Wayne D's Blog

Lesson for today, don't try to use Super Heavy Duty batteries in your digital camera, they won't work. I decided a week or so ago to go out and take some pictures of the Christmas lights in my neighbourhood with my digital camera. I tried holding the camera as steadily as possible but no luck, the pictures looked slightly surreal, but not in a good way. Using the flash also produced less than satisfactory results. I wanted to borrow the tripod from work but it was unavailable because someone was using it for legitimate business purposes. Finally last night it came home to roost so I brought it home today with the express purpose of finishing my 2006 Christmas Light project. By the time I got myself organized and realized the Super heavy Duty batteries were a no go it was 9:30 so I had to go to the local combo gas station and variety store to buy some alkaline batteries. They wanted over 10 bucks for a 4 pack so I decided to make do with two Duracell's. I don't know about other digital cameras but mine is a battery vampire, it drains them dry in no time.
It was raining tonight so after putting on a sweater under my rain shell, digging out my grey acrylic wool hat, mounting my camera on the tripod and covering the camera with a Ziploc bag, I grabbed a flashlight and set out. You can see the results on my Flickr photstream. After the first ten pictures the camera started complaining about the battery level but I pushed it until it gave out completely. When I got home after walking around my neighbourhood for and hour and a half my pants were soaked, the water was leaking through my boots, the water had begun to soak through my coat, I had started to develop a blister on one heel from my not so walking friendly winter boots but I think it was worth it.
I don't know about your neighbourhood but in my neighbourhood there were long stretches where people hadn't bothered to put up Christmas lights. Christmas has lost much of the Christian connotations in our society and has become a secular holiday. I wonder why people don't want to put up some lights to help chase the long dark nights of December away.

I knew it was too good to be true. After hunting through TV listing sites the other night and settling on msn.ca I have found that both last night and today they don't work for me anymore. I get a Firefox error message that the connection to the server was reset when I try to load the page. Maybe too many Yahoo refugees climbed on the ship and Sympatico decided that they wanted to keep their listings for their own customers. No matter, the TV listing on canoe.ca are at least as good if not better. Canoe's listings which are powered by zap2it.com show which shows are repeats, something that I couldn't find on msn.ca. It takes a bit of fiddling around to get the Canoe listings to appear they way you want them but it's worth the effort. To get more than 20 channels showing on the page all you have to do is customize your channel lineup.
Yahoo 360 has finally included a spell checker in their latest update. I'm just glad that the same team that did the TV listings didn't work on 360.

(updated April 4, 2009) Time change and things improve see Yahoo TV lisitng s don't suck anymore for an update

I first realized that Rogers Yahoo had changed their TV listing when the grid on my rogers.yahoo.com personalized pages changed and lost about half the clickable links to show information.  When I clicked on one of the shows that was still linked I was transported to the new Rogers Yahoo TV beta. Wow, what a change. What seems to have gotten most people up in arms is the new TV listings. The major complaint people have is that the page doesn't load the information until you scroll and then you wait, and wait some more.

My biggest complaint is that the summary listings on my personalized Rogers Yahoo page are severely broken.  For example the listing for Malcolm in the Middle on YTV tonight at 8 shows that the show runs from 8 until 10:35. I went looking for a replacment and found that msn.ca's listings are a pretty servicable replacment. They lack the information on when a show was originally aired but otherwise they load quickly, have a nice clean look and actually show the right information. The pop-up box that shows additional show information is pretty cool too. The new Yahoo TV listings are the kind of application that shows why using the newest technology is not necessarily the best idea. The implementation of Rogers Yahoo TV listings uses Ajax which is the same technology that Google Maps uses so effectively and which runs like a three legged dog in Rogers Yahoo TV beta. I'm a bit surprised that Yahoo didn't run the TV beta in parallel with the old version as they did with the Yahoo Mail beta. That would have allowed their users a safety valve now all they can do is vent and offer alternatives in the Yahoo Feedback blog.

Here are a couple of other articles that offer their take on the roll out, a blog posting by Jeremy Zawodny, A Yahoo staffer and an article by David Utter at webpronews.com.

This probably isn't such good timing for Rogers. their old affinity bundle program expires at the end of December and they have reduced the savings that are available to customers who purchase multiple products from them. One of the guys I work with is extremely unhappy about this price increase. I wonder how many other Rogers users are checking what other options are available. About a year ago Rogers stopped providing Usenet access as part of their Internet service while Sympatico still offers limited Usenet access through a third party provider.

I'm curious to see what happens with Yahoo TV. I'm going to give polls a try to see what other Rogers Yahoo TV users think.

I just spent a frustrating 45 minutes trying to figure out why I was constantly getting 403 errors when I tried to access user directories on my local system with Apache on Centos 4. Turns out I had turned on SELINUX when I had upgraded Centos to version 4 on my machine. To enable access to your user home directories when SELINIX is enabled go to the home directory and issue the command
chcon -R -h -t httpd_sys_content_t public_html

alternatively you can disable SELINUX by setting SELINUX to disabled in /etc/selinux/config


I hope this save you 45 minutes of tearing your hair out. This should be just as applicable to people running Redhat EL4.


By the way, if you want to create your own podcasts under linux (Or OS X) from Internet radio check out  Internet Radio to Podcast with Shell Tools , great article at Linux Journal. One caveat though the command they recommended perl -e "install XML::RSS,XML::Simple" -MCPAN to get the required perl modules didn't work for me, it just complained about things after running for about 5 minutes and trying to work things out. I used yum instead, much less painful.

I've given myself a one hour time limit to write this entry as Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is on in fifty-five minutes and I want to see it. So you get it in at the end of the hour warts, spelling errors and all. Remember how I gave kudos to CTV for making Studio 60 available on their broad band network? I spoke too soon as they don't let Linux users access the shows, sigh. Three steps forward and one step back.

Saturday night I received a one finger manicure. I went to the mall to by an iPod to cassette player adapter for my iPod to use in the car. I have tried two different FM transmitter attachments but really wasn't happy with either of them. They work fine inside my house but don't work very well in the car, I think there are just too many FM stations in Toronto that interfere with them. I bought a cassette adapter at The Source and wandered off to see who had Clerks 2 at the lowest price, I also wanted to pick up KT Tunstell's Eye of the Telescope CD. I had seen it prices at $9.99 a while ago but couldn't remember what store it was in. I found Clerks 2 for $23.99 but the lowest price I found for Eye of the Telescope was $14.99. Normally I would have bought it on iTunes butI knew I had seen it on sale for $9.99 a while ago and I figured paying the extra $1.40 for the booklet with the lyrics was worth it especially since my wife likes to sing along occasionally. The nice young lady at the Dead Sea kiosk at Hillcrest Mall did her best to sell me a nail care kit for my wife for Christmas even though I told her that I had already bought her present. She tricked me into coming over, buffed and polished one of my nails then put something on it to seal the nail and protect my cuticle. I expect she thought that having a nice young lady hold my hand and massage my cuticle would fog my judgment but I am not so easily influenced. My one nail does look very nice now, maybe I should get a manicure.

By the way, the cassette adapter works pretty well in my car radio except for the fact the my car radio cassette player occasionally decides it want to change sides and play side 2 of the cassette adapter. It always decides to switch back to side 1 which is the one that the music comes out of.

Did you know that brown shoes and belts are in fashion for men now? I didn't but Michelle set me straight at church this morning while critiquing her brother's fashion choices. We had a nice stew and soup lunch fund raiser put on by the ELW today. Stew, bread,  desserts and drinks for $5, it was yummy and a great value.

I went to Future Shop today to see how much they wanted for Clerks 2, they had it for $23.99 and also had Eye of the Telescope for $9.99 so I bought both of them. They recently renovated our local Future Shop store and moved everything around. It used to be set up like a supermarket with a line of parallel checkouts in front of the main doors. They have removed the checkout lanes and left a large empty space and moved the checkouts over to one side and arranged them with three desk on one side and two on the other side of a single, not very wide, aisle. It's a disastrous redesign. When I went to check out there was a crowd at the end of the aisle that had formed two rough queues. Nobody in the crowd knew whether they were supposed to go by the first register to the second position. It was very difficult to figure out which checkout desks past the first one was open. One desk had a clerk there but there was an open binder on the counter and wasn't calling anyone out of the crowd to the position to check out. Another staff member was trying to direct traffic without much success. I mentioned to both the clerk checking me out and to the person directing traffic that in my opinion the redesign was terrible. They gamely accepted my griping but I don't expect it went much further. It wasn't very busy in the store but it was certainly chaotic at the checkout, I wonder what it will be like when the store gets busier, I expect it will be similar to Home Depot on a Saturday afternoon. I know in the future I'll think twice before I go to the Future Shop at Yonge and 16th Ave. The experience was so traumatic I had to walk across the parking lot to the King Henry's Arms for a pint to steady my nerves.

I did quite well on writing to deadline. I still have 14 minutes left, I'll spend the remaining time proofreading and spell checking.

Good gracious, I just checked iTune and they want 11.99 for Eye of the Telescope, caveat emptor. Sometimes it is worth the drive to the mall.