Wayne D's Blog

TwestivalTO: Can anyone provide an open WiFi hotspot at CiRCA without using the building connection? Need our bandwidth stable for displays. #TwestivalTO
@TwestivalTO If you want stable connections use wires. You put too much WiFi in too small a space and nothing will work.
@TwestivalTO Conference wifi (which is sort of what you are talking about) is a pretty tough problem, good luck. I'm going to rely on my BB
TwestivalTO @wdawe We're definitely using wired connections for our displays, but are thinking abt folks w/o cellular data plans. Hence need for WiMAX.

So went the short twitter exchange with the TwestivalTO organizers in advance of the TwestivalTO. When I arrived at the event my Blackberry was working fine but when you pack four hundred people the majority of whom are using smartphones into a small space and they try to use them you soon see have close to the edge the cellular infrastructure is operating. At a certain point in the night Roger's EDGE network became overburdened and trying to post Twitter updates produced network failure messages. A twitter search reveals that Telus, Fido and Bell users also had problems. What does this say for the future of the wireless internet when 400 people can bring the cellular data network to it's knees? Wifi isn't much better, when I stream video from my family room to to my bedroom via wireless I occasionally run into such problems with wireless network congestion in my suburban neighbourhood that I have to copy the file locally to be able to watch it without interruption. LeWeb, the large European internet conference had a great deal of trouble providing wifi access at the conference this year.

Too much wireless data use in too small a space means trouble and this poses a huge challenge for the future of the always available, ubiquitous internet access that we are growing to expect. How our service providers address this challenge may ultimately determine their success as businesses. Capping data transfer in an attempt to manage infrastructure is a short term solution at best, the old type utilities have learned the hard way that they need to be able to handle peak demand. The new age wireless utilities also need to provide the level of service we have come to expect. They ignore this at their peril.

The genesis of this post was Lisa Bettany's appearance on TWIT 177 (video link) on January 11th. Video of TWIT is live streamed as the program is recorded and Lisa was in the studio and on video with Leo Laporte. Leo streams on Stickam which means that the video stream comes with a chat room. Lisa was dressed nicely and a few people in the Stickam chat room decided to make crude comments about her because she is a beautiful woman and decided to dress up a bit to come on the show.

Jason Calacanis gave up blogging because he didn't want to have to deal with the "haters". He moved to an email list hoping to get rid of the people who think posting something like "You suck" is valid commentary. One of Calacanis' recent post to his email list in response to Micheal Arrington's vacation from blogging for a month after being spit on refers to what Jason calls Internet Asperger's Syndrome (IAS). He goes on to describe, "In this syndrome, the afflicted stops seeing the humanity in other people. They view individuals as objects, not individuals. The focus on repetitive behaviors--checking email, blogging, twittering and retiring andys--combines with an inability to feel empathy and connect with people." you can read the full text of the post at calacanis.com/2009/01/29/we-live-in-public-and-the-end-of-empathy/. This same lack of empathy for other people was demonstrated in spades when Yahoo Live was still operating. Chat rooms would be quickly filled with groups of people who's only contribution was to make rude and crude comments to the person on video. Services like Facebook and Twitter already help people to create a controlled online environment where the bores can be excluded, the equivalent of an online gated community. As we continue to move to a point where our lives are conducted more online than off what does this mean?

What if this tendency to treat people as objects starts to spill out in to the wider community? I correct myself, it already has as witnessed by the recent global economic meltdown which has its' roots in a quest for personal gain irrespective of the effect on the larger community. Perhaps the question should be what happens if this becomes the norm. Empathy makes good evolutionary sense and we ignore it at our peril. Do you want to live in a world where no one cares what effect their actions online or otherwise have on other people? That would be a scary place and may not be as far away as you think. Now it makes the news when the neighbours don't call police when shots and screaming are heard but what if it didn't?

(updated with video link, changed the spelling of anonymity)

Tired of ssh'ing into a machine that has ldap authentication but doesn't have a home directory for you? Adduser or useradd doesn't work when user already exists in the Ldap directory. You can manually create the directory, copy the files in from /etc/skel and change the permissions but there is an easier fix.

First verify that you have pam_mkhomedir.so in /lib/security Then all you need to do is to add the following line to /etc/pam.d/sshd and systems that don't have a home directory for your login name will have one created the first time you connect via ssh.

session required pam_mkhomedir.so skel=/etc/skel/ umask=0022

That's it, there is no more.

Recently I upgraded the version of smplayer which the EEEPC uses to play video. In the process I managed to break it so the volume control in smplayer no longer worked. Smplayer is an mplayer wrapper and mplayer also lost it's ability to change the volume from inside the player. A bit of digging turned up the answer, somehow the video players were using the wrong sound driver. The sound still worked but the volume didn't. Once I figured this out the fix was simple. For mplayer I added the line ao="alsa" to the file config which is found in the .mplayer subdirectory of my home directory. For smplayer I changed the line ao=oss to ao=alsa in the smplayer.ini. smplayer.ini is found in the .smplayer folder in your home directory.

The experience of Linux on the EEEPC neatly summerizes the problem with Linux, that is Linux is a concept and not a thing. For some unfathomable reason Asus picked the Xandros distro as the version of Linux to install on the EEEPC. The charitable interpretation is that ASUS didn't realize the the minefield of Linux distributions. ASUS' decision to use Xandros means that EEEPC Linux users can't easily run Firefox 3 or Flash 10. This means that using their webcam via Flash is too difficult for the average user to manage. I recently updated video player version using the built in update program and now the volume control doesn't work in the video player.

There are so many flavours of Linux available that many modern Linux software programs can't be used on the EEEPC because the version of the windowing toolkit and the base libraries aren't modern enough. I know that I can install another distro like Ubuntu for the EEEPC because of the hard work of Linux enthusiasts around the world. The point of buying a Linux based netbook was not to have to wipe out the O/S and install a different version in the first year I owned it.

One last unrelated gripe. my wife and I started watching Battlestar Galactica last year and have been working my way through the first three seasons on DVD thanks to Blockbuster. We were happy to see that the Space Network in Canada was streaming the first half of Battlestar Galactica season 4, less happy when we found that they only offered from episode seven forward. As we were almost all caught up in anticipation of the premiere of the second half of Season 4, with one episode left to watch, the Space website gave and error when we tried to watch it. Sigh.