Stevey: At UCC we use camsource for some of our webcams. It's the best webcam software for linux that I've found. It has a plugin arch (as you asked for) which has xwd (screenshot), straight jpg and v4l input plugins, quite a few filters (text, size, brightness etc.) and output plugins (http server, save to file, ftp upload, loopback to another v4l device). The developer is responsive as well, adding in persistant ftp connections (which is currently only in a dev version, along with the jpg input plugin). I've filed a RFP, but there's no package yet - not that it matters, installation is simple. Archiving is done on the machine the images are ftp'd to, just a simple script that saves the images into a directory for the hour. The final piece in the puzzle (which we haven't written yet) is a script to take each day's images and compile them into an movie, so we can archive the original images to DVD-R.
dmullen: Yes! this is one of my pet peeves. I was considering filing a mozilla bug to force link and visited to be different, but haven't because I doubted anyone would be bothered to implement it.
The recent talk about how GNOME needs ideas, and then someone's comment (it's dropped off planet gnome) about how the people with the best ideas are not the best coders rung true with me - I am definitely a grunt worker - half the reason I don't code much is becuase I have no ideas about what to code. Perhaps some sort ideas exchange - where grunt coders like me can hook up with cool ideas and implement them? Some members of the Sungroper solar car team were saying something similar tonight - they just want to build the car, someone else can come up with the ideas. Of course, their problem was there was no consensus on what the good ideas were - and unlike code, you can't easily try out different ideas and choose the best one.
People have been muttering a bit about Mac OS X 10.3, and how you need it to run the new Safari, the old X11 installer (from 10.2) has gone AWOL etc. and how Apple is evil for not supporting 10.2 more. Well, I remember when 10.2 came out, there was a lot of stuff that wouldn't run on 10.1, and there wasn't much complaining - maybe it was because OS X only really came together in 10.2 and so 10.1/0 didn't matter so much? Oh, and aj, have you checked Linux support for the new iBooks? I've heard rumours that it doesn't work - don't forget there's no free drivers for 802.11g, and Linuxant's Driverloader won't help you on PPC.
Ah yes, there was also an article on noise reduction I wanted to link to. The author noticed his 3.2 megapixel camera had more noise than his 1 megapixel camera, so he wrote a photoshop filter to fix this. The idea is quite novel - instead of looking for noise, and eliminating it (which is hard), he looked for detail, and kept it (which was surprisingly easy).
Exams approach in real life. Barely a week before they start. Arrgh! There was a bunch of other stuff I was meaning to talk about, but I've let this entry moulder long enough, so I'll talk about them next time.