I was sitting around with a couple of people and we got to chatting about classic Canadian Cartoons from the NFB. We ended up watching not so good versions off Youtube on my tablet. A bit of research on the National Film Board of Canada webiste turned up these beautiful versions.

The Cat Came Back made by Cordell Baker in 1988.

This hilarious Oscar®-nominated animation is based on the century-old folk song of the same name. Old Mr. Johnson makes increasingly manic attempts to rid himself of a little yellow cat that just won't stay away... Also won the 1989 Genie Award for best animated short film. (text shamelessly taken from the http://nfb.ca page http://www.nfb.ca/film/the-cat-came-back )

The Log Drivers Waltz made by John Weldon in 1979

This lighthearted, animated short is based on the song "The Log Driver's Waltz" by Wade Hemsworth. Easily one of the most often-requested films in the NFB collection, Kate and Anna McGarrigle sing along to the tale of a young girl who loves to dance and chooses to marry a log driver over his more well-to-do competitor. Driving logs down the river has made the young man the best dancing partner to be found. (from http://www.nfb.ca/film/log_drivers_waltz/ )

updated with 2012 links
What difference a couple of years makes. TSN has really discovered the internet and Canadian Masters golf fans are the beneficiaries. For 2012 there is an extensive schedule of online 2012 Masters content starting on Monday April 2nd. You can watch the Masters streaming on TSN.ca at http://www.tsn.ca/live/golf/masters2012/. Streaming coverage during the tournament includes Amen Corner, Hole 15 and 16 and featured groups. This year TSN even have an iPad/iPhone app for 2012 Masters golf fans. Now when are you going to show us android users some app love TSN?

This post used to be titled "Masters streaming Canada should return tsn.ca, TSN needs some SEO help" when it was written 2 years ago. In the interim much has changed and http://tsn.ca is now the first search term returned when you Google "Masters streaming canada". I've updated the original article with the 2012 link information but left the rest of the post as is for posterity.

What follows is woefully out of date

TSN should give ChannelCanada.com a great big kiss because ChannelCanada.com seems to have a clue. I decided to catch some of the Masters today. When I flipped through the channels early in the afternoon and realized that it was televised until later in the day I did what Google has trained all of us to do, open firefox and type "Masters streaming Canada" into the search box. Why "Masters streaming Canada"? I'd argue that "live streaming" has become a generic term to denote video available live on the Internet. I didn't bother to include "live" in my query because it seemed redundant and as it turns out it makes little difference in the results.

The first result Google offered was mastersgolf.ca. When I clicked through and clicked on the large "Watch Live" box in the centre of the screen I was informed that "This service is not available in your area". I had been redirected to the U.S. Masters site and hadn't noticed. The second result was "Masters LIVE Streaming Video in Canada Exclusively at MastersGolf.ca", a press release from 2008. I already knew that wasn't true. Luckily for me the third result is a blog post on ChannelCanada.com that talks about TSN's coverage of the Masters on tsn.ca because the fourth result is "Masters streaming in Canada. Nope! [Golf]" a bulletin board post from 2007. Why doesn't tsn.ca show up in the search? Probably because the banner they have on their main page that says "Watch Masters Live Now" is a graphic with only "Watch Masters Live Now" as the alt text. They don't appear to have tried to optimize for other search terms. If you search for "Masters Live Canada" they show up sixth, behind a number of educational institutions who offer Masters degrees. "Master Live Canada" is an ok choice of keywords but not as intuitive as "Masters streaming Canada" at least to me. Maybe TSN believes that everybody in Canada knows that's where to look for Masters golf coverage but I'd argue that many golf viewers may not know that tsn.ca has live streaming of the Masters golf tournament. It's even more important because we have the day off today in Canada and Canadian Masters fans could have watched most of the day.

The ironic thing was that after I found the site, watched their 1:15 seconds of Flash commercials I couldn't watch the live streaming after all because they were using Microsoft Silverlight and Silverlight doesn't run on Linux.

Another case of major SEO fail? I'm pretty sure I saw a promo spot for the new Red Dwarf series Back to Earth which is premiering in the U.K. this weekend on a Canadian cable station. Unfortunately I forgot which channel I saw it on and this morning I tried a whole bunch of different searches without success. Sigh.

I haven't blogged for a while and I suspect you are wondering why I am blogging about women's lingerie and bras. A friend of mine recently open a lingerie and bra store in Richmond Hill and I thought I should throw a little blog love her way to help along. She calls her store Coup de Foudre and specializes in top of the line luxury lingerie and bras. Her store is located at 1285 Elgin Mills Road East in Richmond Hill which is right across the street from Richmond Green and about 2 minutes from the 404 which makes it convenient for lingerie shoppers in York Region. If you know if anyone looking for top quality ladies lingerie and bras why not give Coup de Foudre a try. If you drop by tell them Wayne sent you and maybe my friend will give me a good price on a pair of fancy mens underwear.

Lying on my deck enjoying the great Thanksgiving weather and listening to the Sunday Edition. http://www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition/ http://www.cbc.ca/video/news/audioplayer.html?clipid=2149705842 http://www.cbc.ca/video/news/audioplayer.html?clipid=15329089

(2011 information, updated July 15th 2011, with livestream.com embed)
TSN has announced their live broadcast and streaming schedule for the 2011 British Open and is offering live streaming of holes 14, 15 and 16 at http://www.tsn.ca/live/golf/britishopen2011/. Live streaming starts at 4 a.m. on Thursday and Friday, 6 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

The BBC is streaming live coverage of all four rounds of the Open on the BBC Sport website for British golf fans. You know the Brits love gold when a tournament called the Open Championship has to be golf. The BBC Sport website will carry live streaming of the network broadcast, plus play through the 14th, 15th and 16th holes. Coverage begins at 9 a.m. BST on Thursday, details on times for the other days will be added as they are announced. As mentioned below Canadian's will need to use a service like http://hotspotshield.com/ (free) or www.witopia.net (paid) to access the BBC Sports British Open live golf streams if they need to get their golf fix. BST is currently 5 hours ahead of EST. 2010 information is shown below so you can weep about how good we had it last year

Livestream.com also offered coverage of the British Open.

One neat feature of the British Open website is the opportunity to play a virtual version of the Open at Royal St. Georges at http://www.opengolf.com/en/VirtualOpen/VirtualOpen.aspx

(2010 information)
Canadian golf fans don't despair, www.TSN.ca has published their broadcast schedule for the 2010 British Open and so far has only announced live streaming coverage of holes 9, 10 and 11 from the Old Course at St. Andrew's. The streaming will start when groups arrive at the ninth, TSN has said more details will follow.now says live streaming will start at approximately 3:30am est/12:30am pst. TSN's live streams are available at http://www.tsn.ca/live/golf/BritishOpen2010/.

The Brits are big golf fans and as one would expect the BBC is streaming live coverage of all four rounds of the Open on the BBC Sport website for British golf nuts http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/categories/sport/golf/?sort=dateavailable. The BBC is offering wall to wall 2010 Open golf coverage with live streaming running 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. BST (British Summer Time) on Thursday and Friday, 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. BST on Saturday and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. BST on Sunday. BBC Sports will not only stream their live TV coverage they will also live stream holes nine, ten and eleven each day. Canadian's will need to use a service like http://hotspotshield.com/ (free) or www.witopia.net (paid) to access the BBC Sports British Open live golf streams. BST is currently 5 hours ahead of EST.

Watchlivegolf.com offers a 1 year package of live golf streaming for $12.95 but after reading through their FAQ I'm not so sure I'd be willing to gamble with my money. Their FAQ says
"We at watchlivegolf.com do not provide streams of any live golf coverage from our website. Nor do we provide links to download software from any illegal sites. Instead, we provide links to the best live golf streaming available online. These links come courtesy or third party providers where the streaming live golf videos are legal practice." I found one review at http://judgespot.com/review/watchlivegolf.com that said the site was a scam so be prepared to kiss your $12.95 goodbye. If anybody tries please come back and leave a comment.

While you are waiting for the Open to begin TSN has a video flyover of each hole of The Old Course at St. Andrews to whet your appetite here http://watch.tsn.ca/2010-british-open-on-demand/2010-british-open-hole-by-hole-flyover/#clip323782
Thanks to Anosmia for releasing the picture that graces this article under a Creative Commons license http://www.flickr.com/photos/jenniferboyer/180863929/

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.