The nw8xx webcam driver I mentioned here that had not been developed since 2004 has had new files comitted to CVS. The updates include a new Makefile & patches to allow the module to be built against newer 2.6 kernels. For instructions on how to get the driver please see the original post.

Here is the obligatory ‘Happy New Year’ post, if a little late. The site also has a new look for the new year.

Making some decent progress with Pry lately, a web based search engine that I am writing for my Uni final year project. I pretty much have the basic search functionality working without problems, and now need to work on some more advanced crawling techniques and some stuff to improve searching like stemming and page ranking. I was a bit concerned about the speed of performing searches and indexing while initially designing the system, but thanks to python and the Berkeley DB libraries the whole thing should be pretty scalable. I’ll upload a working demo here shortly.

Back to Uni on Sunday for another term so progress should speed up a bit.

I’ve recently discovered an excellent text-mode media player for Linux and other UNIX like OSes. The C* Music Player (cmus) uses curses for it’s user interface and is operated in a similar way to the Vi text editor using commands.

It is light on recourses and intuitive to use. It can play FLAC, Ogg/Vorbis, MP3, WAV and many others. I’d recommend checking it out.

Using MidpSSH I have managed to get SSH access to my boxen from my phone (a Samsung D600) with publickey authentication. MidpSSH will run on tons of mobile devices that support Java with MIDP version 1.0 and 2.0. If you need SSH access while out and about, I’d recommend giving it a go.

I’ve been learning Python recently, an open source dynamic object-orientated programming language, and stumbled upon Dive Into Python, a great book that is published freely under the GNU Free Documentation License. The book is available in a number of formats including pdf. If you already have some object-orientated programming experience and want to learn Python I’d recommend giving it a read.

My PGP public key is available here. It is also listed on subkeys.pgp.net. Please use it to verify PGP signed messages from me, and to encrypt messages you wish to send to me. I welcome encrypted email.

The Divio nw8xx series chips are used in a number of old Logitec webcams, among others. I was given an old Logitec and got it working using this driver. This driver provides video4linux (v4l) support for nw8xx based webcams. Although it isn’t currently frequently maintained, it works quite well. Image quality is not excellent but is adequate. The webcam displayed on this site is currently using these drivers.

You will need a copy of the kernel source for your current kernel to build the driver. To use the driver, get a copy of the latest version from anonymous CVS:
# cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@nw802.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/nw802 login
# cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@nw802.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/nw802 co -P nw802-2.4
When prompted for a password, just press enter. Next compile the driver:
# cd nw802-2.4
The following two commands are only needed if using a 2.6 kernel
# cp Makefile.26 Makefile
# patch -p0 < patch-2.6
# make clean
# make
Load the kernel modules:
# insmod usbvideo.ko
# insmod nw8xx.ko
Plug in the camera and check dmesg output to make sure it registers the device properly and you’re good to go!

After a few months without really getting chance to work on my content management system I have finally decided to switch the site back-end to WordPress for now. At least it will allow me to have a fully functioning website while I work on finishing off the CMS. I’ve been really busy with coursework and revision for uni recently and really havn’t had time to work on it a great deal, it’s looking like it will be summer before I have a chance to finish it now. I was getting a bit bored with the theme I’d written for the old site so I decided to write something completly different for WP, it still looks a bit “theme” like but I’m working on improving it.

I’m slowly porting the content over from the old site as I get chance, it should all be up soon althought I am pretty busy at the moment. I’m also going to stick my CV and some other stuff up and hopefully make this site a bit more useful than it has been.

Things have been a bit dull lately, last term was a lot of work and I didn’t get up to much that was a lot of fun. Quite a lot of the work was pretty boring and massivley time consuming, ended up pulling more all nighters than I can remember. We had quite a bit of work to do at the beggining of this term for the software engineering project and my exams start next week, so I still have quite a bit of work on. After exams we also have preparatory work to do for our finaly year project, which means I’m going to miss out on a holiday to Newquay with the rest of my housemates. I’m really looking forward to the end of term and the beggining of summer. Hopefully I’m going to learn to drive over summer, provided I get a job to pay for it all. Anyway, it’s pretty late and I need to get up and revise tommorow.