Yet Another IT-related Blog

Videoconferences have proven to be a pain to me. Some years ago I used netmeeting, which worked fine almost 50% of the times I needed. Afterwards, I made some changes to my network and there was no way of making it work… Besides I’m a Linux user in my workstation, so it was time to change but neither gnomemeeting nor Ekiga gave me good impressions.

Probably Ekiga is nowadays a pretty good videoconference client, but I didn’t manage to configure both my webcam and microphone quite well. And even more difficult was to ask my friends and relatives to install it. So I couldn’t dedicate enough time to enjoy it.

So I remembered I’m also a MacOS X user and many people around me were using Skype… Yes there is also a Linux version but it doesn’t support videoconference. So it was time to give it a chance. The problem was that Apple doesn’t allow third-party manufacturers to add support for OS X in their cameras (generally)… You know, it’s all about hardware control and minimum quality requirements. And I wasn’t going to spend more than 25€.

But there is this project: macam, which is a collection of drivers for hundreds of webcams to work in OS X. There is a compatibility list, so it seems to be an easy task to choose the right one. Well, not that easy. Some webcams have different revisions and the product id is not printed on the box so…

After some time looking in the store I decided myself for the Creative Webcam Vista rev. A, since it was on the compatibility list, but it didn’t work! The problem was that the rev. A printed in the box was the one listed in the list as Webcam Vista (D)… Ovislink 519 chip, which seems to be supported for some cams but simply not that one.

This guys at Creative have a passion for making hundreds of revisions of the same products… There is no way of identifying exactly the model without opening the box so I searched for another brand. There were almost 20 webcams in the store and finally the Hercules Classic webcam was in the list, no revisions, only one version… And the same chip!!! The OV519, but this time it works.

So this time, being an OS X user hasn’t saved me from the hardware incompatibilities which we Linux users have to suffer. Lucky me it has saved me from the software incompatibilities

These days I’ve been doing some upgrading/tuning tasks in my workstation that I had previously postponed because of exams and other projects. One of them being the upgrade of vmware player, which felt more responsive and finally features usb 2.0 support. I really like this virtualization software and the freely available player version joint to the ability of QEMU for creating vmware images allows me to test new OS versions, multiplatform software, etc. Since I cannot afford the workstation version.

The installation was really straightforward, I downloaded the 64-bit version from its website and executed the vmware-install.pl script. It overwrote my previous version and asked only for installation directories, which by default matched the ones of my previous install in /opt. The difficult part in vmware installations usually comes now with the vmware-config.pl script, specially when it comes to the compilation of the kernel modules, but this time everything worked fine! Default options were right, it detected my kernel source libraries and compiled against them.

The previous time I had to install vmware-player there was no way of doing it without patching both configurator and kernel, I’m sure some of you have heard about the vmware-any-any patches So everything felt quite good, I just ran vmware as always, accept the license agreement and…

saburo virtual # /opt/vmware/player/bin/vmplayer
/opt/vmware/player/lib/vmware/bin/vmplayer: symbol lookup error: /opt/vmware/player/lib/vmware/lib/libvmwareui.so.0/libvmwareui.so.0: undefined symbol: _ZN3Gtk13RecentManager11get_defaultEv

Symbol lookup error… cool, time to google a bit. Lucky me, having waited for some time to upgrade let time for others to go around this problem and there are already fixes posted in vmware forums. It’s got something to do with GTK libraries for the user interface and the fix is as easy as adding the following line before the exec command in the /opt/vmware/bin/vmware script:

export VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=yes

And that’s all…

There is always this confrontation between Security and Usability in the area of human-computer interaction. And there are well-known cases where security constraints have made a system fully unusable. So this is a really interesting field for both security specialists and software designers. As I am not the expert I’ll only refer to some texts that I read recently (better said: still reading) and found very instructive and practical for my career.

The first one is Security Engineering, which gives a wide overview of general aspects of security. The Bible, very amusing and freely distributed. Not directly related to usability but it’s a needed base.

The second one is Security and Usability, which I recently bought and haven’t finished yet. In fact it’s a collection of essays from different experts regarding main topics about building secure usable systems. It’s interesting because it exposes practical cases.

And finally, it’s impossible to avoid reffering to the guru Bruce Schneier (I know, it’s always the same with gurus, xD). He’s writing lately many things about psychology behind perceived security and that’s the third corner of the Security-Usability-Trust triangle. I hope you like it. Just let me quote this part:

Like a squirrel whose predator-evasion techniques fail when confronted with a car, or a passenger pigeon who finds that evolution prepared him to survive the hawk but not the shotgun, our innate capabilities to deal with risk can fail when confronted with such things as modern human society, technology, and the media. And, even worse, they can be made to fail by others–politicians, marketers, and so on–who exploit our natural failures for their gain.

There is also a spanish translation of the last document.

I’m still doing some setup work on my new blog and also some design work. This time I’m not really interested in designing a new template or something, like I did with my friend’s blog. Web design is somehow entertaining but time-consuming and also there are these great people who really know how to make things look good and contribute to the community by freely (as in free beer, though) publishing their work.

So I’m only making little modifications based on the iTheme template by N. Design Studio.

And why was I telling you all that? Ahm, yes, because I found a really interesting Firefox extension: Firebug, which in fact is not a new one, that let’s you examine and modify the CSS content of the webpage you are visiting. Of course modifications are only local, but it’s really easy to change some CSS properties with it and see them rendered in firefox instantaneously. That way you can test and debug your design really fast. I’d only add an option to export local changes in the form of a patch file.

Other not less useful features are Javascript debugging and network monitoring (load times). Well, I’m not paid to advertise them so I’ll let it stop here, xD. Did I mention also that it’s an Open Source project?

Hi there,

my name is Jacobo and this is my new testing Weblog. I never had one before although I designed some webpages.

This introductory post allows me to describe the aim of this Blog, it’s going to be a personal one, so the text published represents only the thoughts of the writer, no further responsibility

The topics are going to be usually IT (Information Technology) related, regarding some personal projects and interests. And oh, the language, as you can see, will be English, although it’s not my mother tongue so please be understanding with mistakes

In Spain, there are some regulations for public administrations regarding Technological Neutrality (Observatorio de Neutralidad Tecnológica) and maybe therefore this year the programs aiding informative declarations are “multiplatform”. Meaning that, supposedly compatible with Windows, MacOS X and Linux. For this great purpose they have used a JVM and an InstallShield .bin installer.

I will not get into the point that Java is not really portable, since there is no descent JVM for some platforms like my laptop’s PowerPC + Linux combination. This post goes for the difficulties using InstallShield installers in x86_64.

Continue reading »