Wayne D's Blog

Whilst hanging in the Twitterverse Wednesday night I received a tweet telling me about another one of Geoff Smith's ustream concerts. Geoff set up his gear in the backyard. Ignore the interrogation room lighting, Cali Lewis offered to send Geoff a better light for the next concert because the sound is great. Geoff sang for over 2 hours, a mix of his original material and viewer requests.

The road trip referenced in the title? Geoff let slip that he was planning a Geek Brief Christmas party in Nashville on December on Monday December 15th at the Big Bang Piano Bar. I checked on Google Maps and it says I should be able to drive there in 12 hours. If I could recruit one or two other Toronto Geek Brief/ Geoff Smith fans to share the driving with it isn't that crazy. The other alternative is a $200 flight from Buffalo. Hmmm it doesn't seem that crazy after all.

Want to check out Geoff's concert then click below? His newest video can be found here. The song, Ones and 0's is about how mean people online can be at times.
If you want to share driving to Nashville let me know.

Streaming Video by Ustream.TV

I had been planning on writing a blog post about my July 2008 canoe trip to Killarney Provincial Park to go along with the route map I posted last month but wanted to do something a little bit different.
(updated November 2010) Flowgram ceased operation in June 2009. They offered an export tool but unfortunately in my case it didn't export the video properly. I finally got around to recreating my slideshow using the audio track and cinelerra to create a video which I uploaded to Youtube and embedded below.

I was thinking of some sort of narrated slide show and looking around for a tool to do it I remembered that I had signed up for a beta with the Flowgram service back at the beginning of July. After a few false starts and poking around a bit I realized that Flowgram could import my Flickr set and all I had to do was add the narration. After struggling with getting a mike that didn't pick up the TV or the kids watching TV or chatting in the room behind me I managed to get the background noise down to a dull roar. My first problem was Flash kept freezing on me, I think it's more of a Flash than Flowgram problem. I can't wait for the release of Flash 10 for Linux. I know this version of Flash for Linux has some significant issues that need to be fixed. My second problem was when I went in to lower the default display time on the pictures without audio from 10 seconds I managed to get one slide set to 13:30 and two others set to 5:00. My 4:52 slide show now timed out at 27:35 and the only way I could fix it was to delete the pictures and reimport them. I have reported my problem to the flowgram guys, I know they have been working on a revamped version which I expect has fixed this issue. Until they tell me how to do it right you get to look at unnarrated pictures for 10 seconds, Flowgram is a closed beta so I am not expecting perfection. Updated Aug 09, I sent my bug report to the Flowgram team at 7:52 p.m. their time on a Friday night and received a response at 11:06 p.m. confirming that it was a known problem and would be fixed in the upcoming release. Once it's released I'll change the timing. That's phenominal customer service. If you want to try Flowgram out yourself let me know, I have 10 invites to the beta available. What I have done in my little slide show doesn't use it's capabilities to include and highlight web pages. Support for importing Powerpoint presentations was also recently added.

Now I invite you to sit back, turn up your speakers, click below and spend four minutes and fifty two eight seconds in Killarney Provincial Park as we travel through Bell Lake, Three Mile Lake, Balsam Lake and David Lake, climb Silver Peak and return with a side trip to Little Bell Lake.

(updated August 22th, 2009) Finally thanks to My EeePC Blog there is a simple way to put Flash 10 on your old EEEPC. Some caveats, this method replaces some core libraries and may break other software you have installed. Packages it is known to break are build essentails, vlc, xchm, amule and some others. I used this method and it worked fine for me. The steps are fully explained at http://eeepc-albkwan.blogspot.com/2009/03/install-firefox-3-with-flashplayer-10.html so I won't repeat them here. If you don't want to make major changes to your EEEPC then the methods listed below still work. The Linux version of Flash has an issue with the webcam and microphone permission box popping up and not responding to clicks to be able to dismiss it. See this blog post for a solution. (updated June 7th, 2009) Short answer, getting Flash 10 to run on the EEEPC can be difficult but if you know the tricks you should be able to get it working. (flash bug info moved up the page) If I haven't scared you off yet feel free to read on and good luck. (updated Dec 13th) The release version of Flash 10 is not compatible with the EEEPC because of dependency issues, I have added some information on how to work around this problem, you need to use Svolli's patch utility if you use the latest Flash 10 version. (updated Oct 27th) Looks like I may have spoke too soon. Though Flash 10 works sometimes I have had problems getting it to work on mebeam.com and live.yahoo.com. It has also worked intermittently for me on ustream.tv, the good news, flashcam still works with Linux Flash 10. You can also check out Flash camera support on the EEEPC 701 for my survey of flash based video websites and how to get them to work on the EEEPC 701. Adobe has released a new release candidate beta for Flash 10 for Linux and the good news is that it includes V4L2 support which means that Flash should be able to access the EEEPC's camera without using flashcam. The bad news is that the official release version that came out a few days later doesn't work on the EEEPC because of dependancy issues. When Adobe released Flash 10 for Linux they used a version of a library the EEEPC doesn't have. All is not lost though because the beta that came out a few days before the official release doesn't have this problem and seems to work find, though it has other issues. I managed to find the beta version of the library on my PC. If you want to use the latest version you can download it from Adobe and use Svolli's Flash10 patcher but make sure you read this post for a solution to the popup permission box that won't go away. I leave it up to you to decide which option is best for you, I've tried both and either works fine, my advice is to use Flash 9 on the EEEPC unless you absolutely need Flash 10. I've used the beta without too much trouble and installing it isn't as complicated as Svolli's patch utility, it's up to you to decide which path to take. The instructions below are for how to install the beta version. If you decide you don't want to upgrade the original EEEPC version of Flash you can still use flashcam to access the camera but more and more websites are requiring that you run the latest version of Adobe Flash to access them. To give the Flash 10 beta that works on the EEEPC a try download http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer10_install_linux_081108.tar.gz. I'd suggest using the save file option. Then extract the files using the extract all option in the file manager or using the command tar -zxvf flashplayer10_install_linux_081108.tar.gz in a command window. This should leave you with a folder called install_flash_player_10_linux. Open a terminal window using CTRL-ALT-T and enter the following commands. NOTE Each numbered line is a single command and should be entered on a single line.

/home/user> sudo su
eeepc-wdawe:/home/user> cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
eeepc-wdawe:/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins> cp libflashplayer.so libflashplayer.so.orig
eeepc-wdawe:/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins> cp /home/user/install_flash_player_10_linux/libflashplayer.so .

To make it easier to type in the long path names you can use the TAB key i.e. typing /home/user/install then pressing TAB should give you /home/user/install_flash_player_10_linux. Now restart your EEEPC and give it a try. If you don't restart before trying it will not work. I've checked the results with 12seconds.tv, live.yahoo.com and ustream.tv and they all worked ok. It's important to remember this is a release candidate so there may still be some bugs. If you want to revert to the original version use these commands.

/home/user> sudo su
eeepc-wdawe:/home/user> cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
eeepc-wdawe:/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins> cp libflashplayer.so.orig libflashplayer.so

Today (13-08-08) I received an error message that my camera couldn't be found when trying to use my cam on 12seconds.tv. I was able to fix it by closing the browser and entering the following command to enable the camera in a terminal window eeepc-wdawe:/home/user> echo 1 > /proc/acpi/asus/camera the green light should go on beside the camera If you didn't follow my instructions and back up your previous version and now Flash doesn't work here is the backup file from my EEEPC. Next time follow the instructions!


blog post flash 10 beta install on the EEEPC on 12seconds.tv

I remember when I switched from altavista as my primary search engine to Google. Google provided a nice clean interface with highly relevant results. What you were searching for usually shows up on the first page and Google is still the gold standard for search engines. Cuil debuted this week trumpeting that there index was three times larger than Google and like many others I decided to give it a try. I used the same search query I used in the Powerset vs. Google challenge. I typed "how much does a loonie weigh" and hit enter. The result, nothing. Then it was on to a vanity search wdawe.com. The first page of results show links to wdawe.com but doesn't list the primary site. Then i searched for eeepc camera flash support, which on google , Yahoo and live.com brings up my blog post on the eeepc port of the flashcam project as the first result. The result, again nothing. It looks like there is a lot of junk in that index cuil.com says is three times bigger than Google. Cuil has received a pretty rough ride mostly because they created very high expectations and then failed to even come close. Search results that do come up also suffer from poor relevancy. Cuil.com looks cool but the search results are worse than live.com. They still have much work to do.

The weather was perfect for watching golf, warm but not hot, enough clouds to provide some shade but not enough to rain. Our day began with a ride in a 7 series BMW with a hydrogen fueled engine. When we reached the shuttle bus stop at the Oakville Go station the BMW guys had just finished showing the car to a group of five guys who turned down the offer of a ride to the course because they didn't want to break up their group and with the driver there were only three seats left. We arrived around two in the afternoon as the final pairing was teeing off on hole four. We went off to hole sixteen to watch a few pairings play through and then moved to hole nine in time to watch the last three groups play through. Then it was off to hole sixteen and seventeen to watch for the rest of the day. The shots that were most impressive weren't the really good ones but instead the shots where the player was trying to get our of trouble. One player landed his shot on sixteen deep in the right side rough almost on the cart path right right at the rope, He picked his club, lined up his shot and fired it onto the fairway and then chipped it into the hole. Another player on seventeen hit his shot far to the right of the rough landing it in the wood chips at the base of a tree across the cart path. He took out his rescue wood and whizzed it under the trees and down the fairway to eventually par the hole.

Even in the middle of the afternoon there were people lined up to hit balls in the golf simulator. After the final pairing passed us on the seventeenth hole with Chez Reavie in the lead by four strokes we headed out to beat the rush to the shuttle buses. Nine minutes and were back at the car and heading home.

We stopped at the London Pub Company to celebrate my wife's birthday and stumbled upon their Sunday Singer Songwriter night. Show up with your guitar or keyboard and some songs to sing and you take the stage. No cover, no minimum take what you get. I felt a bit like we were intruding, other than us and the couple with rambunctious kid with a cast everyone else there seemed to know each other. Only Jeff Scott mentioned his website but that is such a common name that I couldn't nail it down. A shame since a couple of his songs were really nice.

(Update April 20th 2009)

My mini review managed to attract the attention of Jeff Scott himself as you can see from the comment below. Now that Jeff has pointed me in the right direction I've added his ReverbNation music widget so you can hear what he sounds like. As I said above I liked his music and now you can listen for yourself and if you really like it you might even want to buy his CD.
="http://www.reverbnation.com/c./a4/15/88137/Artist/0/User/link">