Missile Shield in Poland

So this seems to have pissed the Russians off. They are threatening a response....

Anyone placing a bet that they send some missiles to be based in Cuba?

Spam Email

I receive more spam email than most people. Over 58784 spam mesages in a month maeans 1.4 spam emails per minute! Google seems to have picked up on this and tries to advertise me Spam Quiche.

My Great Granddad. H. G. Riddell

My dad just sent me this scan. Pretty cool job, though probably not for me.

Trip To Glasgow

I had a trip through to Glasgow today. We had a few CD players to repair and I had to make some deliverys and collections.

There was a very very heavy rain storm round Glasgow while I was driving. It made the trip slightly more interesting.

Edinburgh Military Tattoo

Harriette and I bought some tickets for the tattoo. We went for a nice meal at Darios then braved the crowds!

After the slow walk up past the security check we made our way to our seats. The weather just about held out for us with only a slight drissle at the begining of the show.

We went to one of the shows that the BBC was filming. Its always funny when the mobile camera men almost get trampled down by the marching bands :)

Skiing can be dangerous. Skiing with fireworks down hill on the esplinade... One guy trips over, though he gets up so fast that it almost looked like part of the show.

One of the bands this year had a comedy dancing dragon. I missed the abseiling down the castle walls that I'd seen a previous year. But the marching bands were every bit as good as I remember them being.

All in all the tattoo is a must see show if your anywhere near Edinburgh in August.

Web Cam / CCTV

I'm currently thinking about integrating my cctv system with my computer network to allow public access to the cameras via a web page.

There are several different options for doing this. The easiest two methods are.

1) Use the network monitoring software to view the DVR (Digital Video Recorder) inputs on a PC, Perform a screen capture on the PC and pipe that to the streaming software on the web server.

2) Capture the video output from the DVR using a tv capture card then stream the tv capture to the web server.

Unfortunatly both of these options require running 3 machines the DVR, Web Server and a PC that processes the DVR signal. I dont have a problem with the DVR or the web server, these run 24/7 and are dedicated to what they do. However I cant justify the system performance hit that processing the video stream would have on my destop computer.

What would be ideal is if the DVR featured its own streaming web server, or I was able to capture its network stream directly on the web server. Unfortunatly the DVR needs its own custom software to view the network stream and I cant find a way for the web server to capture it directly.

Hmmm.

Stock Markets

Why do stock Markets close at night?

With electronic trading and a closely linked global economy, it seems old fasioned that stock markets close for the night. Its true that traders need to sleep and they cant all trade 24/7 but, its easy to set up trade plans to buy/sell in your absence. Or in the case of multinational companies, have another office (different time zone) continue the trading.


Just a thought.

Beatbox Poster

A few posts ago I was talking about historic club nights. Here is the poster from 'Beatbox' the regular Friday night club in the Teviot Row House union in the early 90's.

Lamas Fair St Andrews

We take a trip to St Andrews for their anual summer fair.

My first experiment at attaching a video to the blog!

This video is from big wheel on Market Street in St Andrews during the Lamas Fair. Staring Harriette and John Riddell.

Flat pack furniture

I spent the afternoon building some draws. In the evening I reconfigured my instilation of JTVLAN for more fluid streaming of TV through the flat.

JTVLAN is a handy solution for streaming TV over ethernet LAN from a PC TV tuner card. It was the first software redily avaliable to do such a task. I've been running it for almost 2 years now! Another handy package that I use for remote streaming is 'Orb Media' not so great for use on a LAN but great for streaming TV to your mobile phone.

Georgia War, Google Maps

Wondering if there had been any censorship of satellite images etc. I decided to take a look at Georgia in Google maps. Was slightly surprised to find that all of the Town/Road names are missing. Either they were never there or they have been removed as a reaction to the conflict. Though curiously enough the satellite coverage still looks ok, and it still takes you to the correct place on the map if you search for a Georgian town name. Weird.

I would be interested to know if the map information has been removed or if it was just never there.

Asian wedding.

Probably about 1000 seats at this gig. Which is quite typical. You can see our pa and plasma displays by the stage.

Asian wedding in glasgow.

Im called in to configure the pa system control unit and video systems.