Wayne D's Blog

After the election was called on September 7th it was almost two weeks until I saw any sign of campaigning by our local Conservative candidate. Up unil that point I only saw signs from the NDP and Green party on my trips to and from home and work. I looked up out candidates name out of interest the might before I drove across town on the 19th and saw my first local Conservative candidates road sign. Now, a little more than a week later, a few signs have sprouted up. I really shouldn't be surprised the Conservatives aren't putting much effort into my riding, the past two elections they have trailed the Liberals by a huge margin.

I'm not very impressed with the campaigning so far. Between the Conservative attack ads and the Liberals being MIA on an explanation of what their Green Shift plan is all about I am disengaged and disinterested. The first time I heard a cognizant explanation of what the Green Shift was on a CBC comedy show on the same day I saw my first local Conservative election sign, or maybe it was a week later.

Maybe I'd be more engaged if the parties were talking about the proposed ACTA which will turn our ISP's intp copyright police and have the Canada Border service agents searching through our laptops and iPods for illegally copied materials. I think I'm surly because our Prime Minister decided to call an election when he thought he could win a majority, he's probably right but that doesn't mean I have to like it. There is no doubt the Liberals will win once again in my riding, I think I'll vote Green to make them feel better.

The picture at the top of this post shows the fence I erected yesterday for the community garden at my church. I was dropping my son off for the kids cooking club that one of the members has started when I saw the garden manager and stopped to chat with her. She told me about the terrible theft problems they were encountering. People would come to harvest their vegetables and find that someone had cleaned them out. This filled me with righteous indignation and I was determined to do something. It was off to Home Depot for a couple of rolls of plastic fencing. To save money I didn't buy fence posts which were terribly expensive as compared to the cost of the fencing, instead we used some tomato stakes that we scrounged from the garden.

We are also considering adding a video camera to monitor the parking lot and the garden access. If you are woman in the red jeep who thinks that a community garden means free vegetables we are watching for you. Stealing from our garden in different than stealing from the supermarket. If you are the other thieves who think that stealing vegetables other people have nurtured all summer or from the plots that we use for vegetables for the underprivileged members of our community you should be ashamed of yourselves.

I have been struggling with trying to get an open source program to compile on any of the version of Linux that I have available to me with no success so far. To add insult to injury the person who released the project has released executables for both Mac and Windows and not for Linux. Linux users have to be satisfied with a tarball because as any reasonably savvy Linux users knows Linux has it's own version of dll hell, shared library hell. Each Linux distro has a different set of what the distro considers to be the standard set of shared libraries. The package I was trying to compile uses qt4 which neither Centos, Ubuntu or Fedora core uses as part of the core distribution. Additionally this particular package uses a version of someone else's library that isn't the latest version. Finding the source code for this particular version of the package is very, very difficult because the maintainer has changed source control packages. This means previous version aren't available in the software repository. At some point I decided that four hours was enough time to struggle with this particular project and I installed the Windows version of the software instead. It took less than a minute to get it running not including the download time.

I was reminded of this problem today when Codeweavers released a version of Google's chrome browser that runs on Windows. The wrinkle? Instead of being a native Linux version it is a port of Chrome that runs under Wine, the Linux project that allows Linux users to run Windows software. Codeweavers have brilliantly avoided the problems with shared library dependencies by using the Linux Wine standard API, which is the Microsoft Windows API. I download the Chromium browser and had it running in less than 5 minutes. Wine isn't perfect, it wouldn't run the Windows version of the package I was trying to install earlier but maybe that's the path Linux should take at least in the desktop space. (updated Sept 24) Even better, it did run under Wine after installing Chromium Refine the Wine implementation of the Windows API and give people a real alternative to Windows. Now I have a dilemma on my earlier problem. Should I continue to try and get the dependencies satisfied for a native Linux version or would my time be better spent fixing Wine? Hmmmmm.

Today I received a comment on one of my previous posts about how anxious the poster was for the return of Pushing Daisies and it reminded me of a USA Today story that I read when I was in San Jose for Nvision. The story basically says that the studio wanted to "rein in the more "fantastical" elements of the show to woo a broader audience". Oh, oh, the quirkiness of the show is what I found so endearing and charming. Pushing Daisies was my favourite show of last year. It also sounds like Kristin Chenoweth, who plays Olive, may not be playing as large as part in the show as she did last year with her move to a nunnery. I am prepared to give ABC the benefit of the doubt until I see a few episodes but I am not hopeful. Studio exec's meddling with shows is usually the beginning of the end and a show that has only had nine shows needs a chance to find it's legs.

For those of you who haven't seen the show I can't do it justice with a description but I'll try. It's about a pie maker who can bring the dead back to life for a short time, his childhood sweetheart who he can't touch, his detective partner who uses the pie makers unusual skill to solve crimes for the rewards. If you want to see what all the fuss is about and live in the U.S. you can watch the first season online at http://abc.go.com/player/ if you are outside the U.S. you can try Google. I'm keeping my fingers crossed until October 1st when the show premieres for this season.

As I have been writing this post I have also been watching a rerun of C.S.I. that I didn't see last year, with a funny cameo by the Mythbusters watching one of the C.S.I's lighting a dummy on fire. I also just saw an ad for Star Wars: The Clone Wars, I hope it's not aimed at me because I wasn't impressed.

(update Sept 19) Here are a couple of season 2 sneak peek videos I found on Brightcove.com.

I was watching Diners, Drive Ins and Dives recently and they kept featuring eight ounce burgers, and those were singles not doubles. Around here most restaurants have taken to serving eight ounce burgers with fries for $10. Cheese is extra of course. To me that's too much meat especially when it's high in fat as most burgers are. I understand that it's in a restaurants best interest to sell a slightly bigger burger for more money and that people want more meat but when will it stop? Eight ounces used to be a good sized steak and now it's a normal size burger. Remember when a quarter pounder was a big burger? Not any more.

Just say no, end the burger madness.