Advogato blog for nny

26 Sep 2000

Tue, 26 Sep 2000 20:57:40 GMT

Found another W9968cf hacker on SourceForge. Sent an e-mail, hoping to be able to do some co-development. He's a student, and will probably have very little time most of the year. I want this driver happening ASAFP.

25 Sep 2000

Mon, 25 Sep 2000 21:45:34 GMT

Progress

I've got a simple kernel driver that detects my WebCam Go, but nothing more exciting than that. I discovered that Creative have not added the optional EEPROM that makes the camera look like they made it. I think all they've done is to license the chip, slap on a decent motion-sensor and lens, plus the maximum amount of memory. Neat.

With actual detection working, and seemingly no leaks (bah!), I can start figuring out the following:

How to configure the camera (luminance and other fun things) and set up how much bandwidth to grab (full 12Mb/s might be possible)
How to read a videostream, and pushing it to the V4L interface
Choosing between JPEG or uncompressed images
Reading the stored pictures

Getting the picture looking good might be another problem - heaps of settings to tweak.

24 Sep 2000

Sun, 24 Sep 2000 02:14:53 GMT

Another weekend to spend in front of the computer. Useful things done so far:

1.Played Diablo II - getting near the end for the first time with a necromancer. A lot of the things I like were never mentioned in actual reviews of the game. I think today's journalists are getting lazy. Have they even played the games they review, or are they inventing some wibble based on the press blurb? Are short sentences any better than run-on sentences?

2.Read Advogato, and remembered I hadn't certified bagder yet. He's not a personal aquaintance, but I did some translation for project Dancer waay back. Maybe I'll check out the project again soon...

3.I am fed up waiting for Creative to get their arses in gear and give us the promised driver for Webcam Go. I am writing one now. I have the W9968cf specs, and I intend to use them. Hopefully the userspace utilities I downloaded will be useful in debugging.

Judging from the Winbond docs, there is a way to store pictures on the camera built into the chip, so I might get full functionality straight away. I just hope Creative haven't replaced that bit with their own way of storing pictures. I've e-mailed Creative with a request for some information about the driver status, but I have no hope of ever getting a reply.

If any USB-knowledgable developers are reading and want to help out, just go through Sourceforce to contact me when I've set up a Go page.

Who reads this diary, anyway?

5 Sep 2000

Tue, 5 Sep 2000 19:44:46 GMT

My cow-orkers are psychos. At least one or two show symptoms of borderline psychosis. Developers, the lot of them. Depression seems to feature a lot among them, too. Is this normal? I know a lot of programmer types, many of them doing it for a living (of sorts) and they're either mad in some way (mostly non-destructive), or they're quite depressed (which isn't madness anymore, not with inflation and diseases and banks messing with your account and teeth hurting and women rejecting you and salaries that never last long enough and buses on strike and CDs misburning and people complaining loudly in their online diaries and bosses yelling at everybody when one person screws up and overtime payment being cancelled and fave websites being DOS'd out of existence and stupid locals who smell). Anyway, I don't think I know any normal people at all.

Development is at a standstill. This time it's the fault of apathy and Diablo II. And I'm tired all the time. Maybe staying up the night before going to work, just to play Diablo II isn't always a smart thing?

I've never been known to be smart, just clever ;)

31 Jul 2000

Mon, 31 Jul 2000 21:06:21 GMT

Ack. I ache again. Tip if you want to start with martial arts: Get a body-replacement before you even begin the flexing-of-legs things. Seems to work well against my aching wrists, but I'm not sure if it's worth the trade-off. They might not be available for sale yet, though; the MIBs, who broadcast straight to my pineal gland on Saturdays, say they want to keep it private for another 20 years.

Lameness on the coding-side, but I sort of have the planning for how a decent gameloop should be setup. Garg! My friggin' connection died again! Fork() you, Eircom, fork() you and the router you rode in on!

The most useful thing I've done the past week or so, apart from taking a vacation, was debugging an SDL program for someone on #sdl at openprojects.net. Got me started SDL coding again, too, and I realised my coding is shit after staying away for about 20 hours. Don't give up, Coen, it'd be bad for morale if we all gave up straight away!

I need more hands on my project. Only cynical adventure-game freaks need to apply, though.

23 Jul 2000

Sun, 23 Jul 2000 05:21:47 GMT

First entry:I cheer!

I live in Ireland, but I don't enjoy it much more than the previous place. It's early morning, and I'm downloading old games for research purposes. Lack of sleep is making the voices come back. They tell me to set up an account on Advogato, so I do that. Maybe a silly move. I go sleep now.