Flyfunston

Hi all,

We are in the home stretch for fixing the wind page and stables web cam. Here is an update.

* The stablescam computer hard disk died. Strictly speaking it was just *mostly* dead. Dave managed to boot the computer in Safe mode and get most of the configuration files and software on floppy (yes, floppy).

* Rick Cavallaro, thinking ahead, has an exact duplicate of that machine ready to go. Unfortunately, Rick is in Italy preparing for the Olympics for a couple of weeks.

* The hard drive still has disk errors, so I purchased a 100 GB hard
drive to replace it. This weekend we are going to install the new hard drive, reinstall Windows and the drivers, reinstall wind.exe (the wind capture program) and take a crack at reinstalling Easysnap (image capture). Easysnap may actually be a problem since we don't have the
software CDs, just the files in the directory.

* We will also have a remote power switch so we can boot the computer from the roadway if necessary.

Changes for the future:

* We should keep a Norton Ghost disk image of the hard drive and distribute it to a few people for backup.

* We have talked about moving as much as possible to a USB flash drive instead of the hard disk. This should reduce the wear on the HD. It's unclear whether we could boot from the USB drive, though that'd be ideal. At the very least wind.exe and Easysnap should be installed on the USB drive and save their data to the same drive.

There are a few other small items we're going to implement to increase the stability and accessibility.

I have searched all over the Bay Area, the web and ebay and can't find any hardware to make the wind blow west.

Daniel