RPG Articles

A client of mine made the switch to Ubuntu from Vista (after Vista constantly threw up on itself over using the AHCI disk mode, despite being shipped that way. One of the lingering issues from the switch has been setting the laptop up to record video from the webcam when motion is detected. I found a number of solutions, but none of them were user friendly enough, or they only captured to stills.

Then I found wxcam. So far it’s a brilliant webcam solution. There were two issues I had installing it, a small one and a big one.

First there was a library dependency that wasn’t available from the 9.04 repos for some reason, but installing the 8.10/Intrepid version went fine. I don’t recall the lib name offhand, but just google for it if you need it.

Second was when I went to run it. It would pop up say it detected the webcam them segfault. Thankfully the mailing list archive provide the answer. Simply edit the .wxcam file in your home directory and correct the resolution that has been mysteriously set to something bizarre, like 1600×1200. The webcam I was setting up runs at 320×240, but setting that to 640×480 is fine and easier to view.

From there it was just a matter of setting the motion trigger area, hitting modify, check the motion detection box and hit record.

If suddenly something you’re working on starts throwing errors, it’s very likely your fault.

In this particular case I was slamming my head against the wall wondering why this file upload script was always uploading the same picture in subsequent fields. I finally realized I hadn’t made anything unique about the field being polled for the file info, so it would just hit the first match over and over again. Thankfully this didn’t take me a long time to figure out.

This project is probably the most sprawling thing I’ve ever worked on. It’s not bloated, yet, but it is comprised of very many little components. Not as many as, for instance, Drupal or anything else insane, but a lot for a team of one to be managing.

Except that Internet Explorer makes it useless, at least in terms of wide availability.

Don’t get me wrong, if you run IE in this day and age you should have a cattle prod used in your re-education, but if you actually don’t want to exclude a potential market, SVG isn’t for you. It seems that even IE 8 does not yet support SVG. There’s a plugin, but that’s going away, and requiring plugins is bad news for a simple page.

Which is a shame. Otherwise you could use Inkscape to generate really pretty web content. I mean, you still can, but a ton of people will have issues with it.

I decided to play with KDE, and so far it works well and is pretty, though I’m rather used to gnome at this point. However, my only real complaint, thus far, is that there was no network icon by default, so I had to go into the system settings to connect to the wireless. Also, that wireless setup tool in there? Very pretty, but it could benefit from easier to read text on those network names. Maybe black instead of light grey.

So, not a huge issue, but not as friendly as its cousin under gnome. I don’t know if this is a common occurrence, or if I’m special because I installed it after the fact.

Anyway. Onward.

After some adventures trying to burn a screwy image, I finally got 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) burned and installed on my CQ50 Compaq/HP. Everything, so far, works great thus far. I’m going to keep this as a dual boot, at least for now, but will try to steadily shift more and more to the linux side.

I should mention that the stupid wireless button doesn’t work under linux, so the light on it is always orange, but the wireless itself works brilliantly so far.

On one of my current projects it seemed best to store some photos in the MySQL database we’re using. This took me a while to decide.

Pros-

No need to worry about duplicate photo names (which is important in this project)
Less file paths to fool with

Cons-

If the database goes, the pictures go
Probably not as fast as disk access

In the end, however, the file name bit sold me. If you have several offices uploading their own photos, it’s great not having to do a lot of extra work to make sure nothing is being overwritten. As for the database corruption question, well, so much is being stored there already that the pictures would hardly be the most pressing concern. That’s why you make backups.

If anyone reads this and knows of other pros or cons, I’d love to hear ‘em.

Let’s clear up a few things. You know you should make regular backups of your data, but you don’t, or you think there’s already a solution in place, but when you need it you’ll find out how inadequate it is.

So, how do you know what a good solution is?

A backup must be separate from the system it is backing up. At the very least an external drive. Otherwise a power supply failure can fry your original data and the “backup”. Ideally the backup will be as far away from the original as possible, so that a single event won’t be likely to wipe them both out. This is the most critical thing.

A backup should never delete files. Ever. If someone deletes a Word template today, it should still be in the backup next year, or until you make a conscious choice to remove it. Automated deletion of files will screw you.

The backup should be searchable; one shouldn’t have to dig through it file by file hunting for the file you need, or be forced to restore an entire archive.

A non-critical, but handy, feature is “versioning”. You find this a lot with online services, such as iDrive and Apple’s Time Machine, but it can be implemented locally as well. This sort of thing protects you from overwriting a good file in the archive with a corrupt version of that file.

One of the more common mistakes is to rely upon a RAID. RAID systems are great, but they aren’t backup solutions. They’re good for certain performance gains, and a certain amount of failure tolerance, but just thinking “Well, we’ve got the RAID, so it’s backed up” will lead you astray. First off, all those eggs are one basket. Secondly, while not likely it is quite possible to have two or more disks fail within a short span of each other, especially if they’re operating under the same conditions. Thirdly, there is absolutely no protection from file corruption or deletion.

Remember, if you aren’t sure something is backed up, assume it isn’t.

I was staring at Facebook when I noticed that Firefox had become convinced that it couldn’t resolve addresses. Everything else looked cool, so I figured meh, restart the app and clear the fluke. I get back on, do some other things, then open Facebook again. After some experimentation I can say that it seems that Facebook is freaking out my browser.

It’s probably some stupid Windows thing. I can’t wait to get Ubuntu on this laptop.

Alright. I’m going to put this simply.

If you don’t use LDAP (which includes Active Directory), then screw Outlook. Give them a little more time and even that won’t matter.

What am I talking about? One of the best mail clients around, plus an incredible add-on for it. Get that rolling and you have a nice mail client with a fancy calendar. You can “invite attendees” which allows people to add your event to their calendar, plus send you a return message with their status. There’s even a checkbox to support some versions of Outlook, though I have no idea how well that works.

So, there, now stop paying hundreds of dollars on crusty software and donate to some open source projects.

First things first- Vista, Internet Explorer, and Windows in general are gobs of feces. That said, if you design websites you have to consider the proles, and will likely need a way to do this.

One option is to run a collection of virtual machines. If that’s more intense than you’d like, or you’d like to limit yourself to one VM for such a lightweight task, there’s a great option. Gentlemen, lady, I give you the best way to check your websites against shitty MS browsers.

Last things last- All you regular folks out there, please, please get into linux. It’s free AND better than Windows. Hell, it’s even better than OS X when you get down to it.