Wayne D's Blog

Boy am I tired today. Yesterday was both Argos Fan Day at the University of Toronto Mississauga campus and my cousin's 25th wedding anniversary in Elmwood Ontario. The director of the Argonotes decided that it would be a good idea for us to get together for at least one rehearsal so we booked the Mist theatre as a rehearsal space. The only problem was that we had to be there at 10:00 a.m. to get the practise in before the start of Fan Day. Coupled with the long trek out to Mississauga it meant getting up early on a Saturday morning. The main purpose of the rehearsal was to try out some new music for inclusion in our repertoire. We had decided to try to do some recording so it was necessary to get there a little bit early to get the microphones set up and hook the mixer up to the Macbook we were using to record the session. I've decided that my next computer will be a Mac, I just haven't decided which model to get yet. I've used Audacity to do recording before, this time we were using Garage Band which looked like a a nice package.

During our rehearsal/recording session I had to try to put out a metaphorical work fire that had flared up as approached the turn in for U of T Mississauga. It eventually involved three people and meant that I didn't get a good picture of the Argo's cheerleaders on field routine. After meeting up with my family, having a burger and playing a few tunes at Fan Day it was back in the care for the ride home. Pictures for the day are on my Flickr. A quick change and it was back in the car for the two and a half hour trip to Elmwood. There was square dancing, drinks, food. The kids played in the park outside the community centre until it got dark. Then it was back in the car for the trip home. We pulled into the driveway at two thirty and I collapsed into bed. I had stupidly decided to call a meeting of Inspyre for this morning after church which meant that we had to drag ourselves out of bed and off to church.

Why might we Wii? In the middle of the rehearsal my wife called to say that one of my collegues had called to say that he was in a store and they had ten Wii's. He had called to see if he wanted him to buy one for us. I haven't heard back from him yet, but I may now be the proud owner of a Wii.

In an effort to aid my Linux compatriats I occasioanlly post the answers to problems I have run across. Last week we had a power failure and our LDAP server which doesn't have a UPS came back up slapd wouldn't start. LDAP logging is turned off by default because the default logging is quite verbose and creates large log files. To turn logging on add the line:
local4.* /var/log/ldap.log to /etc/syslog.conf and restart syslogd
when I did that I saw
May 31 17:39:20 server slapd[4817]: @(#) $OpenLDAP: slapd 2.2.13 (Aug 13 2006 01:27:00) $ buildcentos@build-i386:/hom
e/buildcentos/rpmbuild/BUILD/openldap-2.2.13/openldap-2.2.13/build-servers/servers/slapd
May 31 17:39:20 server slapd[4817]: bdb_initialize: Sleepycat Software: Berkeley DB 4.2.52: (December 3, 2003)
May 31 17:39:20 server slapd[4817]: bdb_initialize: Sleepycat Software: Berkeley DB 4.2.52: (December 3, 2003)
May 31 17:39:20 server slapd[4817]: bdb_db_init: Initializing BDB database

the slapd database wasn't initializing.
To fix this I had to run db_recover in /var/lib/ldap (after stopping slapd). Make sure you run db_recover as the user who owns the database otherwise you will get premission denied errors when you try to start slapd. If you run it as root you will have to change the owner from root back to the appropriate user for your system. On my Centos 4.4 system the owner is ldap.

Our new UPS comes tomorrow.

A few weeks ago I thought it would be a good idea to buy the kids a Wii. I haven't been paying much attention to what has been going on in the video game world since the hype of last winter when the PS3 was released. I quickly found out that the Wii is pretty much unavailable even though it's been 6 months since the product launched. One Walmart I was in even had cardboard taped over the Wii display case probably so shoppers wouldn't bother to ask the staff if they had any Wii's. The same Walmart did has PS3's available. I can understand there being some product shortages around launch time but six months later? I checked a few Wii listing in the Facebook marketplace and people are selling used Wii's for almost $200 above the retail price. Talking to a few of my friends I found out that if you want a Wii you have to call around to stores, find out when the 2-6 units they get each week come in and then hustle on down there on the appointed time and day and buy one. I don't want a Wii that much. Doing a bit of browsing around the web revealed that Xbox 360's weren't readily available until a year after launch. Can't these companies properly plan product launches? What's the point of releasing a product that people can't buy? The buzz on the Wii has been good but a non-gamer is not going to act like a fanboy. Looks like Nintendo has dropped the ball on this one. Good idea, terrible execution.

Tonight was supposed to be blog night but it turned into plunger night when I had to plunge the downstairs toilet which was clogged by an unnamed son and the ensuite shower which was clogged by an unnamed wife. Her long hair is very cute and sexy but it plays havoc with the shower drain. She seems to lose more hair in the shower than I ever had. Got to pick up a boy from Timberwolves in a few minutes so I thought I'd give you a quick update on my transition to Centos 5. It's OK but has some features of the newer distros that I find particularly irritating. I know that most of these irritants can be fixed but I like an OS that works out of the box.

1. Give me back my DVD. When I push the button the the DVD drive that means I want my disk now! I don't want to have to su to root to get the eject command to work. I don't want to have to set the sticky bit on the eject command so it works from a user login. Give me my disk when I press the button or I may resort to the flat bladed screwdriver.
2. Why don't I get the option to go to a terminal prompt when I right click on the desktop in Gnome anymore? Unix without a command prompt is like a day without sunshine. Install nautilus-open-terminal to rectify this.
   
3. Autorun on CD's and DVD's doesn't work anymore, CD's and DVD's are mounted with noexec permissions by default. Grrrrr.
4. SELinux still sucks. Turn it off by default or you will regret it.
5. If I want the screensaver to lock my screen I'll set it. Why would anyone make that the default behaviour on a fresh install?
6. Give me a kernel with Firewire! It works on Linux so why not include it in the base kernel?
7. Can you make MP3 support any harder to install in Sound Juicer? It used to be one rpm and the greyed out button worked, now it's a couple of packages ( gstreamer-plugins-bad, gstreamer-plugins-ugly) that need to be installed plus a mysterious Gstreamer pipeline parameter ( audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc ! id3mux ) that needs to be entered right or else.
   

I just finished downloading my emusic.com tracks for this month so I thought I'd tell you all about them.

• First is vox humana by Mel Watson of Fruit. I saw Fruit in concert a few years ago and was really impressed with their high energy show. This album from one of the members of Fruit has a pop feel with some nice horn backing.
• Retriever by Ron Sexsmith was another of my choices. I heard him on this week's Vinyl Cafe with Stuart McLean and was impressed enough with his music to pick up some of his songs.
• Dances like Flames from Tanglefoot is also on the list for next month. I've seen Tanglefoot in concert a few times and always found them quite entertaining. Tanglefoot has added a female vocalist and fiddle player who adds a new dimension to their harmonies.
• I also picked up 5 tracks off of Hungry Ghosts by Doug Cox and Sam Hurrie. Some of the tracks on the album were a little too bluesies for my tastes so I didn't get the whole album but the more folk focused tracks I did download were quite satisfying.

If you want cheap, legal, DRM free, indie music emusic.com is the place to get it. If you want to sign up and get 50 free tracks send me a message and I'll send you a referral. That way I get 50 more free tracks too. Not from emusic.com but also new to my iPod this month is The Phenominal Ruthie Foster a new album from (surprise, surprise) Ruthie Foster. I bought this one from Amazon.ca using my Telus $10 off discount on purchases over $40. It works out to be less than buying on iTunes after the discount is taken into account.

I finally gave up on using the radio to cassette adapter in my car and switched back to the FM transmitter. It's gotten to the point that the cassette adaptor gets ejected by the cassette player ever 30 seconds or so. It works fine in my wife's car so I think it's the cassette deck in my car.

Now I'm off to rip more of my old CD's to add to my music library, on the pile is No Doubt - Tragic Kingdom, Exchange - Into the Night, Natalie MacMaster - In My Hands and Randy Newman - Faust.

After writing about Tiki Bar TV a few weeks ago I hear that Steve Jobs mentioned the show in a speech last year. So as always I am late to the bandwagon.