The Five Million Copies Project

Sunday, January 14, 2007

dan waber takes the cake!

Dan Waber

Ross

> hah! yes,dan, it did! amazing! you really rock, dude! (as we used to
> say)
>
> i'd love to set it up in a gallery or something! sit and watch all
> five million!

That'd be easy to do, it would just take some upload time. There's
about 40 gigs of images.

> so tell me a bit about the tech side... or do i have to take it
> apart? what's in there anyway?

It was actually a lot more involved that I thought it would be. The
first thing I did was get a friend of mine to code up the creation of
the .jpgs. He whipped up something a little too quickly--the first
time he ran the program it overwrote his entire hard drive including
the boot sector. After upgrading his system and re-installing
everything, and recreating the program more sensibly Windows Automatic
Update ran after 4.25 million copies were done, and the machine
restarted.

Finally, he got it to work, and sent me 10 DVDs of .jpgs.

It takes a really long time to access a DVD with half a million files
on it. And I wasn't going to just mail you a pile of DVDs.

So I got with another friend of mine, and he really did some magic and
had some of the needed hardware. He randomized the images, optimized
the file system on the 40 gig USB powerable laptop drive and made it
auto-run and do that displaying in the browser part. The first time
through it took several hours for a reasonable Windows machine to read
the hard drive--5 million makes for some very esoteric problems with
most file systems. Luckily, he was able to get that initial start up
time down to something reasonable.

Then, the two most beautiful girls in the world helped me decorate the
box. As you can see, no expense in stickers was spared!

> anyway, thanks a million! thanks five million!

So, does that mean the project is completed now?

Regards,
Dan