Peter's Blog

I could do with a TV in my computer room. I have my old Gentoo server and a Pinnacle TV card sitting idle. I thought I would try just booting a Knoppix CD and seeing what I got. It booted ok and looking through the multimedia applications I found Xawtv, a TV application. It had a good go at searching for TV channels but it didn't find any. I faffed about for a while, setting up different types of TV card and tuner chipsets, but no joy. It didn't tell me it was broken but it didn't work either, all I got was a black TV shaped window with some noisy coloured pixels at the top. It my well be because of the aerial connection (in fact driven from my Sky Plus box downstairs, via a booster/distributor box) but it's too much hastle to grab a portable TV and check that out.

Knoppix: Works nicely. Possibly a good replacement for Gentoo as long as it has good package support.

Update: spent the afternoon on this and here are the conclusions:

• The card is a Pinnacle PCTV Rave
• It uses the MT2050 tuner chip which is not supported by the bttv drivers on the version of Knoppix I am using (17-7-04).
• Patches exist but not sure they will work on a live CD. I'll try latest Knoppix before installing something properly.

Update:

The tuner works with Knoppix 3.6 (2004-8-16) running the 2.6 kernel (i.e. with the boot option 'knoppix26). The picture is very noisy, looks like a lot of processor noise. I'm thinking of installing properly, rather than just using a live cd. Choice of distribution? Knoppix, Debian, Ubuntu...

I bought a copy of Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album online. It's a decent enought program and using Paint Shop Pro has made me a fan of their software. I have tried Picasa for organising my photo's and it is free and very flashy looking but I found it to be too restrictive, it's like a lot of google stuff in assuming you are a moron and that configuration options will confuse you. It hides grubby details like where on the disk it has put your pictures because you are too dim to understand the concept of files and directories.

Things I like about it:

• Adjust Wizard: shows you your photo and previews of what it will look like after various enhancements. Go through, accepting the previews you like.
• Easy to use Redeye correction. The Paint-Shop Pro redeye is very powerful but fiddly: you have to figure out the exact colour of someone's eyes, size of pupil, stuff like that. I use an old Nikon Coolpix 3000 camera which often produces redeye.
• Organises and nags you into making backups. Not a bad thing for irreplacable family photo's.
• Can quickly find photo's, rotate portraits etc, and quickly drop into PSP if a photo needs advanced editing.

However, after purchasing, attempting to get my licence key gives me the following error:

Internet Connection Failure

The product you are attempting to run is unable to connect to the Internet to
obtain a license key. You may not be able to run this program fully until a
connection is made.

Please check that you are connected to the Internet. If you have a connection
already, please check that your firewall settings will allow this software
program access to our servers.

Error code: -1

I've been trying this for three days now. I sent a message their customer service two days ago and have had no response. I tried turning off the Windows firewall but this made no difference and their online FAQ does not mention any specific ports that should not be blocked. The key retrieval thing asks for a password that I entered when I bought the software. I'm pretty sure I'm putting the right password in but their system does not give the option of emailing me a reminder.

Most registration systems I have used email you a key that you enter into the software. It looks like Jasc are using some outfit called Digital River for their software licensing and a system that downloads the key for you. It would save you a small amount of hastle except it is broken. I've had hastles at work with Pro/E CAD software licensing (Macromedia Lice) and when trying to add reliable dongle support to software.

Open Source software has another subtle advantage: a flaky copy protection scheme won't break it.

Blogging has a less subtle advantage: you can vent about something to hundreds of millions of potential customers. My Iotech diatribe got a response from their web master who was doing some market research using google.

I use 1&1 (geddit?) for my domain name registration. Last week they sent me an invoice for renewal of a domain that I no longer use. I emailed them back asking to cancel it and after a week they replied to say that I have to do it in writing. They have already debited my credit card for another year so I am stuck with it.

I may have to pre-emptively cancel all my services with them, except maybe bisiand.me.uk, as I don't like this way of doing business (debiting with no warning, delaying feedback, making cancellation awkward). They emailed me this morning about their affiliate program. I don't intend to recommend them to anyone.

My referrer logs are full of references to debt consolidation, poker, car rental, dating sites and similar rubbish. I think the idea is that if I happen to publish my referrer logs then these sites get pagerank.

I don't publish these logs and it gauls me that these people are eating my bandwidth and giving me false hits. Drupal makes it awkward to find the originating IP addresses, otherwise I'd be denying access. Ok, I may cut out folk on dynamic IPs but life is hard.

Drupal has a mechanism for telling the world about the existance of a new Drupal installation. I thought I had this turned off. Somehow the comment spammers know my site exists and are using thier Drupal logins to spam it. Bad Drupal.

Found another cool Firefox extension: ViewSourceWith. Adds a new context menu item allowing you to view page source with a real editor.

Some of our email servers at work have ceased to be so I am having to send email via a Microsoft Exchange server, using Thunderbird as a client as I despise Outlook.

I was having problems sending mail outside the company: I'd get an error telling me that it couldn't relay messages. I fixed this by telling it to authenticate my login to the Exchange SMTP server.

Since I flashed my DLink DI624 last week I haven't had any annoying/weird connection problems. So either:

• Flashing DI624 fixed annoying/weird problems
• WiFi using neighbours are on holiday
• It's a flash in the pan and will start again, worse than ever.

Right now I have a UltraVNC window open on my laptop controlling my desktop PC upstairs while it burns a Knoppix ISO downloaded with BitTorrent using ISO Recorder.

Cool

Trying to capture images from a webcam 200ms after a shutter is opened. Getting big problems due to propogation delays in the video drivers and partial images being captured. There is little control over the webcam via the DirectShow interface. The whole thing is wrapped up in a user-friendly black box.

Decided to go the ambitious route: write own driver. This way I can avoid any propogation delays, auto-exposure control, maybe stop it trying to stream video and just capture still images. To this end I am struggling with libusb-win32, a library which should allow me to write a USB driver in user space (i.e. not a device driver). Unfortunately it is steadfastly refusing to allow me to send any vendor messages to the device without giving me a CRC error. The USB initialises ok, I can select interfaces etc. I am using SweexCam which can capture images from a SN9C102 webcam chip but was written for linux. Comparing this with Sucr, a native libusb-win32 utility, I don't see what I am doing wrong.

I am using libusb-win32 as a device driver rather than as a filter driver. From what I can gather (there being no documentation other than a mailing list) the filter driver hooks into the existing device driver chain and allows you to inject your own traffic. With the device driver you take full control. I would prefer to use the filter driver and that do the initialisation but it dies early on in the initialisation sequence, when selecting an alternate interface. Also, whenever I uninstall the Filter Driver it takes out the USB Hub driver on my PC which is a little bit worrying (I have to uninstall and reinstall the Hub to get USB going again).

I got a good trace of the USB activity from the real driver using USB Sniffer and I feel there is a good chance I can get this going if only libusb-win32 will start playing ball. Unfortunately, USB Sniffer is refusing to log the activity of the driver I am writing, which would have been a useful debugging facility.

I may have to write my own code to initialise the CCD on the webcam. The webcam main chip appears to talk to this via an I2C bus. USB Sniffer gave me a good trace of the initialisation sequence so I am not too worried about this. That's the next problem.

Update: Tried latest development snapshot of libusb-win32 (20041118) and got past these problems in the release version (0.1.8.0: which is nine months old). Apparently this version also supports Isochronous transfers, which I may need.

Yesterday:

FireFox

decided to show me profile manager and refuses to let me open my old profile. Have to start new profile from scratch, installing extensions etc

ThunderBird

not connecting to IMAP server: waits forever and doesn't time out

Looks like the spammers have worked out that only the first 6 characters in gmail email addresses are significant and are bombarding gmail with spam. Both my accounts are getting it, none of the email has the exact correct email address. Looks like combinations of words are being used to invent addresses. Gmail is recognising and filtering the spam but I still have to vet the spam list.