about the amazing madisoncam
who?
the amazing madisoncam is run by e. axel larsson, enterprise integration specialist for drew university's department of computing and network services and drew alum (c'02).
what?
the camera itself is a logitech quickcam 3000. the camera is attached to the computer drew issued me as a student, the acer extensa 368d as part of drew's computer initiative program.
on 27 june 2004, the 368d's hard drive finally bit the dust. it was replaced with an acer 512t on the 28th.
the computer is running windows 2000 and webcam2000 software which functions as a web server. the site itself and its database run on a linux box at drew.
when?
the madisoncam is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, barring outages and upgrades.
where?
the camera is located in my apartment on the third floor of the 72 main street building (above il mundo vecchio). it is sitting in my living room window and looks out across the street. the laptop is located under my couch.
why?
i don't know. the drew laptop was collecting dust. now i found something for it to do. also rosenet used to have a cam across the street, but they stopped, so someone had to pick up the slack.
how?
requests are handled by a perl script running on a linux box at drew. mod_perl is utilized for performance reasons. mysql is used for the commenting and image database. only images which have comments associated with them are stored in the database. all others are purged after 15 minutes.