Linux - Zoneminder

Another big fail for me.  I have my nice cheap Chinese dash camera, and I wanted to whip up a home camera, using spare parts, sort of a Frankenstein for Halloween.  I started with Linux, a webcam, and Zoneminder, which is a neato program that does complex motion analysis.  The problem with a security camera is that it would store an awful lot of boring stuff on a terrabyte disk. You just want to trigger, or highlight when people or cars appear.

Enter Zoneminder, which can use complex zoning trigger algorithms.  But zm is a horribly complex thing, using Apache web server, Perl scripts, a database, and who knows what else.  I spent hours on it, following dozens of recipes.  In the end I gave up.

It's somewhat ironic that I was doing this on my old media PC.  I got the Zotac years ago, when Sony went all nutso with the PS3.  I ran xbmc on it, and it served movies to the big screen.  It was also horribly complex since it had to deal with endless variations of hardware and Linux distributions.  The update process was unworkable, and finally I gave up.  It was all replaced by a tiny WD box from Costco.

It's fun being a pioneer, but eventually all this gets embedded in a special-purpose box, using Linux.  Soon Zoneminder will be incorporated into a cheap Chinese camera that can connect to your network.  Oh well, on to the next thing....

Update:  Whoopeedo.  I got 'motion' working.  It set up real nice with a standard install.  The hard part was making the old media computer a headless, wireless server.

This is fixed up a bit by Youtube.
It show that it records only with major movement.

Update2:  That camera is useless at night because of internal reflections.  I've looked around and have yet to find my perfect outdoor wireless ip camera.

Update3:  I'm waiting until Spring to install my ideal camera - dome, ip wireless, 1080p, night vision, etc.  All for very cheap.  :)

The Breathing of the Oklahoma Earthquake Mechanism

We're on an exhale right now, so I thought I'd dig something up.

The OK mechanism is one big organism, and it breathes - one day busy, one day light, etc.  By this I mean it is composed of discrete elements, and no longer acts as an elastic body.  Discrete element modelling is great fun.

You model as a bunch of little independent components.  This is a huge one requiring a super-computer, but you can do little ones on your computer (Great Science Project!).  Once activated it appears as a living organism, since a little disturbance propagates as slow displacement waves, in an irregular manner.

Think of a sand pile being slowly fed from the top.  You look at it and see the obvious, many slope failures as the sand attempts to keep its angle of repose.  But if you shone double lasers at it (Great Science Project), you would see it's alive, since every slope failure must be set up by slow displacement waves.  (I just thought that up, never been done before.  Isn't the brain wonderful?)

This is the only fun I get from Oklahoma with its high fractal roughness.  By now Arkansas or Ohio would have had a storm of 6's.  It's like watching paint dry, which I'm doing right now.

Google Inbox - Multiple devices, multiple inputs

The Fish has been honoured to be an early recipient of Inbox.  Don't tell him if you got it too.


I think email has single-handedly destroyed the dysfunctional bureaucracy.  In a company, everybody and their dog sends stuff to every person, just to cover their rears.  5000 emails in the inbox is typical for a harried executive.  Well, forget those people, because they only use Microsoft.  Let's think about people in the New Economy who are effective.

We all now have at least three devices - phone, tablet, and computer.  We are getting info from at least two sources - hangouts (texts), and email.  We'll get the email first on the phone, while we are enjoying our espresso at Starbucks.  It's a link to a report, we don't want to deal with that now - pin it for the computer.

Things can be bundled and labelled - 'Boring' for corporate stuff, etc.  Links to YouTube videos can be saved for the tablet at home.

I didn't go through all the features, since I'm not a busy person, but I can see the potential here, and it would be great for my kids.

Update:  Apparently some people get a 'Golden Ticket' to invite others.  Not me, they're probably worried I'd sell it.  :)

Update2:  Man, no wonder they aren't giving me anything.  $200 a pop!

A Geology Grand Question: What is the process that eats continents?

Inspiration

Everywhere we look we see that the continents were increased by the plastering of fresh silicates from island arc complexes.  This is the fundamental deep geology of Ontario and Oklahoma, but they ignore it in the States, and for Bruce Deep Holes.

Like Einstein, I believe in a Friendly God, for things that I don't want to think about.  For example, we'd all be dead if water didn't expand when freezing.  What if???   Ouch, my brain hurts!  But I do know that in human biology, if you find a mechanism that increases serotonin in the brain, you better start hunting for something that destroys it.  This is The Balance of a Friendly God.

So, continents keep increasing, but we know that for the last billion year or so, the ratio of continents to oceans has been exactly the same.  Look for something that eats continents.  If  the amount of carbon dioxide increases temperature exponentially and unending,-- look for a compensating mechanism.  We have been hit with carbon dioxide before in geologic time.  If you want to think harder and don't invoke a God, then call it dumb luck.  And we wouldn't be here to yap about it.

I think the compensating mechanism for continents is heat flow.  As a thought experiment, double the size of continents.  What happens?  All Hell breaks loose because that light and fluffy silicate is a great insulator.  So, put all these continents together as a Super Continent, and watch out  for the fireworks!  The Deccan Traps would be nothing.  So, it is a simple matter that if we increase frothy silicates, the mantle gets hotter, and pours out basalt.  I think during a continental get-together, the edges get eaten off.  Even without that, if a continent gets too big for its britches, its deep keel gets eaten, even to the point of creating a Michigan Basin, a great example of mantle-munchies if I ever saw one.  :)

I think this will be the great next thing in tectonics -- Continental Breakfast.

Lowe's is the Target of Hardware Stores

I went into an empty Target store the other day, and they still have zombies and empty shelves.  Although I had just bought a lot of junk at Walmart, I felt an instant pressure not to buy anything.  If they had a Target Bar and Grill when Rob Ford was young, think how the world would be different today!  They couldn't sell sex at a Target brothel.

I always go to Home Depot, but the new Lowe's is closer.  Because of road construction I went into it today.  Instant Damper!  But I had to get something.  They are so hopelessly American that they don't have credit card chip readers as a matter of principle.  That tore it for me!  If my credit card gets bunged, I'm going to really say something.  :)

Oklahoma earthquakes very active in the mid to low 3's

Ha!  This is a meaningless post, but I do it to keep awake on Oklahoma.  This type of activity goes back 6 months, the more modern thing was activity in the high 3's.  Boring!  The only other geological news is the 'record breaking temperatures' thing.  There is no more mention of the rate, so I guess this is another semantic shift.  I like to keep track of such things.  :)

Toronto fish ladder kills fish

It's sad, I haven't been around to bug them, and the Ontario gov't has let the fish down.  Billions wasted and they can't do a little thing.

They can't jump over the falls, and they get trapped in the clogged fish ladder.  The prov. gov't (Libs) sucks.

Update:  I sent a form to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Dead Fish.  If they are the usual government, it'll be weeks before the fish are not saved.  The summer students are gone, and the old guys don't do Internet well.  I suppose there might be an unpaid intern scavenging under the minister's table, but that would be just too lucky.  :)

Update2:  I was afraid to go down for a week, but I'm happy to report that the intern found the email and it's all cleaned up.

Linux - new kernels cause endless ALSA problems

There had to be a reason why there were so many postings about alsa problems after 3.14.  It took me forever, but I found it, and got my sound card working again.

So, no matter what your lspci tells you about your soundcard, when configuring the new kernel hit every sound option and all the debug as well.  And go into the 'hd audio' and hit everything.  Then, even when dmesg says it can't find a soundcard, everything works.  Get rid of that loser 'pulseaudio' and go with alsa on everything.  Seems a bit quiet right now, but I'm glad I got my sound back.  Even though I have an Nvidia soundcard, it likes ATI hd audio.  Weird.

Using 2 step authentication

Apparently, all a hacker has to do is whine to the support, pretending to be an air-head celebrity, and all the nudies are theirs.

To prevent this I have encrypted my devices, and now I use Google 2 factor authentication.  It just ups the difficulty a bit, but it's enough for them to go on to the next sucker.

Do it!

Last Cottage Report

This is the big Canadian Thanksgiving.  We have it much earlier than the Americans because it is difficult to dig out the turkeys from under the snow.  :)

Anyway, it is official cottage closing weekend.  In the old days when we believed in global warming, we could go well into November.  But now, with the 70's coming back, we're lucky if we don't freeze up before the weekend.  This weekend we had nice days, but some nasty ice pellet flurries, and it was very cold at night.  I feel I got the pump drained in time, and Monday was a nice send-off of total cold dreariness.

Our neighbours will go across the water in an open boat until December.  Then they have to wait a month for the ice to freeze, and then go again.  I can feel it in my bones!

LInux - fstab's gone wild again

This only happens on my 'bleeding edge' machine.  For a long time, I couldn't mount nfs in fstab, because that would get executed before the network was up.  They finally fixed that.  Now, with the latest Debian update of systemd (I think), I can't mount my extra disk in fstab.  I have to wait and do a mount command.  I suppose that will take another few months to fix.  :(

Oklahoma M4.3 earthquake party

Yep, another one.  Good thing it is in the middle of nowhere.  Doesn't mean anything.  This will probably get discounted to M4

Update:  Two identical earthquakes at the same spot are called couplets and are diagnostic of injection.  This one was felt more, perhaps because the first one softened things up.

Note the effect of swamps on the large scatter.

Update2:  No reduction.  A real M4.3

Dear Santa, I want a slab of Burgess Shale

You can't get this anywhere.  I was near the site in the winter, and saw some slabs in the local museum.  In the summer they take visitors and have hilarious stories about people trying to run off with a piece.  Usually a grizzly bear gets them.  :)

But now....

Article

Now we can out own slabs to hang on the wall.  I would put in a bit more vertical just to make them stand out.  After all, this is art!

Oh darn, another Oklahoma M4.0 earthquake

I'm not in the mood for that whole place falling apart right now.  I have created a fictional bubble that nothing was going to happen there (cognitive therapy), and this earthquake was the pin.  :(

So, I looked at that solution first, and had a rough idea where it was.  I thought, that's weird, none of the fault planes are lining up with the main shear fault.  Perhaps I am totally wrong after all.  Then I looked at the location in detail.

Blah, in a totally new zone.  The mechanism relates to the stress relief of the thrust.  Still on course.

Update:  It was a 4.3 cut down to 4.0    Interesting.

Non-linear acoustic and seismic

Reference


It's a stretch to bring this to earthquakes, but that's what I do.  I'm glad they are doing this in the lab, since I was looking at this for earthquakes 30 years ago.  Non-linearity simply means they blast the hell out of it.  With dynamics, all materials have a low stress linear zone, and then it starts to curve as the amplitude gets higher.  With imaging, they have to be careful not to go too high.

This just dips into the fine cracks.  With earthquake seismic waves, the linear zone starts at about 10 km away.  In the East, when the seismic waves hit this sweet spot, they can propagate 'forever'.  But nothing gets damaged in this zone, unless it is a brick building on a deep swamp.  This is what those 'early warning systems' want to protect us from.  When I did a study for a deep nuclear repository, I found these seismic waves are limited in their induced stress to a very small level.  That is why the PGV is so low on rock.

In the immediate fault zone, all bets are off.  Non-linearity is in full swing.  The PGV can really get up there.  This is also the reason I went for PGV exclusively, it directly reflects the induced stress of the wave.

Linux - The New Samba

Further to my adventures of reinstalling my main machine, I have discovered the New Samba.  What a shock!  Anyway, they've gone full out with security, and it makes difficult for a small network, where all you want to do is watch legal movies on your wd-live.  :)

First off, they now totally pooh-pooh SWAT which I used to use to configure the samba server.  Now I have to use gadmin-samba.  The worst is that they also diss the use of security=share, which was a convenient way to blow out all the security.  After reading everything on the Internet, I had to settle on having a samba user for my exported drive.  The wd-live could handle it.  No more 'anonymous'!

Update:  It's security=share, now you can only use 'user'.

LInux - Reassembly

On my main machine, I use Debian Jessie, which is testing, and I always put in the latest kernel.  After a year or so, the updates become quite confused.  I always know I'm in trouble when an update suddenly wants me to remove half of KDE.

I copy everything to the second disk, including the hidden files.  Then I install the latest Debian testing.  It's a pain reassembling all  my programs, but they are all out there.  Nice thing about Linux.

Now it's all working again.

Cancel That

I'm fine now.  All the earthquakes respected my wishes and stayed quiet.  Hopefully nothing will happen for a while.

Depression hits the Fish -- Good-bye

I've gone into a manic frenzy with these earthquakes, collimating with my poem.  I've got no response, so I assume everybody hates it.  That's the trouble with us Intellectual Depressive, we get as depressed as being right, as being wrong.

I don't like that I'm always right when making fun of stupidity, and it gets to me sometimes.  So, with this post, I'm shutting down, again, for the 10th time, or more...   I don't think there is a size of ok-kan earthquake that will get me back, since I have predicted all this, in a depressing manner.

An earthquake poem for Halloween

This is verry scarry.  Keep it away from little kids.  I've put out the scary pumpkins, and now in celebration of the big Kansas M4.4, I present this:

Earthquake Halloween

This is not the friendly monster that lives under your bed,
No, this is the kind that knocks you on your head.

It all started eons ago, when there were mountains as high as Everest,
The rock thrusted up, then down, total turmoil we shall call ‘Never-rest’.

It then settled down for a hundred million year sleep,
With a blanket of oil-bearing rock, cozy and comfy, and nary a peep.

But all the while, tectonic plates kept grinding,
Horizontal stresses building, the monster hardly minding.

He gave a little chuckle, and almost a song he did sing,
When his cousin, New Madrid, made the bells in Boston ring.

But now it was his turn, there was no stopping,
By injecting noxious waste, the friction was dropping.

But they weren’t merely injecting saltwater, that was a bland paste,
No, they were going for stress corrosion, the direct application of Fracking Waste!

After a few billion barrels of the water,
The Monster was ready to get up for the slaughter.

And so it came, with a brick building on a swamp,
There was a knock at the door, the Monster ready to romp.

“Go away!” said the occupants, “We are God-Fearing Fundamentalists, tucked in our bed.”
Said the Monster “Old scriptures won’t help you, should have gone to Science, instead.”

He shook and he roared, and broke every house,
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

“I’ve done it!”, I’m the strongest force in the US!
That’s it for Oklahoma, now on to Kanzess!

Kansas M4.4 earthquake - Toto, this isn't stable Kansas anymore!

I'm working on my Halloween Earthquake Monster poem, which I would release on that day, or a big earthquake, whatever came first.  I better hurry up!

Nothing to say, except that this is a much bigger version than the last one.  They'll probably knock it down, since it is a normal (tension) earthquake, and not much PGV for its size.  That's one reason that everybody thinks induced earthquakes pack less bang for the buck.  Now, had it been thrust, near houses, that would be something!

M4.4 is the magic number where both Arkansas and Ohio gave up.  I give credit where credit is due, and these two states won't be cowed by such a weeny little earthquake.  They'll go up to 7 at least!

Remember Kansas, you can keep your 4.8 billion dollar income if you pay me a few million for the Fish Treatment.  :)

Update:  I'm looking at the street view of the epicentre, Danville, totally destroyed.  Wait!  ... that was a picture taken before  .... drat.

Update2:  Now on sale at M4.3

Update3:  Quite a number of aftershocks.  The injectors will be happy as the pressure drops.

Kansas may be opening another earthquake mechanism

I'm just joking around here.  One earthquake all by itself does not an injection site make.  After all, there are completely natural and organic earthquakes.  But it's right along the Grenville Front megathrust, and would make a great injection site.  :)  Just a few billion barrels and we'd have something!

Update:  Yeah, they're following the OK religion!