This is a feed from my Delicious account showing the last 5 recent links I’ve bookmarked.

• I wish we had a better metric than the “man-hour.” How about measuring flow or energy required for a project? – Phil Dhingra 2010/02/11
• The no-framework PHP MVC framework – Rasmus’ Toys Page 2009/08/22
• Dive Into HTML 5 2009/08/22
• 10 Windows XP services you should never disable | 10 Things | TechRepublic.com 2009/08/22
• Free SEO Software Tool & Text Browser, Search Engine Optimization Tools – SEO Browser 2009/08/22

Latest Twitter: I’m in FUD mode! # 18 hours ago

I recently installed the webcam on a Lenovo Y430 running Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope).

First thing I did was install Cheese:

sudo apt-get install cheese

It’s not necessary, but its the only program I’ve seen that recognised that I had the Lenovo EasyCamera. Also, it’s helpful to note that sometimes your camera is really off. You can turn it on by pressing Fn + Esc.

After that I opened up terminal and did the following:

uname -r

The response should be:

2.6.28-15-generic

If it’s less than version -15 then download the latest Linux header by typing into terminal:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

Next open a browser and go to:

http://linuxtv.org/hg/~pinchartl/uvcvideo/

And download the tar gz (left hand side). After downloading, extract the files and go to extracted directory using terminal
and type the following:

make

It takes more or less 10 minutes to make the file. Then, still using terminal type:

sudo make install

Followed by:

sudo depmod -a

and finally type:

lsusb

Now try reopening Cheese and your camera should work. If it still doesn’t work try restarting your computer and trying again.
Hopefully this helped anyone trying to install their webcam on Ubuntu.

After reading Michael E. Driscoll blog posts about How XML Threatens Big Data I wanted to point out that XML on it’s own is probably the best data interchange format around. Yes, I know of CSV (comma-seperated-values) and a few other, and they all got their place. But the beauty of XML is that it’s very human readable.

Just the other day I was running Windows Event logger looking for error logs. It provided both a quick view of the errors and a XML view. I could easily copy-paste the XML output and post it on a forum. It’s easy to edit and flexible enough to create a quick parser around it. Other tools such as HiJackThis! uses XML for reporting allowing users to easily post problems to forums to find system errors.

Big data ported to XML mght not be the best idea, but having a tool to convert data from one format to another is the strenght of XML. While “XML’s expansiveness” costs a huge system footprint, it can be scaled much better for imports. A XML file can be broken into several smaller files and the import can be scaled using cloud services, something that cases a lot of problems using other current day solutions.

To draw a point, XML isn’t a bad interchange format, as long as it know’s it’s place in data conversion and doesn’t become the data access medium.

Ever since version 9.0 (that I can remember) Opera has removed the keyboard shortcut for copying a URL and the creating a new tab and pasting the URL straight to it and loading the site. To modify it back to its old shortcut do the following:

1. Open Preferences (Tools->Preferences or Control F12)
2. Go to the Advanced tab  then Choose Shortcuts from the left panel
3. Under the Keyboard Setup list highlight Opera Standard and click Edit
4. On the search field type “Paste and Go” (without the quotes)
5. Under the Actions column, double click the “Paste and Go” text and replace with “New Page & Paste and Go”
6. Press Ok all the way out and you’re set.

I needed to repost this on the blog to save this helpful tip.

1) Launch camera application
2) Press the Vol button (up/down doesn’t matter)
3) Camera will switch between rear & front