Over the past few days I’d noticed my PowerBook G6’s built-in iSight had crapped out. Whenever I wanted to use an app like PhotoBooth to check my hair (because say what you want, it is a nice mirror) I would get an error:

Photo Booth cannot open because no camera is attached or the camera is in use by another application.

Eh? I just booted! I knew it wasn’t a hardware error because of two reasons: a) it showed up fine in the System Profiler (whereas an actually broken iSight in a MacBook I had seen earlier did not show up properly) and more importantly: it worked perfectly fine a few minutes earlier, the only difference between the two times being that before, I had been using Leopard. And when I rebooted back into leopard, voila: it worked again.

So, I thought. Must be a software issue. So I did an archive and install of Tiger. No dice. But it had also kept some non-user settings so I figured some other crap must have been left behind. So I backed up all my stuff and did an Erase and Install, figuring it would then pretty much have to work. Nope. Not even during the OSX setup and registration screens.

Not a hardware problem, and not a software problem. What the hell?

I did some digging into how the iSight works, software-wise and eventually found my way to a forum topic on the Parallels forums about Parallels possibly supporting the iSight now that Bootcamp did. There, a post detailed the contents of the new Bootcamp installer, and there being an updated iSight driver that apparently also updated the iSight’s firmware:

System Profiler reports:
before Boot Camp 1.1: Built-in iSight Version 1.55
after Boot Camp 1.1: Built-in iSight Version 1.82

So, this mean Boot Camp 1.1 updates the iSight’s firmware to version 1.82 in order to bring support for the Windows iSight driver.

Ah. I had installed Bootcamp 1.1 to partition my internal drive for Leopard. I had a look at my System Profile and sure enough, Built-in iSight version 1.82. Apparently this newly firmware-updated iSight does not work with the pre-update drivers, as installed by MacOS X versions 10.4.7 and earlier. I didn’t need all of bootcamp again, so I opened up the bootcamp installer package, installed the iSight Driver.pkg package, rebooted and whammo, my photobooth hair checking mirror was fully functional again.

This will most likely not be so much trouble anymore once 10.4.8 gets released, but right now if you have installed Bootcamp 1.1 and then reinstall your mac, be sure to reinstall bootcamp again so your iSight will continue to work.

Update: Apparently I just did something very right when reinstalling in preparation of bringing Portia to the doctor (also known as Apple Centre) for an issue with the screen because not only did the iSight work during the install assistant, its firmware version is now back to 1.49. All I did was repartition and do a minimal (deselect everything there is to deselect) installation so I’m not sure what kind of dark magic is causing this…

But still I managed to secure cyberhq.eu. Now I only have to wait for three SunRise applications to time out that PriceWaterhouseCoopers fucked up somehow, saying they don’t have the documents even though I sent them on time.

On a happier note, I finally found the artist I had been trying to find for a while now, who has some snazzy cool covers of such songs as Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. His name is Paul Anka, and he has been sitting right under my nose for half a year now, in the shape of Gilmore Girl Lorelai’s cool new dog. iTunes Link.

Apparently, my website is now on some big ‘SPAM-THESE-WEBSITES!’ list, because over the last few days I’ve been getting comment spam. Not just ‘more’ comment spam, but comment spam, at all. I used to get none. Most of them still didn’t come through because I have wordpress set up to automatically moderate comments with three urls or more in them. But still, deleting them all is very annoying.

Luckily, Wordpress comes with an anti-spam plugin that I have now enabled. It sends all comments to a central server that checks them for spamminess and returns a ‘good to go’ or ‘low-life spammer’ rating. The only downside is that you need a wordpress.com account for it, which means you get a wordpress.com blog (wordpress.com: boo! fix!). At least it doesn’t require any action on the commenting-side, like those annoying ‘type the characters in this image’ things.

Ugh.

Just to say that I agree entirely with him on his copyprotected CD issue. They are evil things forged by satan and blessed by some other religion’s evil dude. By buying copyprotected CDs, you are actively encouraging the record labels to produce more of those pieces of crud. So don’t buy them.

I’ve just had, for the first time ever, a computer call me and tell me that I’ve won a free caribbean cruise. While I was watching an episode of Coupling. How rude. Usually I at least get a person talking to me. Anyway, the message went something like this:

Congratulations! You’ve won a free caribbean cruise. To reclaim your prize, press 9. That’s the nine-key on your telephone.

In English, yes. Note that I live in the Netherlands. I wonder if they were calling from the US. If so, I suppose I should have just let the thing talk while I continued watching television. Unfortunately I only thought of that after hanging up immediately.