Wayne D's Blog

I've written about Geekbrief before and when I watched todays episode about Twitter I thought it would be a great short video to share. Check it out especially if you are a Facebook status junkie.

his weekend I went camping with my son's Explorer troop. Saturday night was cold, at 5 a.m. I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep. Sunday night was worse, it was -21 C when we got up Monday morning and it was probably at least -25 C during the night. I had three sleeping bags and four layers on top, three below and when I woke up at 11 p.m. after two hours asleep I was miserably cold. I toyed with the idea of getting in the car and heading down the road to the small town nearby to see if the motel was still open but I soldiered on. It was so cold that when I put my hands outside of the sleeping bag they hurt. For some reason my body responds to the cold by wanting to pee which I had to do twice in that very cold night. At least after dashing into the night my toes were no longer ice blocks for a few minutes. It did not last, drafts seemed to slip into my sleeping bag everywhere. I am so over winter camping. If I never see the inside of a frost filled tent again I will not despair.

While browsing for a method to input Korean characters on a touch screen the other night I ran across Dasher. It a new method for information-efficient text entry. While not as fast as touch typing it is a m interesting alternative text entry method and also is really cool. It has a number of potential applications including text entry on non traditional keyboard based products and as a text entry method for the disabled. On the site there is an explanation of the technique along with a java applet where you can try it out. Before trying the applet I'd strongly recommend you read the How Dasher works section of the website. The Google video below is 54 minutes long and I thought I'd watch the first five minutes and ended up watching the whole thing. I challenge you to do the same and see if you can stop.

Yahoo Live refused to let me go live once again but after speaking to some other I realized that the service is suffering from the classic two place problem. Keep some information in two places and they will invariably get out of sync.The symtom here is that when you log into Yahoo Live everything works fine until you try to push the GO LIVE button, you can see the video from your camera in the preview but the GO LIVE button wouldn't activate. Looking at your status in the chat window show the bright green activated symbol. People report that your video screen in the chat screen is black, You can't broadcast your video because the client thinks you already are, You can't shut it off because you aren't broadcasting video.

The only way to get around this problem until the Yahoo Live team fixes this problem is to use a different Yahoo id. In some database deep in the bowels of Yahoo there is an entry that says you are broadcasting video. The last time this happened to me it was fixed when Yahoo took Yahoo Live offline for maintenance which probably had the side effect of clearing everyone's broadcasting flag. I'd report this to the Yahoo Live team but they haven't made it easy to leave them feedback. Of course they may already know about it, but who knows.

I don't know if it's blogging late at night or blogging on the eeepc but I have noticed that my posts are gettng published with more typos now then previously. I shall try to be more diligent in my copy editing in the future.

I managed to miss watching Guinea Pig on Monday night. I really must put together a Myth TV PVR soon. When I went to Discovery,ca to see if they offered the show in a streaming version I was delighted to find that even though that particular episode wasn't available they did offer flash video streaming of other episodes. Flash streaming video works great on Linux. For many years Linux users had to be satisfied with a not so good implementation of flash. Macromedia didn't release Flash 8 for Linux. That changed when Adobe decided to make simultaneous releases of Flash 9 on Windows and Linux. Now Linux users enjoy the same web experience that Windows users do.

Microsoft, seeing the success of Flash in the marketplace has decided to release Silverlight which is their version of Flash. They call it cross platform but to Microsoft that means Windows and Mac. Some hardy souls hve announced that they are going to do a Linux version of Silverlight, but how much help do you think they will get from Microsoft? For a more in depth discussion of why Silverlight is such a bad ideas see silverlight bags another one at the malocite blog.