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Real-Time Penguin Cam 40

Posted by CmdrTaco from the flightless-birds dept.
Dave Coombs writes "Montreal's Biodome has a webcam aimed at a bunch of penguins, 24 hours a day! " See! the penguins walk around! Behold! the excitement of them standing there.
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Real-Time Penguin Cam More

Real-Time Penguin Cam

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  • apparently this runs on linux :)

    ---

  • wOooOOo! (Score:1)

    by pica ( 8795 )
    Finally, since I can't have penguins living in my walk-in freezer, I get to have some virtual pets!
  • Poor birds, robbed of their privacy...

    Free NUGGET!

    - Adam Schumacher
    cybershoe@mindless.com
    N.A.R.T. #009
    P.W.T.T.K.S.S.S.T.H.U. #001
  • ummm, never mind
  • I can't believe we're Slashdot-effecting a zoo. They'll probably never understand the huge influx of sudden interest in their penguin exhibit.

    But perhaps some things are better left unexplained.
  • - and send him a link to this! I think he'd get a big blast out of seeing his beloved bird...
  • As awesome as penguins are, and as cool a place as the Montreal Biodome is (seriously; if you've never been there it's a big indoor zoo shaped like a giant insect when viewed from the Olympic Stadium above it), I find it interesting that they haven't used more elegant tactics than "press reload every 20 seconds" in their layout. There's a Java applet that will do this for you as well as a technique involving meta tags that reloads the page. Perhaps they wanted to stay in tune with those who don't have fast connections and the latest browser technology, but I still find it interesting.

    ~Dan

  • :) (Score:1)

    by morbid ( 4258 )
    *cute*
  • Taking a look at the image URL, it appears to be a series of cameras looking around Montreal. The URL is:

    http://www.montrealcam.com/cgi/cam.cgi?p=cam10

    Replace those last two digits with numbers 1 through 11, and you get other views. Neat.

    JT

  • Insight (Score:1)

    by mw ( 16262 )
    Hey, now I'm able to see online the hard work of the kernel development group :-)
  • ...that there was acually a penguin at a zoo somewhere that had been adopted by somebody (LI, RedHat, etc.) and name Tux. Is this true?
  • But they're not as cute as wombats!

    http://www.mistral.co.uk/ghira/wombats.html
  • For all you americans:
    Yes Canada is and arctic country. Snow, Ice everywhere... polar bears and penguins just wander the streets all the time.
    All the heat from my computers is melting my igloo
    ahhhhh

    j/k Canada is not all snow and ice (well most of it)
    hehehehe
  • Let's see... i think it _might_ be dark seeing as how it is evening in Montreal, and winter...

    post 6pm + post Oct 23, but previous to ~ March 20 = dark.


  • your post went up at 8:27. By that time, it's very dark in Montreal. In January, it gets dark at about 4-4:30 (local) in Seattle. Montreal, being farther north, must get dark sooner. The cam isnt broken, there just isnt enough light.
  • instead why penguins never hunt polar bears. While the polar bears love the arctic, the penguins have an iron fist over the antarctic. While it has been proposed many times that an invasion might occur where the penguins anhailate the bears for control it has never happened. This question has been asked over the centuries and noone has been able to conclusively give reason. Myself I think that the penguins are running mines with slaves that they have captured through the ages. After all the surface of Antarctica may be -60 C but 1000 m below it will be 50 C (given that they are mining the earth rather than a big sheet of ice). In fact I believe that the penguins are stacking up arms. When the time is right the penguins will issue forth and enslave everyone on Earth. This will be just punishement, they feel, because we have been fishing near Antarctica and taking away fish that they would normally get. This, of course, causes the penguins to become very discontent! Unlike Ol' Tux these penguins mean war.... I suggest that we nuke the poles before its too late! Sure, the water level will rise 300 m and half the world will need quick lessons on having to tread water, at least we won't be enslaved to work in mines for 20 hrs a day by birds! Its time to do something and if we don't it'll be our extinction. Nuke em!
  • Awwwww.. how adorable... well.. that is one of the sweetest webcams out there.. minus my puppycam of course

  • This is even better than Netscape's FishCam. :-)

    (Okay, so I'm easily amused...)

    Zontar

    (somewhere in tenn.)

  • He's maybe the one who installed the physical cam, but I'm the one who wrote the software for it and still maintaining it. The machine is actually a Pentium 133 with 16MB of RAM, a Matrox Meteor framegrabber and RedHat 5.0 (or 5.1, depending on the machine). The software grabs a picture every 15 to 20 seconds, compress it in JPEG and send it via a simple, but new "protocol" to a server machine which runs the montrealcam.com website. That machine is a Digital Alpha running Digital UNIX 4.0B.

    He's just using the fact that he installed the physical cam to plug his new company. What a shame.

    I was the one to send the previous story, last year. Just check it out [slashdot.org].
  • at least there standing in front of the cam now..

    geez i've REALLY got nothing to say
  • As a matter of fact, they are not dead and this site is NOT outdoor, but inside the biodome. It's just that they have to duplicate the polar seasons, so some part of the year, they turn the lights off up to 18 hours a day, down to 4 hours some other parts of the year.

    It's not like they are shy, or they're up programming some kernel routines, but rather that the biodome people are kind enough to duplicate their native environment.

    ...David (the guy who wrote the software that captures their little faces :))
  • Linus got a penguin for X-mas 96. It lives in the Bristol Zoo in the UK. Details are here [fnal.gov].

    --

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