I made an impulse buy this past week ordering a Tripp-Lite clip-on webcam for my laptop. My wife and I are leaving next weekend to go on a week-long cruise without our kids, and I thought it might be fun to post some video blog entries for them while we are gone so they (and ultimately you as well) can see what we are up to.

I chose the Tripp-Lite camera due to pretty consistently positive cost/value reviews, although I was a bit worried that I couldn't find a single instance of anyone on the internet actually using one under Linux. Why should that stop me, huh? When it arrived I plugged it in and... nada... nothing! Although my laptop could see the device, I couldn't seem to get the drivers to work. After doing some digging around I found that it uses the Z-Star Microelectronics Corp. ZC0301 WebCam chipset, which seems to be very common in the cheapo-Chinese-made webcam space. There is an unbelievably awesome project out there where a guy named Michel Xhaard has written drivers for tons of webcam chipsets, and although mine was included I just couldn't seem to get it to work, no matter what I did.

Eventually it hit me that since I am using an Alpha version of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron), perhaps I should roll to a release version and see what happens. Given how easy it is to swap distros in Linux, I decided to roll back to a 7.04 (Feisty) remaster disc that was laying around. Upon plugging in my camera on the new distro it just worked natively! YAY.

So, now I am playing with the apps a bit. I found Camorama which does video captures and can FTP them to a server at regular intervals. I thought it might be fun to create a custom pod on my blog that shows a current picture of me working - or zoning out... picking my nose... whatever. So, the pic of me you see on the left is the most recent of those. The timestamp text is a little small when I resize the pic, but if you view it in full size (or pull out your magnifying glass), you can see the date.

As for recording video in Linux, I created a launcher that allows me to record AVI files with audio using mencoder. For those interested in doing that, you will first need to install mencoder:

$ sudo apt-get install mencoder

mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l:width=320:height=240:device=/dev/video0:forceaudio:adevice=/dev/dsp -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=64:mode=3 -o /home/dshuck/Desktop/webcam.avi

killall mencoder

I have now been using Ubuntu for about 2 years, and oddly enough one thing that has always evaded me is how to properly set up the JRE plugin in Firefox. It *seems* like that ought to be an easy process, but it is one of those annoying little things that just hasn't worked for me, although it has never been important enough for me to chase down.

Yesterday I had to do a Webex presentation that required the JRE plugin, so I decided it was time to hack my way through it. One thing that I was thinking my be a factor is that I use Swiftfox instead of Firefox. I decided to take that out of the equation just to make sure, so I went ahead and removed it. When running Firefox and hitting about:plugins in the address bar, I could clearly see that the Java plugin was not in the list. I looked in ~/.mozilla/plugins, and saw a libjavaplugin.so in there, but it was obviously not doing its job.

So, after a lot of floundering, here are the basic steps I took that got me going...

• First, I completely uninstalled Firefox:
  $ sudo apt-get --purge remove firefox
  
• I then reinstalled it:
  $ sudo apt-get install firefox
  
• Next, I had previously installed the sun-java2-bin package, so I wanted to wipe all evidence of that and reinstall it. I did the following:
  $ sudo apt-get --purge remove sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin
  
• To reinistall it I did:
  $ sudo apt-get install sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin
  
• After doing this I opened Firefox and put about:plugins and still didn't see the Java stuff. At this point, I went into my ~/.mozilla/plugins directory. From earlier attempts I had some libjavaplugin.so and libjavaplugin-[something I don't remember].so. I decided to kill those off:
  $ sudo rm libjavaplugin*
  
• At this point looking around I found a file /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so that seemed like a decent candidate, so I did a symlink like this:
  $ ln -s /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so ./libjavaplugin.so

At this point I restarted the browser, hit about:plugins and was thrilled to see an entirely new section for Java!

Now, take the steps above with a grain of salt. I certainly don't want to infer that this is by any means the right way to get it working, but it is the series of steps that finally got it working for me. Hopefully someone else might get something out of it as well.

This is probably and edge case that doesn't come up very often, but today I found myself with the need to remove all messages from my Postfix queue.  I had generated a LOT of emails that were set for outbound delivery to all the users on InstantSpot using Postfix as the mail server on my laptop.  After generating the messages, I realized that the ISP that I was sitting on doesn't allow outbound messages from SMTP servers as a spam prevention method.   There was some urgency to the messages that needed to be sent, so I ran the process again on out production server which sits on a more open network.  The messages went out from there and all was well... except that I had a few hundred outbound messages sitting in my queue.  I knew that as soon as I connected to another network, all those messages in my Postfix queue would be delivered ... again.   

So, after a bit of searching for files locally, I did some Googling and found that you simply have to run the following command:

(as root)

#postsuper -d ALL

(on Debian/Ubuntu)

$sudo postsuper -d ALL