« July 2007 | Main | December 2007 »
I've changes a couple of items on this page.
First, the "Current Geyser Activity" has been removed because there's no current information to report. During the past couple of months Mary Beth Schwarz allowed me to keep it fairly current by reporting activity of Grand, Beehive, Fan & Mortar and Giant, but with the end of the season, so have those reports.
But I've also added the new streaming video webcam. In order to view it, you will need to download the Silverlight plugin from Microsoft. Once you do that,you will see a small thumbnail of the realtime video direct from the broadcast server. If you click on the image, you will be taken to a full image page, which also show the old static webcam images. Clicking on the blue dot will zoom out to full screen mode, while the red/green will start and stop the broadcast. Unfortunately, because of network latencies and buffering, it doesn't stop or restart immediately. But it will allow screen captures. I'm hoping to add some other new features, like zooming the staic camera and a "bozo blocker" once I figure out how.
Why am I using a new proprietary technology from the Evil Software Empire? For two reasons. One is that it quickly allowed me to create the code necessary for these pages, since the Mac doesn't seem to have native support for the protocol used, and I wanted to see it. The other reason is that I've been the "Mac Guy" on this project for the last year and a half, and I think it's nice demonstration of its capabilities and what we've done. It took me only 20 minutes to get the basic display working. And since it's not using Flash, people who block out all those annoying and stupid twitching ads can still see this. (Off the record, as far as we're concerned, Adobe's welcome to that market.)
If anyone wants to add this sort of thing to their website, contact me if you can't figure out the code. It's easy, and the network load is entirely on the video server. Just make sure you credit me.