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January 19, 2005

Hoax Update

Alek of the infamous Christmas lights webcam hoax was kind enough to e-mail me today: (reprinted by permission)

Rita,

I tried to comment on your blog entry about my fun little christmas
lights hoax, but it wouldn't take the comment ... but here's what I was going to say:

Glad you guys enjoyed it ... and yea, I was pretty surprised nobody
ever asked anything difficult - heck, I could have done this another year if
I hadn't decided to approach the Wall Street Journal to break the
story.

BTW, some of the TV video coverage was pretty funny - see
here.

Happy Holidays,
alek

The TV video coverage is hilarious. You can also read a full explanation of how he did it here.

I can't wait to see what he does next year.

Posted by Rita at January 19, 2005 06:21 PM

Comments

I love the night-time sourpusses. "We feel like idiots and it's all his fault."

Posted by: Keith at January 19, 2005 08:20 PM

"We feel like idiots"

As well they should. Even if you could set up the webcam to control the lights, how would you be able to handle multiple simultaneous requests to turn the lights off/on?

That'd be one helluva multi-tasking multi-thread wouldn't it?

Posted by: rita at January 20, 2005 11:29 AM

Eh. Can't be much worse than handling multiple simultaneous updates to a single database record.

That said, I avoid database work like the plague.

Posted by: Keith at January 20, 2005 12:00 PM

There was some locking mechanisms that basically throttled things so the webcam (cough, cough) could only be updated once/second. And when I was getting hammered (peak rate was 18/second), you would get a message basically saying "sorry charlie, your command wasn't taken, try again"

You would actually use a the same approach if there really WAS a webcam (or I guess you could use an averaging technique, but that would generate wierd results IMHO) - heck, some people said I should charge money to let 'em control the webcam! ;-)

In fact, the whole front end would probably remain the same, only the back-end (which was an image generator) would be swapped for some sort of interface to a real device - more details at http://www.komar.org/xmas/hoax/#work

Posted by: alek at January 21, 2005 07:49 PM