Wayne D's Blog

I spent some very frustrating time today trying to an info.callout.add script to run when we added a new USB peripheral to our Centos 5 system. Everything seemed to be OK but the script just wouldn't run. After much head scratching and Google searching I found a clue in a posting on nabble.com entitled Problems getting callouts to work from someone who said their script didn't work when they used an absolute path. Then I found the following on HAL 0.5.10 Specification

"All callouts are searched for and execute in a minimal environment. In addition, the UDI of the device object is exported in the environment variable UDI. All properties of the device object are exported in the environment prefixed with HAL_PROP_. If a device is added or removed is exported in the environment variable HALD_ACTION . The search path for the callout includes the following paths:

including $PATH the HAL daemon was started with during system initialization. Depending on the distribution, this typically includes /sbin, /usr/sbin, /bin, /usr/sbin. If the program to run is not found in any of these paths, the it will not run even if the given path is absolute. To be portable across operating systems, third party packages providing callouts must therefore only use $libdir/hal/scripts."

I also found the infor at Cliff Hacks Things blog to be useful both for his discussion on getting wifi to work with HAL and Network Manager interactions. Note that the script run by his info.callouts.add has a different path yet again.

I don't have a problem with restricting where scripts can be placed but would have it killed them to log an error message when it couldn't execute the script? Failing silently is not the linux standard, succeeding silently is and whining on failure is.

All this effort was in aid of being able to access a USB device that I physically plugged in. Why O why would the default access for a USB device I have complete physical control over not include write access? It's right up there with not letting me eject the DVD I put in the drive.

On Saturday afternoon two of may boys and I went to see the International Bowl at Skydome. I'm not a big U.S. college football fan but I'd never been to a bowl game and I thought it was worthwhile to try it out once. It was a rollicking high scoring affair with Rutgers beating Ball State 52-30. We were sitting in the level above the Rutger's band, that why the only pictures I have of Ball State's Band was from the pregame show. The game was good but as usual the lineups at the Roger's centre for food were atrocious. Nothing is cheap there and having to line up for overpriced, middling quality food is even worse. More pictures of the game are on my Flickr page. You can also click either picture to go there.

The ignomany of it all. Gas is 106.2 a litre, it's extremely cold and the pump keeps shutting off as I try to fill the tank. I gave up at $14.

Our new dryer arrived today, my wife had carefully measured it to make sure it would fit in our laundry room. What she didn't notice that while the were both the same size our old dryer had a flat back and the new one projects out. This means that it sits three inches further into the laundry room.

At least Telus called to say our phone was back from repairs. $25 service fee on a warranty repair seems a bit much.

My first gripe of the new year is really an old gripe. I was flipping around the other night and came across a South Park episode on The Comedy Network that was a parody of the Lord of the Rings. I keep seeing advertisements that you can watch South Park on the web so I decided tonight to go look for the episode. I found it and got a big pop up saying that my OS wasn't supported. I forgot about the acute DRM paranoia surrounding video on the web. Sigh.

Second gripe of the new year Ticketmaster. They want a $9.25 convenience fee and an additional $1.75 for the privilege of printing out the ticket at home. That's $11 in fees on a $25 ticket. There is also a $2 building facility fee. Why isn't that built into the ticket price?

That didn't last very long. I was hoping that I could Bogart some wifi to blog on while I was in Ottawa but it was not to be, there was no way I was going to blog for three days on the Crackberry. Now I am back home with a full sized keyboard and have tales to tell. Well, not really, that's another reason I didn't blog the last couple of days. One person who read my blog said he liked my blog because I wrote about interesting things, not just what I had for breakfast. Visiting the in-laws is not grist for the blogging mill. Generally not much of import happens. We get caught up on what mundane events have occurred in our lives since our last visit or telephone update. I did manage to catch the "Deadliest Catch" marathon on Discovery. Those crab fishermen are nuts. Backbreaking, dangerous work, the money may be good but your wouldn't catch me out there. I also watched the last season of the Sopranos and got caught up on Dirt! This was a TVcentric four day vacation.

Both the to and fro trip were slower than expected due to big traffic problems, on the way down one lane of the 401 was closed at Brockville producing a ten kilometre backup. We took a detour through Brockville to avoid the traffic, I don't know if it was any faster in the end than crawling down the highway. When I stopped at Zellers to pick up some radiator antifreeze and some chips for the boys I saw pop from the Pop Shoppe. I didn't know the Pop Shoppe was still in business. This will have no meaning to anyone who didn't live in Southern Ontario in the late 70's when the Pop Shoppe was everywhere. The radiator antifreeze was bought as a precaution because the car temperature gauge shot up precipitously when we slowed down for the traffic jam. I'd never seen it do that before and was worried that we had a coolant leak as a side effect from a recent trip to the repair shop to attempt and repair our anemic car heater. They flush the cooling system and it's better for a while. I expect that a new heater core is in the cards.

We were making great time on the way home until I saw the overhead sign with the message that the 401 express lanes were closed at McCowan. Traffic ground to a halt, we got off at Kennedy and took an extra 45 minutes to make it home.

Enough for now, my legs are getting sore from sitting crosslegged on the floor to type.