Wayne D's Blog

While Googling for information about Yahoo 360 problems I came across the news that Yahoo announced back in October that they were going to shut down 360. What they actually said was

"we intend to transition Yahoo! 360 to a more integrated Yahoo! experience in early 2008."

Thanks for communicating this to your users Yahoo. In the interim they aren't fixing any bugs which explains why I'm having so much trouble posting and editing articles. My plan is to transition my blog to a more reliable user experience very, very soon. I'm not prepared to put up with another buggy product that never makes it out of beta. I remember the debacle that was Yahoo TV when it transitioned to a more integrated Yahoo experience. That's why I use epguides.com and Canada.com now.

Another blog posting bites the dust. It's late, I'm tired and I didn't copy the text before I hit post so this is the second time I'm writing this post. The router from hell had hung at the office yet again. I noticed it today when I was trying to connect to do some work. Enough being enough I stopped at Canada Computers to buy a new router. While there I looked longingly at the Asus eee PC. They are so cute, I'd buy one but I read that they are coming out with new models this spring. I don't really need it but it seems like such a neat gadget. Trying to get past the 8 GB storage limit is one hurdle, especially when for $100 more I can get a regular laptop. I'd also like to try one before I spend the money to see if an internet appliance will meet my desires.

I was over at my brother's tonight for dinner and we were talking about the 11 communion settings in our church's new service book. We decided there needed to be a poll to determine which was the most popular setting. I'll set it up on my website tomorrow.

The first time I wrote this post I commented on how I should write down my ideas because I can never remember them when it comes time to write. While rewriting this post I realized that I couldn't remember much of what I wrote the first time.

Over the last weeks I watched as they demolished Southbrook farms. The house, the barn, the building where they had their farm store. All that is left is a pile of rubble which will soon be replaced with a high school and more houses. I remember going into the winery store that was in the bottom part of the barn to pick up some wine. There was a fire burning in the wood stove and it was very pleasant and homey. Later on they moved the wine store into the farm store building and it wasn't the same.

I spent some very frustrating time today trying to an info.callout.add script to run when we added a new USB peripheral to our Centos 5 system. Everything seemed to be OK but the script just wouldn't run. After much head scratching and Google searching I found a clue in a posting on nabble.com entitled Problems getting callouts to work from someone who said their script didn't work when they used an absolute path. Then I found the following on HAL 0.5.10 Specification

"All callouts are searched for and execute in a minimal environment. In addition, the UDI of the device object is exported in the environment variable UDI. All properties of the device object are exported in the environment prefixed with HAL_PROP_. If a device is added or removed is exported in the environment variable HALD_ACTION . The search path for the callout includes the following paths:

including $PATH the HAL daemon was started with during system initialization. Depending on the distribution, this typically includes /sbin, /usr/sbin, /bin, /usr/sbin. If the program to run is not found in any of these paths, the it will not run even if the given path is absolute. To be portable across operating systems, third party packages providing callouts must therefore only use $libdir/hal/scripts."

I also found the infor at Cliff Hacks Things blog to be useful both for his discussion on getting wifi to work with HAL and Network Manager interactions. Note that the script run by his info.callouts.add has a different path yet again.

I don't have a problem with restricting where scripts can be placed but would have it killed them to log an error message when it couldn't execute the script? Failing silently is not the linux standard, succeeding silently is and whining on failure is.

All this effort was in aid of being able to access a USB device that I physically plugged in. Why O why would the default access for a USB device I have complete physical control over not include write access? It's right up there with not letting me eject the DVD I put in the drive.

On Saturday afternoon two of may boys and I went to see the International Bowl at Skydome. I'm not a big U.S. college football fan but I'd never been to a bowl game and I thought it was worthwhile to try it out once. It was a rollicking high scoring affair with Rutgers beating Ball State 52-30. We were sitting in the level above the Rutger's band, that why the only pictures I have of Ball State's Band was from the pregame show. The game was good but as usual the lineups at the Roger's centre for food were atrocious. Nothing is cheap there and having to line up for overpriced, middling quality food is even worse. More pictures of the game are on my Flickr page. You can also click either picture to go there.

The ignomany of it all. Gas is 106.2 a litre, it's extremely cold and the pump keeps shutting off as I try to fill the tank. I gave up at $14.

Our new dryer arrived today, my wife had carefully measured it to make sure it would fit in our laundry room. What she didn't notice that while the were both the same size our old dryer had a flat back and the new one projects out. This means that it sits three inches further into the laundry room.

At least Telus called to say our phone was back from repairs. $25 service fee on a warranty repair seems a bit much.