Just bought a cheap Creative Labs Instant webcam. These things are supported by the spca5xx driver. To install the driver under gentoo, do:

emerge spca5xx

To see if your device is detected after connecting it up, do:

lsusb

You should see a line similar to this one:

Bus 002 Device 006: ID 041e:4034 Creative Technology, Ltd

A useful tool if you use the spca5xx driver is spcaview. In any case, initially, after plugging the webcam in, all I got was a dark screen. I believe that’s because the device needs to be initialized. I cannot be sure exactly how I activated it, except that I plugged and unplugged it while running various software. Yes, it is a bit fuzzy. Sorry.

Now, it works beautifully.

Update: You might need to plug the device after the driver has been loaded. Try typing “rmmod spca5xx” and if that works, remove your device, load the driver (modprobe spca5xx) and plug the device back in. If you want to check if it works without any fancy software, do “more /dev/video0″, there should be no error message and you ought to read some characters (maybe blanks).

Annoying bug: It isn’t clear why, but gnomemeeting has the voice button disabled despite the fact that my voice hardware is correctly configured. It could be that the spca5xx driver is messing up gnomemeeting or that gnomemeeting is buggy and sometimes erronously disables the audio.

Update on annoying bug: Gnomemeeting works just fine, but for audio input to work, you have to open a connection to another user. Great software.

I have an old an dusty 3Com HomeConnect webcam. Until a few minutes ago, I thought it was dead. Not so! I plugged it in the USB port, and did

lsusb

and voilà:

Bus 001 Device 019: ID 04c1:009d U.S. Robotics (3Com) HomeConnect WebCam [vicam]

Ah! so Linux recognizes it and suggests the vicam driver, ok, there you go:

modprobe vicam

As a basis for comparison, I tried to connect the same thing to Windows XP and no luck. The only drivers available are 16 bits drivers and they won’t install.

In gnomemeeting, I now see an fuzzy image. After taking apart the lens of webcam and cleaning it up, the image is considerably better, but still very ugly.

I guess I have to buy a new webcam! This user-commented list seems like a good start to choose a new device for a Linux user, but the list of webcams supported by the SPCA5xx driver is impressive. It is still satisfying to know I’m buying new hardware because it is worn out, not because my OS won’t support it. BTW gnomemeeting is really great software.

The Semantic Web Services Challenge 2006 is organized by Stanford University. Phase I will be held March 8-10, 2006 whereas phase II will be held June 15-16, 2006.

The goal of the SWS Challenge is to develop a common understanding of various technologies intended to facilitate the automation of mediation, choreography and discovery for Web Services using semantic annotations. The intent of this challenge is to explore the trade-offs among existing approaches. Additionally we would like to figure out which parts of problem space may not yet be covered. The workshop aims to provide a forum for discussion based on a common application. This Challenge workshop seeks participation from industry and academic researchers developing software components and/or intelligent agents that have the ability to automate mediation, choreography and discovery processes between Web services.

And yes, I am critical of the pratical side of this research. But, people can do research on whatever they want, as long as their results are neat.

On the positive side of things, I believe these challenges are a great contribution to the research community. We need to have more of those.

From Standard Deviations, I learned about IBM shutting down their public UDDI registry. Here’s is what Parand had to say about it:

It’s about time. I can tell you the exact point I lost interest in UDDI: it was the second advisory board meeting and I was struggling with the enthusiasm expressed by the board for adding features and categorizations while the basic directory was failing to get traction. A gentleman who shall remain nameless was waxing philosophic about how UDDI would be used to track shipments and trucks as they made their way across the country. It was such a huge moment of disconnect (…)

I heard even more extravagant claims. UDDI was going to be used for semantic web services: all you had to do is describe what services your application needed (like a shipping service) and the magic of strong AI would do the rest of the work for you. Except, of course, nobody knows how to do strong AI with our current computers, but who is keeping track of these things?

I wrote a new page on this blog called Where are the good places to publish? I use simple metrics and attributes to compare Computer Science conferences. One tool I suggest we use is scholar.google.com. Please comment.

Nearly two thirds of women working in IT have left or are about to leave the profession, according to research by recruitment firm Hudson UK.
(…)
More than half of the women questioned are frustrated at the lack of flexible working times, and over three quarters are angry that they are unable to work from home.

Source: Iain Thomson, vnunet.com 14 Dec 2005

The 3^rd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics (WWE 2006) will be held in Edinbugh together with WWW 2006.

The weblogging community continues to evolve: weblogs are gaining more and more exposure, the number of bloggers continues to grow and the contribution of individual bloggers is becoming significant and compelling. The dynamics of the blogosphere, found in trackbacks, citation links, blog-rolls, comments, tags, shared topics and interests provides a facinating domain of study for researchers from all academic and commercial fields including text mining, social network analysis, computational linguistics, business and marketing intelligence, libarary sciences, taxonometrics, graph theory and data visualization.