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.

No! Don’t groan! I can be long winded, yes, but this one’s short and sweet. There was a point I had wanted to add to the last post but as happens, it got left out. But it is a good one… why, exactly, do I care so much about which browsers user which rendering engines? Or even on their general history?

When I’m checking to see if my web pages work across various platforms and various browsers, I don’t have to start out by going through and checking how they appear in an all encompassing, exhausting review using each and ever on any and all. If I hit the four main engines in the order of their percentage of use: Trident, Gecko, Presto (Opera), and KHTML, I’m in a very good position. Granted, for more troublesome nit picky detail, it is possible for two different gecko-based browsers to have different problems with some bit of HTML or CSS or JS or other, but in the main, I’ve likely shaken out all the major glaring problems in the most efficient manner.

Knowing that Safari has the lion’s share of the Mac OS lets me ensure that I’ve taken care of the majority of Mac users by checking with that one. If there’s some issue with MacIE, I can pretty much leave it alone or let it degrade. Or if I’m pressed for time, I can choose Safari over MacIE or Camino or Mac Firefox and get pretty good Mac coverage.

Speaking of which, I’m aware that this blog doesn’t display well in Safari. I’m hoping to have some time on a borrowed Mac soon to figure out why.

For tables,

border-spacing: 0px;

works fine in every browser (Opera (PC, Linux), Firefox (PC, Linux, Mac), Safari) except IE6 to eliminate the bit of padding around the table and its border and around each table cell. For IE6, it’s necessary to use

border-collapse: collapse;

which works all of the above browsers. I even checked Mac IE which didn’t recognize either, but it’s so dead in the water it can be ignored at this point.

According to W3, both seem to be valid markup (as opposed to made-up stuff introduced ad-hoc that no one should ever use).

This is the start box with no properties specified. Note the table background color peeking around the entire table and between each cell:

With this next box, everyone but IE6 users should see a nicer alternating-row look:

With this one, everyone should see a nice alternating row color:

And now everyone (but the poor Mac IE users, of course) should see alternating rows: