Wayne D's Blog

Continuing in the tradition of the 2010 Men's Word Cup CBC is offering Canadian soccer fans live streaming of the FIFA 2011 Women's World Cup games at http://www.cbc.ca/sports/soccer/fifawomensworldcup2011/video/live/ and best of all it works on Linux too.

Another piece of good news for Linux users is that the video viewer CBC uses for their regular shows which didn't work on Linux last year now also works. Ok, enough of that time to go watch some Women's World Cup soccer, or should I call it football? I'm so confused.

The problem? A Quickbooks install that was running just fine with the company file hosted on a Linux server until a Quickbooks client software update results in the dreaded H202 error. Evidently other Quickbooks linux server users also ran into the same problem as can be seen from these posts on the quickbooks user support forums http://community.intuit.com/posts/qb-2011-h202-error-with-redhat-linux-database-server-manager and http://community.intuit.com/posts/i-cant-switch-to-multiuser-mode.

The solution? So simple yet so hard, to find. Digging through the wireshark capture of the connection attempt shows at attempt to connect to the server on 55333 and then UDP broadcasts and attempt to connect to UDB ports on the server which fail with port unreachable.

An article on the sybase site gives a clue, the UDP packets are an attempt to discover the database server because connecting to the server failed.

Digging into the Wireshark packets I could see that the client was trying to connect to the server using the servers netbios name not it's hostname. When the SQLAnywhere server used by Quickbooks starts it's name is set to the hostname. It seemed that the easiest solution would be to set the SQLAnywhere database name to match the server's Netbios name unfortunately the qbdbfilemon doesn't let you specify the database name and uses the hostname of the server so it failed to find the find the database server. Since qbdbfilemon couldn't find the database server and report back the port number the client needed to use to make it's connection to the server the client connection still failed. The server had a Netbios name that didn't match it's hostname for historical reasons, changing it might have caused too many other side effects so I moved the database to another server where the Netbios name already matched the server name with is the default configuration with a Samba server. The other thing I had to do is change the servers hostname so that it didn't include our internal domain name, so instead of being server1.internal.company.com it reported it's hostname as simply server1.

That's what it took to banish the H202 error.

I don't know what Yahoo did but starting recently trying to access mail from my Blackberry produces a 502 Bad Gateway error. After some unsuccessful Googling I found a download link on the Yahoo site to Yahoo Mobile Mail on getjar.com. Installing this tiny download not only gave me a shortcut to Yahoo Mail on the Blackberry main screen but also fixed up the bad gateway error when acessing Yahoo Mail from the Blackberry web browser.

It's been a while but my latest Howcast video, How to Make Face Paint went live just in time for Halloween. You might notice that is uses the snazzy new Howcast graphics. I tried somethign new on this video and it came back to haunt me. I used a couple of the new LED video lights and though they are nice and bright and cool the gave me a terrible time with the colour rendition. The lights were very cool and blue and even though I didn't notice it when filming it was obvious in editing. I have included an image below that illustrates the issue, the top is uncorrected the bottom is corrected. The corrected side isn't perfect but does look more nautral. Additionally the bathroom footage which was originally shot with the same lighting suffered from shakey cam which meant I had to reshoot it on a different day with different lighting. This meant fiddling during the editing phase to try to fix up the lighting. I have come to realize that light is the biggest technical issue I have to deal with and I now understand why Flolight's new version of their LED video lights are advertised as Daylight with a colour temperature of 5600K.

Now I am off to make my next video How to Make a Spectroscope, who knew you could have so much fun with an old CD or DVD and a couple of razor blades.

When Gmail informed me that Google was offering free phone calls to the U.S. and Canada with Google Talk I decided to give it a try and install the google talk Firefox plugin on my EEEPC. Unfortunately after I downloaded and attempted to install google-talkplugin_current_i386.deb the plugin failed to install because of some library dependencies. Even worse after it failed to install Firefox wouldn't start. Double clicking the Firefox icon produced nothing. Running Firefox in a command windows resulted in the following error message:

Inconsistency detected by ld.so: dl-open.c: 611: _dl_open: Assertion `_dl_debug_initialize (0, args.nsid)->r_state == RT_CONSISTENT' failed!

Luckily uninstalling the plugin with the following command got things working again. Well actually I took the long way using dselect but trust me, using dpkg is quicker and much easier to explain.

sudo dpkg -r google-talkplugin