Kite Flying And Server Work

Today we got a fair amount of work done. Sunij is in the process of migrating the Pentium III and 4 servers to the Intel Atom computers I brought. We’re jumping through hoops a little, as I only bought one dual-voltage switching power supply (I was thinking that the computers would be running straight off 12V most of the time). Regardless, Sunij has setup one computer so far, and it is successfully interacting with the DNS server, so we are almost ready to replace our first server!

I also got the computer with the NVidia Ion chipset up and running, although I don’t think this will replace one of the servers: I think our long time goal is to hook up a PCI Ethernet card and a USB Ethernet card so that the 945GSE boards have three Ethernet ports: this way, we will be able to replace all four servers with one 20W computer, saving a few hundred watts of electricity and allowing the server room to run on UPS for a number of hours once the power goes down.

On the non-technical side, today I tried to fly a kite with Shyami (he told me today that his name is spelled Shyami, so from now on I’ll be spelling it correctly!). We didn’t get it flying, but we still had a lot of fun trying. We also diverged into a number activities: play-fighting (he loves that), juggling (which I tried to teach him…but no one taught me, making the whole thing an exercise in futility), climbing trees, etc. Kid stuff (which I enjoyed perhaps a little too much).

After that, Shyami wanted to take a look through the 1000mm lens on the Sigma: for the past few days, the D300s has been locked up in my room, so every photo you’ve seen since the “Morning At The Market” entry was taken on my point and shoot. We had a good time looking at all the things we could find in Kathmandu (we even watched TV a good 200 meters away!), I’ve been taking a bit of video on the D300s and on my point and shoot, but unfortunately I have no real way to edit. My Adobe CS4 disc image was corrupted, so I came to Nepal without a working copy of Premiere Pro. However, I decided that I really wanted to get some video content on this blog, so today I shot a time lapse of clouds forming and dissipating on the nearby mountains. It’s just a rough draft, the only editing was making it black and white (dull colors today) and resizing the image files to be processed by QuickTime. Anyway, here’s the result! It is in QuickTime’s .mov format, so you can either download it (right click -> save as) or watch it in your browser. If this were an edited timelapse, I’d remove the flickering black objects (birds flying in front of the lens) and fix the minute changes in exposure between frames that gives it that frustrating flicker…but you’ll have to wait a few weeks until I get any edited video posted on this website.

Over the next few days, I also hope to upload some .FLV files that you can stream without ever leaving the blog entry I posted them on; as if it was an embedded YouTube video. I want to eventually post some high definition 720p content, since both the point and shoot and dSLR support that resolution. Eye candy is always nice…

After making the time lapse, Shyami’s friend came over and we had a fun time webcamming with people on Skype. I found it hilarious that in between calls, whenever there were any pictures on websites (especially head shots of models in advertisements), Shyami would shout “NAMASTE! HELLO! HELLO!” at them as if we were webcamming with them. I’ve already taught him the English “Facebook picture” and “video call”, now I need to teach him that not every picture of a person on a computer is someone you can video chat with…

That’s all for now.
Charles