Human vs Machine

After tinkering for about an hour or so, I finally made it.

Beautiful.

Jangan termehek-mehek dulu dengan judulnya :)

Ini oprekan kami (saya dan tukang oprek bersertifikat: si digitallyduck) setahun yang lalu. Iseng-iseng saja. Idenya adalah bagaimana cara memantau kamera keamanan (CCTV) via web secara murah meriah hemat bersahaja :)

Idenya sendiri muncul setelah melihat proposal penawaran sistem CCTV terintegrasi seharga 60 juta rupiah, dimana 45 juta adalah alokasi untuk beli license software yang digunakan.

Untuk RSC-Server ini kami menggunakan Ubuntu 6.06 LTS dan ZoneMinder. Gratis.

Disisi hardware, hanya DVR (Digital Video Recording) yang agak mahal. Dengan 4 port, DVR paling murah saat itu sekitar 3 jutaan. Untuk CCTV, anda bisa saja mengganti dengan webcam @150 ribu seperti yang kami lakukan. Kalau mau, webcam tersebut bisa digandengkan dengan motor/dinamo kecil sehingga bisa gerak 180 derajat otomatis.

Jadi tidak ada yang istimewa sebenarnya, saya posting disini untuk alasan sentimental saja.
Siapa tahu pdf ini bisa lebih bermanfaat bagi seluruh umat manusia. Atau minimal bisa menghemat budget anda sebesar 45 juta rupiah dengan menggunakan solusi opensource yang lebih waras ;)

Selamat mengoprek!

In the beginning there was command line.
Neal Stephenson

Coming from heavy enterprise-class IDE (e.g IntelliJ IDEA, VS.NET, Oracle Apps, etc) where everything is very-well integrated, command line is the least thing I would utilize. However, soon after start writing Ruby scripts about a year ago, I realize that command line is all I ever need.

(Okay. Netbeans’ support for Ruby is awesome, but it still can’t’ beat irb + fastri + script\console, yes?)

Another reason why I love command line application because, well, I had to. 4 months ago I set up a 1 Gigs Debian VPS as my sandbox/development servers. On ssh, vi is the only editor I got. There are ed and joe. But they’re not as ‘powerful’ as vi.

From love of vi, I start to use mutt for POP3 emails. Thunderbird and monstrosity of Evolution are no longer installed. I remove gftp, and start using ncftp, which is surprisingly, from my POV, is far more powerful than gftp.

I also start using wget and ncftp on daily basis, replacing gwget and FileZilla respectively. For web-browser, however, I still use Firefox while lynx sometime comes handy too for light activity surfing.

And last week I just realize that Pidgin, previously Gaim, include a command line chat client: finch. It does eveything Pidgin does, except Finch does it on command line. Ubber-cool!

Finch works only for *nix edition of Pidgin. Some distros, like LinuxMint, already include Pidgin. If you’re happens to be an Ubuntu user, this handy guide might be useful as installation instruction.

Last, but not least, my favorite console internet application is raggle. It is a simple lightweight console application feed reader. And it’s written in Ruby.

I think that’s all my favourite console internet application. I’m still looking good alternatives for bittorrent and X-Chat (mirc client). If you do know such console applications, please do tell.