Using a Graphics Tablet in Ubuntu 9.04

I have a cheap Trust graphics tablet that I used to use for drawing in Inkscape or Gimp.
It stopped working at some point (Can't remember which Ubuntu version), but I decided I needed to use it again, because drawing with a touchpad on a laptop is a pain in the thumb...
It was surprising that it didn't just work when you plug it in, because I'm sure a previous version of Ubuntu behaved like this.
I found the instructions at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AiptekTablet.
You basically have to install the Aiptek xorg driver and put a configuration file in a directory under /etc/hal. I wondered where the X11 configuration was now that Xorg.conf is so small....

Anyway, it works now...

Progress with IP Camera Viewer

The Edimax IP Camera seems to work fairly well, but the video stream seems to get interrupted every now and again, which makes the player crash - vlc just hangs, and mplayer exits.
I decided that exiting was better so I have written a simple pyGTK front end for mplayer to play the screen. It also includes a wireless network link quality monitor to help understand why it is not working - it is here as 'bentv'.

Note that bentv uses a library that I have started work on (named ntpylib for want of a better name) - so far it only contains one class, 'prefs', which deals with saving and loading of simple key/value data from XML files. It includes a dialog box that GUI programs (such as bentv.py) can use to allow the user to edit the data. prefs.py and prefs.glade need copying or linking into the bentv directory to make it work - there is no clever installer!