iSight and Housekeeping

22 February 2004

I got an Apple iSight for my birthday yesterday, and I can confirm that it’s every bit as fancy-pants as they say. It appears to be working with iChat (although I’ve not found anyone to vidcon with yet!), and I’m about to go on the hunt for other iSight enabled tools that I can play with. It’s a lot of fun.

Along with a few updates to Textpattern, I’ve been doing some housekeeping around this site. Most of the basic framework hadn’t been updated since last March, so I though it about time I did some cleaning up. The permalink/comments pages now have a list of related articles so make browsing for similar stuff nice’n’easy. I also added a “What is this?” paragraph to those pages to help all the people who find my site through Google and are a bit disorientated – it links to my new About page. Can you believe I never had an About page?

Also of interest, over at zlog Ronan launches a new discussion list for peeps who want to chat about web and technical issues with likeminded contemporaries. It’s where it’s at.

About Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Caburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

Comments

§ Jesse Rodgers: Happy birthday yesterday… mine was the 19th ;) I got new bindings for my snowboard, I wanted an iPod!!!

I am not sure, cause I haven’t tried lately, but the iSight does not work over Airport and I have no idea why – some say packet loss . Which is why i have yet to vid conference with anyone. But I can set up a web cam site and host it over airport.. very odd.

There is some great software out there though.
§ Amit Karmakar: Happy Birthday Drew! :0) Hope you are enjoying your iSight! :)
§ Garrett: Jesse—the iSight DOES work over Airport. I’m using it on a G5 over AP Extreme, but it works at both 802.11b and g. Apparently, a few people are having a problem—you might not be affected.

I know the iSight works on both my 15-inch PB and my G5 over Airport.

Happy Birthday, Drew. Been reading for a while, figured this was the perfect time to post my first comment.
§ Michael Z.: When I read the headline, I thought you meant that you had to clean up your office before it was presentable for video conferencing.

I, for one, would have to keep an iSight turned off until after about 10:30 am.
§ Jesse Rodgers: Garrett – I can only get it to work when I am really close to my base station.. but that is 802.11b. Any traffic at all and it chokes.. and if I try it from other wireless points at work same thing.

802.11g, no problems. I just don’t have the $$ for a new 802.11g router.
§ David Baracco Scherer: Bonjour,
I’m designer and i find new contact itchat video for exchange idea and project…
Please if you Have some good forum adress who used isight ? just do it
thanks
§ John Chambers: Does anyone know if I can use isight/ichat to broadcast a video signal over my local network (airport extreme)? Something similar to a baby monitor. I want to be able to broadcast from my airport card in laptop and receive over my G4 dsktop.

All in the <head>