Wayne D's Blog

I was ready to write the epitaph for Yahoo Live and then I went there last night. After a promising beginning it had degenerated to, at least on the nights I was there, a wild west, shoot 'em up, anything goes mentality. Women were targeted by roving groups of goons who would flood into a channel and demand the disrobing of the channel's owner. Requests for various things to be placed on heads were also common. Many women have made their rooms private so they don't show up on the public room screen. The sense of community that seemed to exist in the early life of Yahoo Live had disappeared. Then last night I went into the channel of a woman I had met in the heady early days. The expected rush of goon's never appeared. Why not, did they have better things to do on a Saturday night? Was it an aberration on Yahoo Live's descent into anarchy? Only time will tell.

Even it's current state of technical brokenness and dysfunctional community Yahoo Live is a fascinating place. The personalities that can survive in the maelstrom are more entertaining than anything on network TV. My advice to Yahoo, divide Yahoo Live into two sections, a heavily moderated and controlled side and an unmoderated and uncontrolled side.Users could then choose where they wanted to hang out. If Yahoo doesn't do something I expect Yahoo Live will go the way of Yahoo's user created chatrooms which were shut down by Yahoo because of their inabilty to control the activity that took place in them. Yahoo's track record doesn't give me much hope, they seem to have a hard time translating good ideas into something they can monetize. Yahoo 360 is a prime example of this, Yahoo bailed on that project and left their users hanging. I expect the same will happeen with Yahoo Live and it will be a shame.

I'm in the midst of downloading my emusic songs for the month and I decided to add Geoff Smith to the list for this month. I first ran into Geoff's music when he performed a song for Cali Lewis on Geekbrief about the big publishing of the encryption key for HD DVD or Bluray or whatever. I follow Cali on Twitter so when she mentioned that Geoff was holding an online benefit concert to get his wife's wisdom teeth removed. I thought to help I'd download his album from emusic this month. I don't know what an artist's cut is from emusic but I figured it couldn't hurt. You can watch the video from the concert on ustream or play it below.

Updated May 1, breaking news,
Emusic really does like me
A few months ago I applied to emusic's program to put an affiliate link on my website. When I decided to write this post I thought I should go back and check to see what was going on. Turns out they turned me down, so now I am a bit miffed. They didn't even bother to send me a notification of why. I guess my little old blog is just small potatoes for them. I understand if that's the case but even a form email would have been better than nothing. I have talked up emusic and recommended people sign up and this blog is not a link farm so what's their problem? Unfortunately while clicking around I accidentally applied again. What do I do if they approve me this time?

I have lots of blog posts aching to get out so the week long dry spell shouldn't occur again. Now I'm off to add a message board to myyahoolive.com which was going to be the subject of this post until I sat down to write. Stay tuned for why I think Yahoo Live is dead.

When I saw that Adobe had not released a Linux version of Adobe AIR I thought some nasty things about Adobe. Adobe's FAQ from mid December said they were planning for Linux support but I got a bit cynical when March came and nothing had appeared, especially when I was trying to find a twitter client and many of them were designed for AIR. Well on March 30th, Adobe released their Alpha Linux AIR runtime. They are targeting and promising simultaneous Windows, Mac OS and Linux release for AIR 1.1. I loaded up AIR and tried Twirl, an AIR Twitter client. All was well until I changed workspaces and Twirl disappeared. It was still running as it would pop up notifications of new tweets but the main application window had disappeared. (updated June 16th) As of Twirl version 0.8.2 this problem has been resolved and Twirl works fine. Looks like it wasn't an Adobe issue after all. I don't know whether to blame AIR or Twirl but I'm sure it will get worked out before AIR gets released for real. Adobe is embracing Linux and has joined the Linux foundation because I think in part machines like the eeepc have demonstrated that big computing isn't necessarily the way to go. Ubiquitous wireless is enabling internet based applications. My eeepc has 512M of memory and can handle pretty much anything I want to do it. Microsoft's recent announcement that they are extending the life of Windows XP may in part be a result of their realization that they need a light version of Windows that can be run on less powerful portable hardware.

Here is a challenge for Adobe, give me Photoshop on Linux because I can't convince the people I work with to use Gimp. When you do release Photoshop for Windows offer me a free license transfer to Linux because I can't justify buying the same software twice.

I also recently tried out Twingly, a European based blog search tool. Though I have had issues with Google in the past, they seem to like me now. My article on adobe flash eeepc support was indexed by Google thirty-nine minutes after I posted it. Twingly is still in private beta, so my expectations weren't that high. First thing I tried was searching for the title of my latest blog post, nope, but that wasn't that surprising. The I tried searching for Dvorak,the man who plugs his blog relentlessly, nope on his blog too. Searching for Robert Scoble brings up TechCrunch but not Scoble's own blog. I realize that these guys are all American but the web is about finding information wherever it is. When I signed up I pinged my blog to see if they would index it, no new spider has appeared in my logs, I guess my blog isn't significant enough to be indexed. Google has a worldwide presence because even with all the link farms they have worked hard to stay relevant. Knocking them off their perch is not going to be easy.

(updated Dec. 27th) Finally thanks to My EeePC Blog there is a simple way to put Flash 10 on your old EEEPC. Some caveats, this method replaces some core libraries and may break other software you have installed. Packages it is known to break are build essentials, vlc, xchm, amule and some others. I used this method and it worked fine for me. The steps are fully explained at http://eeepc-albkwan.blogspot.com/2009/03/install-firefox-3-with-flashplayer-10.html so I won't repeat them here. If you decide that you don't want to take this radical a step you can still use the instructions shown below to get your camera working with the EEEPC default Flash installed. You should be aware that many websites only work with Flash 10 so upgrading as described above is probably your best option.

Though Flash 10 works most of the time you may have trouble getting it to recognize your camera. Getting things going on ustream.tv can be quite a chore. The good news is that the flashcam still works with Linux Flash 10 if you have trouble. You can also check out Flash camera support on the EEEPC 701 for my survey of flash based video websites and how to get them to work on the EEEPC 701.

The release of Flash 10 for Linux has rendered this method less necessary see EEEPC flash camera support without flashcam for details. Flash 10 has support for V4L2 which is what the EEEPC camera uses. Installing Flash 10 on your EEEPC brings with it a whole host of new issues.

I thought there must be a way to get the camera on the Asus EEEPC to work with Flash 9 which is the default the EEEPC shipped with. The sticking point was that the camera driver on the eeepc was v4l2 and linux flash plugin only supports v4l. Someone who was more energetic than I finally decided to do something about it. It's a bit of a convoluted installation but it seems to work You need this file flash-cam-eeepc-1.tgz The download file has been changed to add sudo chmod 666 /dev/video to the beginning of the vlback.sh file after some people reported problems with device permissions. This download file combines the original two downloads from http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=203137, the original topic thread. This saves the irritating wait to download from the file sharing site where the files were hosted. I have also included the modified script that worked for me.

To use:

• download the file to your user directory
• extract the files by right clicking the file and choosing extract in the file manager, you should see a new vloopback folder created
• open a terminal window using CTRL-ALT-T and cd to the vloopback directory
• enter ./vlback.sh and press enter

You should see
ln: creating hard link `/dev/video' to `/dev/video0':
Input device: /dev/video

Size = 320 x 240
and the green camera light should come on. Don't close the terminal window unti you are done using the camera in flash. In your flash application be sure that you choose the vloopback device and not the uvc camera.

If I get some time over the weekend I will create a .deb package.

I neglected to give credit to The Flashcam project the guys who made all this possible.

After Firefox crashed on me last night I did some quick web research and found out that Firefox 2 runs on Centos without any fancy gyrations required. By then it was too late to late to rewrite my post on the demise of jPod.

I started watching jPod on the CBC website because I'm finding it more difficult to keep track of when shows are on since I stopped getting a weekly TV magazine. When watching online you sometimes don't notice when a show goes away. It turns out that jPod was cancelled at the beginning of March though I didn't hear about it until much later. It was a quirky show and I guess that it didn't appeal to enough of the CBC's audience. It's death knell was probably sounded when CBC moved it to Friday night which is usually a television black hole which also turned out to be the case here. jPod, you will be missed. You can still catch it on the CBC jPod website but don't delay, CBC tends to pull these things down pretty fast.