Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 on Ubuntu

I bought a Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 today for a linux box (Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex). My preliminary research on this webcam found a few people getting it to work out of the box with Intrepid.

My story was anything but. The webcam did get detected by whatever hotplug manager du jour is for Ubuntu. However Skype test call wasn't working. After a few hours of google searching -- there goes my Saturday -- I fixed the problem and here are my notes.

• sudo apt-get remove --purge pulseaudio (another sound server du-jour)
• System/Preferences/Sessions, uncheck Pulse Audio
  
• System/Preferences/Sound, set everything to ALSA, set Sound Capture to USB Device OSS
• Skype/Options/Sound Devices, Sound In -> USB Device (plughw), Sound Out -> Default, Ringing -> Default

Now video is flickering. Very annoying. I have an ATI card with compiz running. Fix is to turn off "TexturedVideo" in xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
   Identifier "Configured Video Device"
   Driver "fglrx"
   Option "TexturedVideo" "off"
EndSection

iPhone goodness

So I finally got an iPhone for myself a week ago and it continues to amaze me. The amount of useful apps in the App Store is astounding. The features I'm using most often so far are the push email, sms, the camera for taking snapshots of books I'd like to find time to read, youtube, podcasts, and of course visual voicemail is just awesome. Some of the free apps I've downloaded and actually using include:

• Forex OTG for checking foreign exchange rates and charts (room for improvement there)
• Shazam for finding the name of the song playing on the radio
• Urbanspoon for restaurant picking
• AroundMe for finding a starbucks near me
• i.TV for TV schedules
• Twitteriffic for twitter
• Google Earth
• Google app for voice activated google search and google reader
• 1password for password syncing with my mac
• iTalk for recording notes
• To Do's for todo tracking. Though this is proving to be too basic. I might try Things or go all out for OmniFocus
• Fring for Skype and AIM
• MyMote for controlling my MythTV box
• FlyCast for online radio
• TouchTerm for ssh
• Apple Remote
• Evernote
• Tap Tap
• BigOven for recipe search

There's only a few apps I've actually bought and one of them is Ocarina. Just amazing.

So back in July I placed an order over the phone with Fido for an iPhone 3G 16GB. It's now October 11 and no iPhone in sight. I called them two or three times. Yesterday they said I will get it by October 30th.

Meanwhile I was able to walk into a Fido Kiosk on September 30th and walk out with an iPhone 3G.

OS X Blooper of the day... "auromatic proxy"

Yesterday I went out to Home Depot and bought a peg board and cable ties. Here's the newly organized office desk with less cable clutter. The main point was to get stuff off the floor. Thanks to Decluttered for the idea. The dimensions of the peg board are 33'' x 24'', cut from a 48'' x 48'' board. About $10 CAD at Home Depot.

N.B. the radiator by the window is non-functional.
There's a little ikea pencil stuck in the peg hole just under the hard drive enclosure.

Fujitsu has announced the availability of ScanSnap S300M. The wildly popular sheetfed scanner is now available for the Mac platform.

I've been using a cheapo CanoScan LIDE 90 with ReceiptWallet to scan all my receipts. The Canon OS X drivers aren't that great. And the flatbed scanning is slow. I think I will be buying the Fujitsu shortly. If so, stay tuned for a review.

I have published Business::OnlinePayment::CyberSourceSOAP in a public svn repository.

I have also started discussion on the bop-devel mailing list regarding the future of Business::OnlinePayment::CyberSource. So far the consensus is that long term the current cpan module should move to the SOAP implementation. I agree with this idea because the current cybs.pm (aka CyberSource::SOAPI) implementation is limited to x86 hardware.