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Linux Powers Controllable Christmas Lights for Charity
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Dec 24, 2006 10:33 PM
from the tux-and-santa-for-the-win dept.
from the tux-and-santa-for-the-win dept.
Santa Claus writes "Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier's recent article at Linux.Com tells the hilarious story of
Alek's Controllable Christmas Lights. When he out'ed himself to the
Wall Street Journal, saying that it was a
simulation/hoax in 2004,
the mass media howled at being fooled while Slashdot simply said Humbug. Alek claims that he went legit in 2005, as confirmed by the Rocky Mountain News. Brockmeier did an on-site visit to actually see and report in detail how the system really works ... for real! For 2006, there are three D-Link DCS-6620G webcams providing live coverage of 15,000 Christmas Lights, plus giant inflatable Elmo, Santa, and Homer Simpson. X10 power technology allows web surfers to turn stuff on & off with a click of a mouse. You can also type in text for everyone to see on a laptop in Santa's Workshop Cam. This year over $15,000 has been raised for the University of Maryland Center for Celiac Research, as a result of the lights. Brockmeier and the Christmas FAQ says it is load-balanced across four dedicated 100 Mbps Apache/Linux servers running mod_perl." Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
Related Stories
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Alek's Christmas Lights: Humbug 327 comments
g00set writes "Alek's Christmas lights story was previously covered on Slashdot here, however the Denver Channel is now reporting that it was all a hoax: 'The Lafayette man said he accomplished the trickery by taking 12 "base" photographs of the house with lights on and off and then constructed a Web page that appeared to show lights going on and off when the Web visitor clicked.'"
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Linux Powers Controllable Christmas Lights for Charity
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Alek says HO HO HO ... ;-) (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.komar.org/christmas/)
Zonker's article is excellent [linux.com] - highly recommend
People around the world are hammering it allready (Google Maps mish-mash) [komar.org] so I'll try to keep the web servers going while everyone turns the lights ON
Have fun with it and Merry Christmas to all,
alek
P.S. The web site is totally free
Re:Alek says HO HO HO ... ;-) (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.saynotocrack.com/ | Last Journal: Friday February 09 2007, @03:02AM)
As an example, on a blog I own (not the site in my sig), one of my posts hit all the major "social bookmarking" sites at once. Here are the stats:
- Reddit: 1,027
- Del.icio.us: 1,856 (I was surprised here)
- Fark: 8,347
- Slashdot: 18,111
- Digg: 94,991
And on my site in my sig, the owner has seen #s from Digg around the 100,000 visits within 24 hours as well (since it's not a tech site, I can't compare #s to slashdot since it wouldn't hit slashdot's front page). It's actually really annoying, because Digg visitors almost never stay for more than ~5 seconds (slashdot readers appear to at least read part of the story).
Re:Alek says HO HO HO ... ;-) (Score:4, Funny)
I think you just said why a site that lets you play with Christmas lights is much more dangerous on Slashdot, than on Digg.
Linux powers the lights? (Score:5, Funny)
Gah! (Score:2)
(http://onphilosophy.wordpress.com/)
Anyone else think that site was just a tad bit spastic?
Humbug! (Score:1)
That's all nice and swell, but... (Score:1)