I was finally persuaded to fix my webcam. The cam had been running through the qc-usb driver and a little xawtv utility. The trouble is that qc-usb is v4l and that doesn't work with the newer kernels. The nice thing about the xawtv plugin was that it automatically scp'ed the image to my webserver for me.
The new v4l2 layer of the kernel has built in support for my webcam, but I had trouble finding a [bold]command line[/bold] utility to power it. So many webcam apps will just try to pull in gnome :( I eventually went with fswebcam. I no longer scp images to my webserver, I setup Apache's mod_proxy to pull the image from another webserver (lighttpd) on the box the webcam is attached to. Seems to be working quite well so far. The init script wrapper I made for fswebcam doesn't quite have a working stop target yet though.
I'm considering rewriting my website in Python instead of PHP. The last major rewrite, going from MySQL to PostgreSQL, was definitely worth the effort. Not so sure Python has benefits over PHP though.
Congress decided to delay the DTV transition so I had to pick a new target for the mystery countdown. Feel free to guess what it is counting down until this time.
Previous countdowns have been:
* Presidential Inauguration
* Shopping days until X-mas 2009
* DTV Transition
I'm switching the markup style to bbcode since I keep mistyping HTML in these. This is a test post. Expect the entire site to be broken while I get it working and update all the old posts.
I think most people know bbcode. If not, think HMTL with < and > replaced by [ and ] (mine is a little more extensible than normal BBcode
EDIT: I also just fixed the Atom and RSS feeds that I didn't realize were broken.
I finally came up with a clever domain name that isn't registered. I bought the .org version cause its most appropriate (or inappropriate depending on your point of view)
You are not clever rewriting the "To" line of the form that sends me email. In fact my system happily accepts this, except its not really sending email. Its writing to a file that happens to resemble a Maildir style mailbox. Makes it really easy to reply to comments and you can't hack it to send email elsewhere, its NOT possible.
Also Luke, I'm not removing you from the isoview page.
I implemented a captcha-type system on the page for registration and sending the webmaster email. Silly answers are rejected although I might put some in as easter eggs later.
This site is now accessible through IPv6 thanks to SixXS. DynDNS won't do IPv6 DNS for free like they do for IPv4 so you'll have to use the IP address for the time being: ]2001:4830:1500:a6::2
This is mainly a test to see if the RSS feed is still being picked up by various websites out there (planet on lug.mtu.edu for one)
I need to do something about my navbar over there on the right, my friends list got tall enough you couldn't read them all if the browser window wasn't tall enough. Until then I have replaced the friends list with a link to a cause I agree with. IMHO Network Neutrality is a key part of the end-to-end design that made the Internet what it is. Expect a rant on the topic shortly.
I added an Atom feed to go along with my RSS feed. Supporting both formats is trivial so neither will be going away in the near future.
This site is going down tonight or tomorrow for an indefinite period of time. Jon is moving.
If anyone uses my Debian package archive I just went through an updated things.
JRE/JDK 1.5.0+update05 -> 1.5.0+update06
autofs 4.1.4-8 -> 4.1.4.9
nvidia/qc-usb/loop-aes also updated but those are for my custom kernels
I wrote a quick photo gallery script that auto-builds thumbnails using PHP's GD functions.
Like all the other code on this site, you can have it if you really want it. (Some of the code really sucks)
I got sick of the gray, so I made a copy of the gray stylesheet and changed it to green on black.
I regenerated my SSL certificate so that is has the right hostname. You can now use https://tesla.homelinux.net/ without getting a warning from your browser. Well assuming you put my Root Certificate in your browser first :p
Also I added full message bodies to the RSS feed so it will work better with RSS software. The same strip_tags rules apply there, so don't worry about getting naughty HTML.
The software is now good, no more flushing of the database.
![[setec astronomy]](/graphics/sa/sa.png){kind=small}