"Joseph M. Reagle Jr." wrote:
>
> At 23:05 11/13/2000 -0500, Ian Jacobs wrote:
> >I would like to catalog my CD collection on the
> >Web.
>
> Pick up a free CueCat and use that to scan all the CDs.
>         http://air-soldier.com/~cuecat/

So, I finally did as Mr. Reagle suggested and got myself
a Cue Cat at the local Radio Shack. When I picked it up,
the guy at the counter looked at me knowingly and said
"You'll find a lot more on this on the Web." I think he
meant "go get your declawed."

I have had no luck since then. I visited the home of the
Cue Cat project [1] to get a driver, but I am not having
any luck making it work. There's a stand-alone program
called "read_cuecat" that I think is supposed to listen
to the cue cat and spit out the bar code info on stdout.
[I'm not sure, since there's no documentation, but the code
suggests this.]

You can also patch the kernel and get built-in support
for this device using cuecat, and I tried that too with
no luck (using cuecat-0.2.1, not the latest version, since
the latest version doesn't work for my kernel version
2.2.16-22).

I am using a Truform external keyboard with my laptop.
The keyboard has a pointing stick in the middle of it.
So I am using the serial port with the mouse [because the
physical layout of the back of my computer prevents me from
using the PS/2 ports for both keyboard and mouse - they are
too close together for the adapters that I have) and a PS/2
port for the keyboard (but not the PS/2 port with the keyboard
icon next to it, the one with the mouse icon next to it). I
mention this because the README that comes with cuecat-0.2.1
says:

"read_cuecat can read data from your CueCat off of the
 regular PS/2 keyboard port or off a serial port.
 In the latter case, you need to build a CueCat RS232 pod
 (see instructions in the "cuecat_RS232_pod" to build it)."

So the fact that you have to build another piece of hardware
yourself is fairly dissuasive, so I'm not apt to use a serial
port. The README continues:

"NOTE : read_cuecat does NOT work under X if you have a
        connected on your PS/2 port. Bad things may happen
        if you run read_cuecat as root under X.
        Instead, you should run read_cuecat in a plain text
        console."

Also very dissuasive if you can't use the driver under X Windows.
However, I shut down X Windows and had no luck anyway.

Further down the README:

 "A program that uses a PS/2 mouse, like GPM or X11,
  needs to run *prior* to trying to use the PS/2 portion
  of the CueCat driver, otherwise the PS/2 mouse will die
  and the console may lock. I have added the PS/2 feature
  as a nicety for the many people who asked it for the
  sake of pushing the enveloppe. I doubt very much that
  it can be of any real use ever with a mouse attached,
  and/or with X."

So it sounds like:

a) To use the serial port feature of this driver,
   you have to build your own hardware (see the author's
   diagrams for doing so).
b) You shouldn't use the PS/2 feature anyway, and especially
   not under X.

Am I missing something?

To verify that the cue cat was "working" at all, I ran xev and
was able to see that in fact, there were some events being
thrown when I ran the cat over a bar code (and not being thrown,
for example, when I ran it over a paragraph of text). So, the
device seems to work, but read_cuecat doesn't send anything
to stdout. And after using the cue cat, I lose the keyboard
(but not every time).

There seems to be other software that one can use, such as
jcat [2] (in Java). I tried this, too, without success and X
Windows crashed. Looking at the documentation [3], it looks
like the driver is part of the package:

 "To use JCat simply type:
     java -jar jcat.jar
 or use the included jcat.bat file.

 Once the program is running, use the CueCat to scan
 a barcode. The bar code should appear in the topmost
 text field."

NOTE: I was a little hasty and tried to "declaw" my cue cat
before testing it out of the package. I stopped, I believe,
before severing the lead in question, so I don't think I broke
the cue cat or even modified it yet. Still, there is a shadow
of a doubt.

- Ian

[1] http://oss.lineo.com/cuecat/
[2] http://www.timpatton.com/jcat/
[3] http://www.timpatton.com/jcat/doc/
--
Ian Jacobs ([email protected])   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel:                         +1 831 457-2842
Cell:                        +1 917 450-8783