[SPARCbook] topowest runs on tadpoles

[Douglas K Landau]

Greetings All,

This is a shameless plug for my new website,  which is about 
USGS topo maps.   However, this msg cannot be considered spam 
since the site is running on four 3GXs from Ross!  They are 
www, norcal, socal, and idaho dot topowest dot com.  thats

http://www.topowest.com

Coverage is present of CA, NV, ID, and UT so far.  Only CA is 
indexed as of today but HTML for the other states to follow rapidly, 
as, I hope, all the topos for the rest of the west and the country.
(They seem to love me down at the USGS [so far] and I am hoping they'll 
let me get my hands on the rest of the DRGs free of fee  :-)

Four others, oregon, wasinginton, nevada and utah, have this week
been retired from crunching images, which they have been doing 24hrs
for weeks, and are now being prepped as kiosks to be placed in Mel 
Cotton's Sporting Goods in San Jose, Halted Specialties in Santa Clara, 
the USGS in Menlo Park, and the MidPen Open Space District offices,
wherever they are.  In May I will put a 3GX in yosemite valley!

The tadpole webservers will eventually be replaced and made into 
kiosks.  As kiosks they are kinda slow to bring up a 2 meg image
but they will do the job passably until until I get a chance to 
hack xwud or xli into mozilla or prefereably make some $$$ and 
replace them altogether.  It has yet to be seen whether their
1600x1200 ability will be fast enuf to be useful...

To print them I use epson 1200s and 750s and xw_print by JJ Sarton.
that's http://home.t-online.de/home/jj.sarton/
In my experience so far, M Sarton's software often produces superior 
quality prints than Epson's own does on a peecee!!  I suspect that
the rest of the time I am not yet using it propery.

BTW if anyone else has a 3GX with a dead keyboard,  I got two good uses
for it...  :-)

I also hope to load up me personal 3GX with Hugo and XMap, gpsd, a GPS, 
and get a topo moving-map.  Looking for that stuff landed me on (where else)
Derrick J Brashear's cartographic pages!   Wow, man how cool! Thanks DB
for all the good info and sw and I will get a link to your pages asap!

With resepct to heat damage, it does appear that there may have been
some small amount to one machine.  The site has been up (more or less :)
since Jan, and the machines have been rotated unevenly and run with 
their lids down and screens on and all save and sleep disabled.  Running
Solaris 2.6 in two stacks, with the little feet folded up in case of 
earthquake :)  They do get quite warm sometimes, and now tad3 has 
one dead pixel and a very sticky hinge, as if some rubber part swelled 
up or something.  However these things may have been true already; I didnt 
examine that machine closely when I got it.  I can detect no damage to
any other machine despite extended toastiness.  Great!

For reasons I cannot explain, socal typcally runs hotter than norcal, 
and norcal is hotter than idaho.  Then again maybe it's because socal 
is on the bottom.

Regards,

dkl