<p><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="182.html">I have a web camera that had been gathering dust for nearly six months</a>, primarily because I was under the impression that drivers were not available for linux. (So why did I buy it in the first place? I didn't it was a gift).</p><p>Since it's very rare for me to find myself on the M$ platform, the camera would have recorded all of 5 minutes of video in it's life time. Since upgrading to the new 2.6.5 kernel I decided to have another go at attempting to install it under linux.</p><p>My assumption (or conclusion) about the device driver being unavailable (this is a Creative Web Cam Pro Ex) was wrong, I recently learned that it's compatible with Philips drivers. This obviously call for another <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="../../linux/upgrade.php">compilation of the kernellvideo4linux</a> modules.</p><p>After succesful compilation attempting to run <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="http://linux.bytesex.org/xawtv/">xawtv</a> always gave me <em>/dev/video0 No Such Device</em> error messages. I did know that, though the entry exists in the dev filesystem a node might be reported as missing if the driver wasn't loaded. But even after <em>modprobe</em>ing quite a few times I still got the same error.</p><p>Such things usually lead to self doubt. So like a newby I went ahead and recreated the nodes (quite silly of me really but don't tell me you have never done anything like that). As expected it had no impact at all on xawtv. In desperation I compiled a few more modules and did a few more <em>modprobes</em> and all of a sudden the LED on the camera lit up and the <em>/dev/video0 No Such Device</em> message disappeared.</p><p>My euphoria however was short lived, no amount of coercion would make xawtv display the images from the lense on my monitor despite the LED blazing away in all it's glory. At least I will be able to make use of the camera as a night light.</p><p></p>

WebCam on Linux

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            <p>Finally managed to get the Sphinx 4 demos to run with out throwing a heap of exceptions. This success sadly was not achieved on my linux box.</p>
            <p><a href="352.html">After deleting the entire source tree followed by another CVS checkout</a>, the build process went smoothly and the programs actually started up without any error. Unfortunately there is still a gap between the 'saying and the doing'</p>
            <p>Though some of the demo programs consumed upto 468 mega bytes of memory they simply refused to respond to voice input. The README that accompanies the demo suggests using the <em>AudioTool</em> to ensure that java programs are capable of producing or capturing sound on your linux system. The fate that befell AudioTool is suffered the same fate but it was capable of playing back sound from a disk file.</p>
            <p>In any case I doubt if my audio set up is the culprit here (even though <a href="../../linux/rcalsa.php">ALSA on linux</a> does have quite a few tricks up it's sleeve). Afraid of completely going bold, I reluctantly decided to try this out on a windows box. Guess what? all the demos started up and actually began to respond to voice input.</p>
            <p>However there is still another step between responding to audio input and recognizing them but that's to be expected. A few more years will pass before we have Speech Recognition software capable of recognizing input from any user (random users) without any prior training.</p>
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Hello Sphinx

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            <p>In the process of working with the <a href="http://www.infodancer.org">Info Dancer</a> maildir implementation, I contacted it's author Mathew Hunter and discussed making a contribution (code not financial).</p>
            <p>I came to learn the he is using subverson for source control instead of CVS. It just so happens I had totally corrupted some of my cvs repositories almost an year back. I had made some errors in tagging and no matter what I did thereafter it always resulted in many conflicts at update or commit. As a result of which some of my projects can no longer be commited at all.</p>
            <p>Yes, it's almost like not having a revision control system and having to make 'nightly tarballs' as a means of safe guarding my code. Though a simple script takes care of it, it remains an annoyance. Now here comes the perfect opportunity to switch over to SVN.</p>
            <p>Since you are no doubt as busy as I am, you would have been putting off many studies like this because there wasn't a pressing need. Now there is a pressing need for me to get the hang of subversion so I will. If not for infodancer my knowledge of version control systems would have remained limited to CVS for many more months to come.</p>
            <p>&nbsp;</p>
            <p>update 2011-11-28 : looks like Info Dancer hasn't gone forward a lot since then and sadly I never made that contribution either.</p>
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Getting Started With Subversion

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            Since it has been a long time since I last updated the apache server running on my pc (RH 9.0) I decided to upgrade to 1.3.29 and decided to try out apache SSL at the same time.

            Apache SSL is actually a patch for the apache web server. This is pretty much the same way that <a>qmail</a> works, except that qmail license leaves no option but to take this approach.

            How to apply the SSL patch is explained very well in the document, and having applied it the next step was configure followed by make. Unfortunately the building ran into a problem - the case of the <a href="../../linux/krb5.h.php">missing kerberos</a> a common occurance on RH9. The solution of course is to set the correct path for kerberos headers. In this case I did a
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #333399;">export INCLUDES='-I /usr/include/kerberos/'</span></p>
            The compilation was successfull after that. I was just a bit worried about what might happen with the make install step, so i decided to bakup my httpd.conf file. Of course the apache installer is well behaved and will preserve your configuration but it's always better to be safe than sorry.

            After make install, I found that I need not have worried at all because apache SSL keeps a separate set of files for it's own use. That also means apacheSSL runs as a separate process and has to be configured separately and so on which i am not so keen on because there are only so many hours to each day. Now for a look at mod ssl

            Footnote (added 24 May 2004):
            I was wrong about having to run two separate processes
            Footnote (added Nov 30 2011):
            This discussion is old hat (well it was written in 2004 after all), since apache is almost never seen anymore.

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Setting up Apache SSL

<p>The 6600 phone I have been discussing is among the limited number of phones that implement the JSR 082, or the J2ME Bluetooth specification.</p><p>My first encounter with bluetooth was around four years ago at the time not many people had even heard of it. Unfortunately I never got the opportunity to look under the hood of bluetooth. Now I am doing that but I am taking a short cut. One of the main complaints that C programmers have about java is that you can create a lot of networking applications with out a proper understanding of the underlying protocols; this is probably true, my bluetooth exploration is a case in point! So even though I claim to be looking under the hood i will not be getting my hands very greasy.</p><p>So far, I have only succeeded in device discovery. I haven't had much luck with the second step of searching for services on these devices. Initially, I had no success at all until I realized that the search service attempted to return systems that matched all UUIDs passed to it, and I was giving it a pretty substantial array. I immediately began testing one UUID at a time, and I started discovering a few</p><p>My efforts have been hampered because I only have an IR dongle but do not have a BT dongle. However I do have a Siemens S55 in addition to the 6600 so i have still been able to do some testing. But if i had a dongle i would have been able to do a lot of work on the Series 60 SDK and save the time in transferring the midlets to the phone after each build</p>

J2ME and Bluetooth

<p>I am sorry to report that my attempts to develop a speech recognition system that can run on Linux have been unsuccessful. Despite conducting extensive online searches, I was only able to find outdated information on the subject, with most pages referring to discontinued products such as Viavoice Linux Edition.</p><p>More digging reveals things like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="000226.html">CMU sphinx</a>, (which seems to have been abandoned in 2002). You run into the occasional nugget where people have tried to install the ViaVoice windows version or dragon naturally speaking on <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="http://www.winehq.com">wine</a>, usually without much success.</p><p>Unfortunately, speech recognition is not an area that can be easily tackled by independent open-source developers. There is a great deal of tedious work involved, and open-source developers tend to shy away from such projects (linux kernel and glibc probably being the exceptions).</p><p>It is not all bad news; you do find some Text To Speech (TTS) engines for the linux platform, hopefully one of these developers will initiate a recognition project and hopefully other developers will join them , i certainly wouldn't mind putting my shoulder to the wheel either.</p>

Monthly Archives for 2004 05

WebCam on Linux

Hello Sphinx

Getting Started With Subversion

Setting up Apache SSL

J2ME and Bluetooth

Voice Recognition on linux