Readers with good memories might remember an abortive C&G Active project last year to deploy webcams across Imperial College. Described at the time as 'ambitious and bizarre' the idea came to nothing amidst a number of stumbling blocks (mostly revolving around the fact that the kind of people prepared to put the necessary work in had better things to do with themselves).

The recent launch of a webcam in the Department of Computing therefore came as a surprise to, well, just about everyone. The webcam gives a view into the depths of the Computing Support Group's Systems room from the perspective of 'Yucca', the CSG plant. The webcam is actually a spin off from the more mundane CSG project of modifying the Department of Computing's Linux distribution to support the USB cameras normally used for group projects and has been on-line for just under two weeks.

Although CSG's David McBride described the web cam as "just a quick experiment" its arrival did briefly spark a renewed interest in putting web cams around the union offices. However, the idea quickly returned to the back burner when confronted with exactly the same problems as last year (though this time cost and lack of IP addresses was more of the problem). According to Mr McBride the camera is unlikely to be permanent and will be disconnected as soon as someone needs it for a project.

Nevertheless DoC Soc (the Computing departmental society) wasted no time in claiming ownership of the camera and the 'CSG Cam' is now available from the DoC Soc homepage.