "Well, OK" I said. "As long as nobody knows, I don't know. Kinda wish you hadn't told me."
          "I don't want to keep secrets from you, John. I think I'm in love."
          "Lets get married!"
          "Lets take it a little slower, OK, John?"
          "I guess," I said. "Better go to work."
          "See you, lover," she said, kissing me. God but I liked this woman.
          The pilot room was close to the Captain's quarters, of course. Hah! Captain! My crew were a bunch of robots and other machines, I only had one passenger and my cargo was whores.
          Shit.
          While I was walking through the boat I heard cats. What the hell? There weren't supposed to be any cats in my boat, but it sounded like two of them were in here fighting. I ran toward the sound, which was coming from the Commons.
          It wasn't cats. It was Lek and Lek, two whores from Thailand. Lek could talk English OK but Lek only spoke pidgin English. Wouldn't you know it, two people from the same country with the same names. I couldn't pronounce either of their last names.
          And they were in the throes of violence. Lek punched Lek so hard she flew all the way across the room and hit a wall. It was like some of the ancient 20th century movies me and Destiny like to watch. Of course, those movies were silly and the boat's at low gravity. So it looked really silly when that whore knocked the other whore across the room like in one of those stupid old movies.
          I'd talked to Lek before, the one who spoke English pretty good. It seems that in Thailand, prostitutes are revered for their service to humanity. I'm sure all those horny guys on Mars will agree wholeheartedly.
          I think she's full of shit.
          "OK," I said, "What the hell is this all about?"
          "I don't know," said the semi-fluent one. "She just attached me!"
          "You tenee drops! Cuen me drops! Me ow! the other one said. At least that's what it sounded like she said.
          "She thinks I have drops and she wants some. I guess she ran out."
          Uh, Oh. "There are drops on my boat?"
          "Are you stupid? Yes. Everybody got them."
          "You?"
          She laughed. "Come find 'em," she said with that twinkle in her eye that, well, I saw in most of them when they boarded.
          I gave the less fluent Lek an hour of confinement. Kids, you gotta ground 'em sometimes. I didn't have a clue what to do about the drops. I should have went to college.
          I went and inspected the engines... shit, I had no idea how they worked but I was supposed to inspect them? OK, just follow the checklist on my tablet and I don't have to have a clue.
          A robot was working on one, and I noted it. Standard procedure. Even though there's always a robot working on one, seems like.
          I was still chuckling about the Thai chick flying across the room in the boat's reduced gravity. We could do one G but the bean counters say it would cost too much, so I fly 'em like they tell me to. Times like that I'm glad gravity is reduced, that was hilarious!
          See, they tell me the gravity is from propulsion, we're always burning fuel. Or acceleration or something, I ain't never went to college.
          I walked back to our quarters. I opened the door – and saw her with an eyedropper.
          SHIT!!!

This is a crude, rough draft of an upcoming book that is less than 10% finished. Continues...

Chapter One
Previously...

Catfight
          Three days after liftoff we had docked with the ship, quarters were assigned to the women, the rocket went back down, the tube was jettisoned in a trajectory that would burn it up, and we were on our way to Mars.
        I was watching a movie, Destiny cuddled in my arm. God, I liked this woman. She was like a female me, only refined, she'd went to college.
        Of course, the tablet had to ruin the mood, damn it. I had to go to the commons area.
        Right now the commons area was a bar and the robots summoned me because there was a damned bar fight.
        I like having company but I hate being a babysitter.
        Tables were overturned, two women were fistfighting so I tasered and handcuffed both of the dumbasses. "OK," I said, "Who are you girls and what's this about?"
        "I'm Billie and that bitch called me a cunt so I hit her," the blonde with the black eye said.
        "I'm Sparkle," the other one said. "And I was just defending myself from that cunt."
        I sighed. "Look, bitches, there ain't gonna be no violence on my boat, get it? Billie, you're confined to quarters, and that means the door's locked, for twenty four hours. It happens again and you're locked up for the rest of the trip. Got it? That shit don't happen on my boat.
        "Sparkle, you get two hours and you better stay out of trouble." I escorted them to their quarters and removed their handcuffs, locked the doors and returned to Destiny.
        If I'd gone to college maybe I'd known about drops.
        As I was going back to Destiny's, Tammy walked up. Tammy, my sole passenger. "Trouble?" She asked.
        "Nope, just a couple of pissed off whores," I said. Yeah, I held this woman in contempt. A dropper whore was... well, you don't want to know one. Believe me.
        "That's what happens when they don't get their drops." she said.
        "Huh?" I hadn't known whores or droppers. But I knew I didn't want to.
        "Droppers get violent when they don't get their drops."
        "You?"
        "Best not fuck with me, asshole."
        Shit, no wonder the company gave me a raise. Droppers and no drops.
        I was in trouble.
          Or maybe not. It was a month before another such incident occurred, and was quickly quelled; I didn't have to ground the kids this time.
        When I say "babysitter" I'm not kidding. These fully grown women acted like spoiled children. It's like they weren't raised right, I don't know.
        Hey, can I go to the bathroom? Thanks.
        OK, where was I? Oh, yeah, drops.
        I knew those damned things were addictive, but I didn't know that withdrawal from them caused violence. And, it seemed, every time. I was in trouble and didn't know it.

This is a crude, rough draft of an upcoming book that is less than 10% finished. This short chapter will be enlarged for the book. continues.

Someone anonymously commented in chapter three that "I'm a sucker for spaceships in the solar system, so thanks for posting!" As he was AC there was no point in answering since he wouldn't have seen the answer, but had he been logged in I'd have said he should read "Nobots" if he hasn't already.

I hope if anyone sees any typos, misspellings, grammatical errors (unless it's the uneducated Knolls who's speaking), incongruities, or contradictions, please comment; I have no editor or proofreader. Also if you have an idea for some crazy stunt one of the droppers pulls, comment and I'll consider it.

Thanks for reading!

A year ago I wondered if it was possible to use a cheap IP camera I had to record the wildlife activity (mainly deer) on my property. As you may know, most of the cheaper (<$100) IP cameras have shitty firmware and require Java or (even worse) ActiveX in order to view video. Additionally, the software that comes w/ these cameras requires Windows, and since I run Linux that's not going to work.

For what I wanted, though, I figured continuous footage was overkill and started to investigate if it were possible to just pull an image every 10 seconds or so, store it somewhere, then use ffmpeg to tie them all together into an mpeg once a day. All IP cameras have the ability to grab snapshots so I set about figuring out how to accomplish this.

Turns out it's pretty simple. Using a little perl and a few cron commands I was able to get everything working and, once it was put into motion, needed very little babysitting to work.

So over the next couple of weeks I'm going to write about what hardware I used (and what I don't recommend using), how I set my server up, show the code I used, and some results.

First off, some specifications:

• the cameras must be cheap, less than $100
• I wanted to use wireless cameras so I didn't have to run a bunch of CAT5 throughout my house
• the camera I had at the time did not include infrared, but the ones I wound up buying later did, and they were rated at 0 lux
• I chose to control everything w/ an old computer running CentOS 6 (basic server setup)

Coming up next, the cameras I used.