Updates & Happenings

• Web stats update
  The firewall configuration for this system messed up the webserver stats for some time, I've corrected that but don't have host-based details on the hits during the first week of August. Now that the dig is starting up again, we might see those numbers again, but I'm not betting on it.

  For reference, based on the web access logs (and not that page counter I put in at the bottom, which is far too conservative, it seems), here are some interesting stats as of 8/16/05:

  • Pages: 153,637 (Best day: 14,929. How much is that in missed Google Adsense dollars?)
  • Hits: 772,795 (Best day: 100,118. Not bad for a 2 week old Linux box :)
  • Bandwidth: 6.3 Gb
  • Most popular day for viewing: Thursday (74,998 hits)
  • Most popular time: Noon (No surprise...)
  • Browser types:

    MSIE - 50.4%	Not terribly surprising, I guess
    Firefox 29.3%	Go Firefox! (Sorry, I'm biased)
    Mozilla 2.8%	Mozilla != Firefox....
    Netscape - 2.3 %	Those may be me, am I the only one left?
    Konqueror - 2.2 %	Sneaky Linux users...
    Opera - 0.1 %	The bright pre-Firefox star...oh well

  • Media/Partner links to the website:
    

    UCMP Berkeley site	16.0%
    sfgate.com	12.1%
    KRON4	7.4%
    SCVWD site	5.9%
    NBC 11	4.3%
    Mercury News	3.2%
    KTVU	3.5%
    CBS5	2.7%
    The rest (44.9%) were direct links within the site

  • Album code update
    Added display.php function to the "total archive" albums that allows for easier navigation (instead of BACK button/reload the index). Also made indicies only show a subset of images (5 AM - 10 PM) by default, even though we snapped images 24 hours a day. The brighter pictures in the middle of the night (such as the 6 AM and 11:30 PM shots in the 08/06/05 album) are a result of the on-site guards' flashlights on the bones. They were quite attentive to sounds at night, double checking to make sure the bones weren't sneaking off to Ebay or some such...
  • Time to make some movies. We have enough good images that were directly taken from the cam (not pulled across the link) to where we have viable animations. I'm toying with convert to make some very teeny (resolution-wise, not file-size, unfort) animations. The work is going on in the album section. If anyone knows of a nice way to animate this without making huge files, please let me know -- Thanks.

  • Added a favicon.ico because everybody else has one so why not us? Lemming, I feel like such a lemming.

  • Added "daily album link" to "after-hours/picture of the day" banner. Ooops.
  • Fixed a bug in the guestbook code (the only part of the site that we didn't write from scratch, go figure...). Previously, page one showed the latest 10 postings, page 2 shows 1-20, page 1-30, etc. Still, for a non-database driven guestbook, it is pretty slick.
    [Ed. note to self: Send a nice note to Joanna at definitelymaybe.org ]

  • Increased the frequency of the webcam snapshots to every 3 minutes. The field site unit can store the images until we can carry them off to the web server. The images we captured from the 3rd make for some good imagery, so more must be better, right?

  • About that uplink...
    The field site is a Linux-based laptop running a cellular PCMCIA card (Sony Ericsson GC83) via a PPP link to update the images. Keeping the link going long enough to run an FTP turns our to be trickier than expected. Adjusting the FTP upload speed (down to a Mammoth-like 500 bytes/sec) and moving the MRU/MTU around seems to have helped, but not enough. Previously, the scripts weren't submitting/posting any image that was marked "Corrupted" from identify but we've relaxed that a bit, The average image fluctuates from 30-50K so we're posting anything over a certain size limit in hopes that a stalled/failed FTP session's carcass is either small or sufficiently viewable to be worth posting.

  • About this website... Well, after a weekend of furious typing, we have some semblance of a website. Being somewhat under the gun, we opted to code from scratch (HTML, Perl, PHP - these are your friends) instead of trying to tackle a larger set of packages. With the exception of the guestbook code, everything (including the bugs) is in-house (though admittedly, some snippets were lifted from previous web projects so I'm sure SCO's lawyers will be in touch...)

  Software list
  With the exception of the guestbook code, all the support and presentation code is being written in-house (common headers/footers, album collection/navigation, file uploads and uplink maintainers, etc.) Most everything else uses standard tools (apache, Linux, PHP/Perl, ImageMagick, etc.) I'd have to check but I am fairly certain this is 100% open software powered, which is kinda cool I think. Even the cellphone card is being powered under Linux via PPP so there's nothing proprietary there. Then again, most of the support/glue code was written (by one Mt. Dew-powered geek) in the weekend before the dig so the bulk was done in the 10 days between July 27 and August 6, 2005, which probably explains a lot.

  Equipment list (I'll have to double check model numbers the next time I am out there, sorry):

  • Field site camera is a D-Link DCS-1000 hard-wired into the Field Site Computer (FSC)
  • FSC is a Toshiba Satellite Pro 1600 with 512 Mb memory, 40 Gb disk running SuSE Linux 9.3, linked up via PPP with a Sony Ericsson GC83 PC Air Card (PCMCIA EDGE/GPRS card which claims 150 K/s but hasn't come close on-site)
  • The web server is Apache (Apache/2.0.53) running on SuSE Linux 9.3 with PHP (4.3.10) and friends (ImageMagick 6.1.8, for example)

  Your thoughts/questions on any and all of this are welcome...

  Miracles to do (time allowing)

  • Better album coding.
    - Should have a next/previous picture option
    - Should have annotation capabilities per album and per picture
    - Should have an "auto play" function
    - Should (and will!) definitely have a movie/animated version (Suggestions/code welcome!)
    

  • Chat room? Something more threaded than the guestbook? Maybe. Your thoughts? Someone wrote in and mentioned a blog. That might be useful, depending on how long the dig goes. We'll know more 8/5/05 I think.

    
    For more information, please feel free to contact us.