computer help? ski related...

ok, I'm in the middle of installing a new weather computer at work - (finally getting rid of some very old SGI equipment!) and want to set up a way to time lapse some of the web cameras at ski areas and in the mountains that we have permission to use.

is there a program I can download (or heaven forbid, buy) that will connect to a website at a given time, and save an image on my local drive? then I can put those images into our new computer and time lapse them easily. Most of the sites that have time lapses on them are 1: java based and 2: use really small images, so I want to save the larger images myself and create those timelapses.

any ideas are very much apprecicated...

My money is on phUnk!

Try Snag it

http://fr.techsmith.com/products/sna...ive/remote.asp

You could use wget on pretty much any platform. It is a command-line based program that downloads from whatever you specify. Use the "at" command to schedule it with your mad command line skillz, or use the task scheduler if you use windows and want pretty things to look at.

For windows, wget is here.

You'll need to write a script to do this and run it periodically. On Unix platforms this is pretty straightforward: just write a small shell script that uses wget or curl to get the desired image, and run it periodically via cron.

On Windows, look into the task scheduler and set it to run a batch file, script or binary that you have written to do what you need (if you're feeling more ambitious, write the latter as a Windows service).

All that said, I realise you probably don't have the technical background to figure all this stuff out in a reasonable amount of time. Do you have an IT guy or someone like that who can help you set up a script that does what you want?

Thanks for the info so far, good stuff. We do have an IT staff, however the network in the weather office is seperate from the building network, and we manage it ourselves.

I am working on four dual P4 3 gig Dell 670's, fully loaded with 2 gigs of ram each, and running a version of Red Hat linux customized for this application, along with a windows machine running XP and hooked up by FTP to the Dells.

I guess I didn't think about scripting a cron job on the linux boxes, I was planning to just use the windows system to download the images, and then FTP them into the Dells to assemble the time lapses and put them on TV...

Hmm...

A look at the office: the mess of cables will go away when I'm done installing the stuff...
http://www.xmission.com/~steveb/office.JPG

Like others have said shell scripts or batch files are the way to go if you are runngin *nix or Windows. In Linux use curl to grab the files and image magik to create the time lapse. If you have a Mac with OSX you do this very easily with simple workflow in automator. Export the workflow as an iCal plug in, open iCal and schedule a reocurrinng event andn have it run the plug in you just created in automator.

wget and cron is your answer here. you could probably set-up the gimp to do any image processing (or gd) you need as well.