Blasting at the office

Some years ago, before we moved to a new building, construction workers had been blasting the rocks behind my office to make space for a new construction. The charges were detonated every day at regular times (one in the morning and one in the afternoon), and they were preceded and followed by warning sirens.

Even though this had become an inexorable part of our working days, and even after having noticed that the process was controlled and safe, no one could really get used to the mute tremor that every blast imposed to the structure of our building and that travelled all the way into our amygdalae, shaking our souls' ancestral roots.

When the workers and their explosive came finally close to our building, I decided to film the blast. Little did I know that, being the protective rubber carpets close to the wall, they would lose much of their ability to retain the stones that inevitably would try to escape the dynamite. I am deeply thankful to a colleague that suggested I should tape the camera to the metal fence, instead of standing outside on the fire stairs holding it.

In spite of being hit by a stone and hanging for a while on the cable, the camera is still perfectly working.

Here is a short version of the video, right to the point:


And here is the long version of the video, also showing a shaky panoramic of the site.

Ricoh Webcam

I have a Sony Vaio with a built-in Ricoh webcam. I am running Ubuntu Hardy on it. Arakhnê provides a driver for my configuration, but unfortunately the kernels supported seem to be from hardy-proposed (at the time of writing I have kernel version 2.6.24-19-generic and they support 2.6.24-20-generic and 2.6.24-21-generic). So I decided to build the debian package from source and here it is:

ricoh-webcam-r5u870-2.6.24-19-generic_0.11.1-1arakhne0_i386.deb

You can install with
sudo dpkg -i ricoh-webcam-r5u870-2.6.24-19-generic_0.11.1-1arakhne0_i386.deb

Works with:
Skype, xawtv
Does not work with:
Camorama, VLC, MPlayer/MEncoder

Here is how I made the file:
dget http://download.tuxfamily.org/arakhne/pool/ricoh-webcam-r5u870/ricoh-webcam-r5u870_0.11.1-0arakhne1.dsc
dpkg-source -x ricoh-webcam-r5u870_0.11.1-1arakhne0.dsc
cd ricoh-webcam-r5u870-0.11.1/
./buildpackage