Hari's Corner

My brother and I went to the Chennai Open 2008 last evening (the stadium is just a kilometre or two from where I live) to see a couple of second round matches.

The first match involved World No. 2 Rafael Nadal and was the big draw of the evening. Nadal, of course completely outclassed his opponent Rajeev Ram (USA) in a couple of easy sets. The other match on Centre Court involved Robin Haase, the highest ranked player from Netherlands. Needless to say I took my camera along and took some good shots. I thought I'd share a couple of them (original resolution 1600x1200 scaled down for conserving bandwidth).

Here's a picture from the first match:

And one from the match between Robin Haase and Lovro Zovko (a Croatian player). Robin Haase won the match in a couple of sets too, but the second one was closely fought (result: 7-5 in favour of Haase).

(snap credit: my brother, Ramshankar)

All evening there was a slight drizzle on and off which kept threatening play, but just as the second match got completed the rain really began pouring down heavily, so we were lucky to get to watch two full games.

Afterwards, I managed to get close to Robin Haase just before he left the stadium and took this snap before he got into his car:

This point was Nadal saving a break point (in the second set I think):

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfozgKKnOv0

It's not often that we get to see international quality tennis played in India, so I enjoyed every bit of it. At least I won't regret having missed seeing Rafael Nadal in person when he was playing in a court in my neighbourhood.

என் உறவினர்களுக்கும், நண்பர்களுக்கும் என் இனிய புத்தாண்டு நல்வாழ்துக்கள்.

சில நாட்களாக நான் தமிழில் எழுதவில்லை. 2008-இலாவது அதிகமாக எழுத முயல்கிறேன்.

Papa Hari News Service

The much-anticipated Papa Hari Annual Most Unknown Person of the Year 2007 award has been announced. This year, the winner of this award is:

Name: Unknown
Age: Unknown
Sex: Unknown
Nationality: Unknown
Current location: Unknown

Releasing the details of the award at the Awards ceremony, Papa Hari said that this unknown person would collect $1 million in prize money if he/she could be found. Unfortunately this person could not be located as his/her current location was not known. He stated that the choice had been exceedingly difficult and that every one of the nominees had deserved the award, but ultimately one of them had to be chosen. The nominees for the award this year were:

1. Unknown
2. Unknown
3. Unknown
4. Unknown
5. Unknown

The spokesman claimed that this list made the ultimate choice of the winner extremely tough.

The Most Unknown Person would have to come forward to collect the award within a week, otherwise the $1 million prize money would revert to the Papa Hari Foundation. When a news reporter questioned the feasibility of such an award, a spokesman of the Papa Hari Foundation said that it was a unique award meant to honour unknown people around the world. "Most of these annual awards are given to known people. We want to be different and give an award to a completely unknown person. When this unknown person comes forward to collect this award, we will definitely give it to that person." Asked how any person who claimed the award could be unknown if he/she revealed his/her identity, the spokesman stated that it would be a problem as becoming known would immediately disqualify that person for the prize.

So far there have been several claimants for this award every year, but it is not known who had successfully obtained the prize money. When questioned by another journalist about past winners, the spokesman said that he did not know who had won. "The very point of this award is that an unknown person wins this prize." It is rumoured that all the prize money from the award in previous years is currently safe in Papa Hari's Swiss bank account (account number unknown), but this is pure speculation based on rumours spread by unknown people.

To all my readers: I wish you all (in advance) a very happy fulfilling new year. Thanks for the continued support. Your feedback always motivates me to come back and write more.

I'm currently in one of the dull blogging phases. Not had a great deal to share of late and my creative energies have been absorbed by other things. I also didn't have the motivation to write much at the year end holiday season when most people aren't at their computers anyway. Look forward to lots more from Papa Hari in the new year.

We have a couple of young cats which live in the backyard of our house. They often roam around the neighbourhood but at meal-times, they unfailingly make a visit. Since we have a rat problem in the scullery near the wash area, they're quite useful at nights keeping those creatures at bay.

This black one is quite camera-shy, but I managed a snap from a distance. The brown cat is slightly bigger and not at all averse to the camera. In fact, she even posed when I brought out the camera!

And here's one of both together.

I have just discovered how to get the in-built webcam on my HP Pavilion laptop (webcam model: Microdia) to work in Linux. Since I haven't found a single clear tutorial on this particular model anywhere on the web (and knowing that such obscure topics do require to be documented), I wanted to write this tutorial and to create a record for my personal future reference as well as for the benefit of others with a similar issue.

This tutorial works with Debian. For other distributions that don't have module-assistant, simple compile the driver source as you would normally do: make, make install and copy the module output file to the directory /lib/modules/2.6.x/ (substitute 2.6.x for your kernel version).

Get the kernel headers

You should first install the kernel headers package. On my system this is currently the package named linux-headers-2.6.22-3. Usually the package is named kernel-headers or linux-headers along with the version number. Choose the correct headers package matching your running kernel.

The command is

apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.22-3

Get the source code for uvcvideo

On Debian this package is named linux-uvc-source. If you cannot find that package simply download the uvc sources from this website: http://linux-uvc.berlios.de/ and compile the driver like you would compile any other application.

On Debian (or Debian-like systems, e.g. Ubuntu) run:

apt-get install linux-uvc-source

This will automatically install module assistant and other necessary tools to simplify compiling and installing this driver.

Install the driver module

Login or su as root and then run the following commands.

m-a prepare
m-a a-i linux-uvc

That's it! This will automatically compile and install the kernel module required for this device. Then run modprobe to load the driver:

modprobe uvcvideo

If you didn't get any error messages at this stage, you've successfully installed the driver! Otherwise check whether your compilation failed and why it did. module-assistant works 99.99% of the time on Debian since it automatically takes care of the necessary dependencies.

Now check the video output

To check whether video works, you can use ffmpeg. Install ffmpeg (if you haven't already) using apt-get. Then to test whether recording works via the webcam run something like this:

ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -s pal -i /dev/video0 temp.mpg

It won't show anything while recording, but the blue LED near your webcam's lens show now glow. After you have recorded for a few seconds, quit ffmpeg and play back the temp.mpg file to check the video output. Obviously audio wouldn't have been captured in this case. But I can confirm the the built-in microphone on this laptop also works with ALSA, so you should merely have to specify the audio input parameter in ffmpeg.

That's all. If I have missed out any steps or you have any questions regarding this HOWTO, just feel free to drop a comment here!