We’re running a competition at the moment to come up with the most novel use of RiverMuse, see here . This got me thinking back to some of the early uses of the web, such as ensuring a good supply of coffee. I was wondering what I could come up with, on these lines, to demonstrate the flexibility of the system. So here goes…

In my hypothetical system, a web cam watches a hypothetical bird-feeding table in my garden. Whenever the web cam detects motion, it records this as an AVI file, and posts this in a directory on my home PC (web webcam only works with Windows). The network access by the webcam is recorded, in the windows event logs, and this comes into RiverMuse Core as an event. Omosd processes this event and de-duplicates it, which is important, as the next step in my process can only handle one event at once.

If the webcam alert has a count of 1, then yarpd executes an external command to process the AVI file into a low bandwidth format and upload it to a website. When this is done the conversion program sends a syslog message back to RiverMuse. This causes a number of events to happen:

1. The webcam alert is closed.
2. I run a shell command to tweet about it so all the fans of my bird table will know there is a new video to watch.
3. I fire an alert back into RiverMuse which contains the date in it and omosd de-duplicates this so I can have a filtered view of alerts that show me how many videos got uploaded in a day.

If the count of the webcam alert is more than 1 then yarpd executes an external script to delete the extra video clips, as my conversion process can’t handle more than one at a time.

As a phase 2 I’m going to processes the web log’s so I can see which video’s are the most watched.