Webcams are interesting beasties…

First of all, I found out, somewhat to my surprise, that the quality of a webcam can depend as much on the software used as on the camera itself. It turns out that Yahoo’s webcam is very choppy and slow, though it gets the job done. The webcam through the MSN protocol was much better. However, using Kopete’s MSN protocol let me to run into a bug where the incoming cam just freezes and lags — at one point, I realized I was seeing images 10 minutes old. I can only speculate the packets took a quick side trip to a sun-drenched beach somewhere first before coming back to our gray, drizzly area.

So, I tried out aMSN to see if it was true that the webcam performance was better over MSN. This package is strictly for the MSN protocol and is designed just for Linux. The interface to this looks a little rough around the edges, although it’s possible that it’s a font issue in my installation. Ubuntu has 0.95-2.1 in its repositories, but I don’t recommend installing that. aMSN has a later version (0.96) that’s demonstrably improved, and I found it here using a standalone installer (a tar.gz for more traditional compile/install is also offered) which intrigued me enough to try it out, and it installed without any problems.

And indeed, it proved quite responsive with both incoming / outgoing webcams, showing the picture with much less choppiness.

I think in conclusion I’d have to say that I really look forward to Gaim incorporating video capability (which is rumored for 3.0, but as I said, I’m not holding my breath since 2.0 just came out) because I like Gaim’s interface the best. Kopete seems to be actively working on its code, judging from all the email on its devel list, so I would expect the bug I found to be fixed quickly. At that point, I’d be happy to use Kopete, as I can see its interface growing on me. It’s just a pity it doesn’t have a windows version, as I like being able to use the same programs at home and at work. But, in the meantime, aMSN’s not bad at all and I won’t mind using it for the webcam until one of the multiprotocol apps work for me. I prefer to run as few programs as possible

But if what you need is a robust MSN connection, I’d definitely recommend aMSN.

What a trip…I decided to see if I could get a webcam running properly under Ubuntu. The answer was eventually yes, but it was a little bit of work.

First of all I did a little homework and found that Logitech webcams were the most likely to be recognized by Linux. The company, bless ‘em, works with the linux community to provide the rest of us with the correct drivers. There’s a very nice list of supported webcams here, it’s worth checking this out first. Some webcams will work “out of the box”, but most will probably need to have either spca5xx (linux kernel versions prior to 2.6.11) or gspcav1 (versions after, which includes Ubuntu’s Edgy Eft).

Now, as far as IM’s go, there are pretty much two choices: amsn (for MSN, which I didn’t even bother with, because I don’t even have an msn account) and kopete which supports both MSN and Yahoo (among others), with webcam support on MSN/Yahoo protocols. I have a Yahoo account (as does my friend with whom I tested) so that’s what I used.

I ordered the Logitech (QuickCam Chat) and in the meantime tested out receiving the images from my friend (who ran hers on the regular Yahoo application from her Windows XP setup). The initial trial run was disappointing as all I ever got from her webcam was the first still in the stream and nothing further. Upon some investigation, which included the helpful folks at the kopete-devel mailing list, who informed me that my version, 0.12.3, needed to be updated to 0.12.4.

At this point, I got a little bit confused, because I could find no deb (or other) package for kopete 0.12.4, and when I said that, the response was “There is no separate tarball.” After puzzling over that for a while, I realized what they meant was that it was all rolled in with KDE itself. That is to say, if I upgraded from KDE 3.5.5 (which is what’s in the Ubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10 distribution) to KDE 3.5.6, kopete 0.12.4 would come bundled with that. Oy. After noodling around that one for a while, I found these partial instructions for Kubuntu (other dists can look here). Once I incorporated the Riddell key, used the synaptic package manager to add one of the listed repositories (not forgetting to reload) and then, the important part, running the following command on the terminal:

sudo apt-get upgrade kubuntu-desktop

With that, I now had KDE 3.5.6 and by extension the upgraded kopete on my system. Woot! And when I fired up the connection with my friend, after a little fiddling on both our parts, her stream came through loud and clear. Double woot!!

So now the second part, getting it to recognize MY webcam (which had arrived yesterday ). This went more quickly but was a bit wonkier. First of all, I had to install and use the gspcav1 wrapper. I followed both these sets of instructions more or less (I skipped some of the setup because my system is already set up to compile things): here and here. I have no idea why there are instructions for installing spca5xx on Edgy as the linux kernel on Edgy (check with uname -r on the command line) precludes the use of spca5xx. Use the first set of instructions if you’re installing the older spca5xx stuff for linux kernels prior to 2.6.11; the second set if you’re installing gspcav1. But note that either way you’ll modprob something called spca5xx so don’t let that surprise you.

And this time, my webcam was up and running and ran just fine on kopete to my friend’s screen. So it was all quite good. The only issue left is whether or not the webcam can be set somehow to be less choppy. It’s really got a horrendous refresh rate, and it must be possible to clear that up a bit? If any of you have suggestions, please feel free to let me know.

Hope this helped someone out. My understanding is that webcameras and the like remain a weak spot in Linux, and it’s certainly true nothing worked out of the box (I do understand some webcams do not need the spca5xx/gspcav1 wrapper, and do work when plugged in, so it might be worth finding those; I was a cheapskate and got the cheapest camera that seemed to work alright.) However, it wasn’t too bad getting it to work; the worst part was finding all the information.

I also made use of a nice quick little tool just to verify that the webcam worked (for some reason my friend isn’t at her computer 24/7 with HER webcam for testing purposes…) called camorama which I found available in the synaptic package manager as well. It was a handy utility to verify that the webcam was indeed working.

Seems everything’s updating all at once –

Internet Explorer 7 for XP

Updated to this at work, no problems. Seems to be running just fine. I’ve snagged the standalone version for 6.0 so that I should be able to continue with testing/development on both. Sigh. Not quite at the point of setting up multiboot between XP and Vista, but we’ll see.

Firefox 2.0

Update on my Windows machine, no problems. Looks VERY nice. I appreciate the tabbing features except for the fall-off scrolling at both ends. I was prepared to hate the close tabs, but they only show up once the tab is active, which means I don’t hit them by accident the way I used to when I tried an older extension. I love the integration with the various feed readers, I was able to remove the Bloglines button and with the MiniMenu extension save some serious real estate on the top. Will be nice to upgrade to 2.0 on my laptop, where the real estate would really be handy.

Ubuntu 6.10

I had no trouble with upgrading from Hoary to Dapper, but a friend did. So this time ’round I’m sitting out the upgrade for a little while. And it sounds like Edgy has some rough spots, so I’m in no hurry. A fresh install may work better than an update over Dapper, but I’ll monitor it for a while longer.

Wordpress 2.0.5

Important security upgrade, you should do it — here and also here. It only takes a few seconds to upgrade if you use Mark’s diff zip file, which I did. Even with the potential bug (which he has a fix for), I would go ahead and update. Keep an eye on Mark’s blog for more info on 2.0.5.

Roger Johansson (of 456 Berea Street) and Lorelle VanFossen both remind us that the new Internet Explorer has been released into the wild and what does that mean for all our web pages?

I want to point out that Internet Explorer really has three main versions right now. (I have to support multiple platforms, so this sort of thing is a large concern for me). IE7 is intended only for XP and Vista. Anyone who has not migrated to either of these platforms will use IE6. Since Win2K is pretty decent, and there’s a lot of people out there who haven’t bothered to shell out for the bigger badder etc computer, I expect that the web pages I work on will continue to have a substantial proportion of IE6 users. So the IE6 bugs remain a real and ongoing concertn.

In testing with IE7, we have noticed that there can be different behavior between IE7 on XP and IE7 on Vista! Now, some of this may be due to the different beta versions of Vista — I believe we’ve gone through at least two updates on Vista beta. However the possibility remains very high that IE7XP and IE7Vista will behave differently from each other as well.

So now that means three platforms to support in place of one!

In any case I’m aware that IE7 does not handle this website gracefully even though IE6 does, as you can see in this screen shot.

So I got some email over the weekend from an old friend back in grad school days, which was a pleasant surprise. I asked him how he found me this time ’round, and he pointed this out:

Actually, I was playing with Google’s new code search. After the obvious vanity search and a couple others, I tried this which lead to your blog. It turns out that their code search is an awesome way of finding lost programmers.

Google keeps pulling new bunnies out of that magic search hat. Searches based on publicly available/published code is a pretty cool concept…