X10 Hallowe'en Display

Spic writes "I'm sure alot of us remember the Christmas light display using X10 that was up for last Christmas, well, the same guy has a Hallowe'en display up. Pretty neat idea. You can even vote for your favorite politcal candidate: Bush, Kerry, or The Incredible Hulk. Looks like he also anticpated our arrival."

What's X10?

[Altima(BoB)]

Perhaps I sound like an insufferable n00b, perhaps I sound like I'm too lazy to do a google search (Umm, guilty) and perhaps I don't actually remember this guy's Christmas display, but what is this X10 thing?

There was a message saying control would be activated in 2 hours or so, does that mean we can control the decorations from the webcam? If so, what can be controlled?

Annoying questions aside, the "Incoming Slashdotter" message was cool. Nice to be part of an internet locust swarm.

Possible FIre hazard

[d3ity]

"Replaced one X10 switch module that felt warm, but otherwise the various hardware, circuit breakers, and web server (go Apache/Perl!) are hanging in there" Felt warm...hehehehe, lets light the thing up! in 2 hours now we'll have some major slashdottage.

OH CRAP!!!!

[xmas2003]

There was a definite Slashdot Effect [komar.org] last year when you guys hammered by Christmas Lights [komar.org] ... but that had a 5-second throttle ... whereas the halloween decorations [komar.org]have a 1-second throttle - I got FARK'ed on Friday (earlier in the day) ... this could get ugly ... just called my neighbors to warn 'em about a HUGE light show tonight - more updates from me in this thread ...

P.S. The pop up is an HTML body alert=message based on the referrer

Webcam image

[sploo22]

I noticed that the webcam is using quite a long exposure to compensate for the low light levels - people on the sidewalk appear very blurred. Even so, there is almost no visible graininess aside from compression artifacts. Obviously this is not a cheap webcam.

Re:OH CRAP!!!!

[xmas2003]

Load factor is currently 3, but web server is barely responding (and I guess I shoulda used mod_perl) ... but it does load the page (minus the graphic) half the time - I'm going to pull the graphic for now to help things out ... for those interested, I CAN load the latest web stats [komar.org] - you guys are POUNDING me!

Re:OH CRAP!!!!

[moosesocks]

You know you've been successful in life when you've got these in your stats:

28: 0.14%: 10: 0.16%: 533,805: 0.17%: .mil (USA Military)
5: 0.02%: 1: 0.02%: 63,463: 0.02%: .arpa (Arpanet)

7: 0.03%: 3: 0.05%: 95,263: 0.03%: Amiga
3: 0.01%: 1: 0.02%: 43,369: 0.01%: OS/2
10: 0.05%: 0: : 121,863: 0.04%: Mozilla/3.01 (WIERD)

honestly.... major props to anyone who gets hits from os/2 AND the arpanet!

Re:X10 Halloween Display

[Anonymous Coward]

IANAE, but I'm pretty sure the apostrophe is because e'en is an abbreviation for evening, or more correctly whatever the root of evening is (even? as in 'evensong'?). I'm sure an etymologist could explain better.