(Editor's Note: This is the original 'geek page' written by MBone which went up on our original website. Prob'ly written in April of 1995. It's completely obsolete now, of course. But it is a good snapshot of where we were when we got started on the web.)
Technical Shit
For Geeks Only
by MBONE
For those of you who must know the details of how this page is put together, here it is.
The ROX Quarry is produced on a 33 MHz 486 PC compatible running Linux. The current server machine is a Pentium P-90 machine, also running Linux and NCSA httpd v1.3.
All HTML code is written by hand because I haven't seen any editors that seem worth my while, yet. Most of the images were created by B with a Video Toaster equipped Amiga. Once I get the images on my Linux machine, some further processing is necessary. I use the pbmplus package to convert the frame grabs from the rgb format to ppm format. I then use xv to do some resizing, color quantization, and conversion to gif format. I use giftrans to create transparent areas on the images and giftool to make them interlaced.
The video is digitized on a Macintosh Quadra 840AV where some minor editing is done using Adobe Premiere 4.0. The quicktime files are compressed using the Cinepak format and flattened using MovieShop 2.0. Our original intention was to provide the video in both quicktime and mpeg formats, however, converting to mpeg proved to be a problem. The only conversion program I could find (for free) was for the Macintosh, and it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. If you know how this can be done, preferably on a Unix machine, please contact me.
More time has been spent on trying to solve file transfer problems than actually writing HTML. It seems our video digitizing machines were on a broken network. We couldn't transfer 1 minute of video and we had 30 minutes total. So we had to find a tar program for the Mac to write DAT tapes that we could read on the Linux server. After some trial and error with the block size, we managed to make all the video available on the net.
— posted by MBone on January 11th, 2012
