Wayne D's Blog

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.

While driving to Ottawa over the Christmas break I took the time to get caught up on Buzz Out Loud. In one episode Molly Wood opined on how cool it would be when the semantic web was finally working and she could get her semantic web feed populated with funny cat pictures. I wanted to reference the particular episode but other than listening the six or so I had stored up all over again I will cross my fingers and hope I have got the reference close to the ballpark.

There was much talk this year about the semantic web being the "Next Big Thing". At its core the semantic web is about making web data easier for computers to parse and determine relationships which in the end is supposed to make it easier for you and I to find what we are looking for on the web. There are two reasons this technology is doomed to fail, firstly because people are lazy and secondly because some people are dishonest.

When I write my blog post there isn't much chance that I will the spend more time creating a semantic web description for the content it contains. I thought the whole point of computers was to make my life easier? Why should I have to write the thing twice? What about video and audio podcasts? After I edit them do I then have to write an rdf file in addition to the show notes so a computer can figure out what's inside?

The preponderance of link farms, keyword spam and tag abuse shows that if there is a way to game the system someone will try to use it. Google is in a running pitched battle to keep their search results relevant because some people are always trying to improve their result placing because they know if they aren't on the front page of results they are in trouble. The history of the web is full of people using metadata in a way that was not intended by the standards writers. The semantic web is just another form of metadata. Under carefully controlled circumstances metadata can be quite useful but in the wild west of the world wide web its pretty much useless. Imagine sending your semantic web retreiver engine out to find funny cat pictures and getting results littered with cat food ads as an example?

Cuil.com promised that it's Semantic web technology would out google Google and we know how that turned. I haven't yet seen a website advertising semantic web technology that has impressed me. I've written a couple of times about Twine.com and though I use it as a bookmark sharing tool the recommendations engine which is supposed to be powered by semantic web technologies has never recommended anything I am remotely interested in. This is not surprising because the descriptive metadata for the web resources that Cuil.com and Twine.com are using is nonexistent. They have to parse the web page and figure it out on their own. That begs the question, other than using semantic as a buzzword what do these two or any of the other purported semantic web driven website mean when they say semantic web? My suspicion is that it has become a hollow meaningless marketing term. The semantic web was last year's big thing, I wonder what it's going to be this year.

Yesterday 12seconds.tv had a special event for New Years Eve. I decided to take my EEEPC out at about 9 p.m. and record some of the Christmas lights in the neighbourhood. It was very cold, probably around -15C. Unfortunately I had to remove my glove to use the touchpad and was wearing a baseball cap because I couldn't find my winter hat. The cold wind and numb fingers convinced me after doing a few clips that I would not stray too far afield. Without further ado, here they are.

NYE lights on 12seconds.tv

New Years Liights pt. 2 on 12seconds.tv

New Years Lights Walk pt. 3 on 12seconds.tv

Another NYE house with lights pt. 4a on 12seconds.tv

NYE house lights only one more to go on 12seconds.tv

NYE lights, My Christmas tree in the window, final one. on 12seconds.tv

I finally got around to updating the Opera Mini version I had installed on my Blackberry. I had installed the 4.0 version many months ago but had problems with it giving error messages when I started it up after the first use. While fiddling around with it to switch from http to socket protocol in an effoer to fix it up I was prompted to download the latest version, 4.2. The built in Blackberry browser is adequate most of the time but has trouble with sites that have a multi-column layout because it doesn't support horizontal scrolling. If the web page has a left column then you have to scroll all the way past it to see the centre column. Other more complicated layouts also don't display very well. One page that is particularly Blackberry browser unfriendly is http://www.argonauts.ca/. Opera mini renders the whole page and lets you scroll a view window over the page and read the part of the page you are interested in. Opera mini also uses your history to assist when entering the address of the page you want to navigate to, a feature that was popularized by Firefox. The one downside to Opera mini is form fields, you can't fill them in in place but instead highlight and click on them which brings up another page where you enter your text. That's OK if you only have a few fields to fill in but would probably get tedious if you have too many to fill in.

If you have a Blackberry and were coveting the web page viewing experience of your iPhone owning friends then Opera mini gives you a free alternative. You can download Opera mini for your Blackberry at mini.opera.com