Wayne D's Blog

Getting old is a bitch. When breaking up the ice last week I managed to twist the wrong way or something and then suffered with a sore back until Thursday. Between the back and the knees some days I feel like I'm 70 years old. Enough about my aches and pains, I'm sure you're not interested.

I'm going camping next week so I went to Walmart today to buy a new pair of winter boots as my suitable for camping boots seem to have disappeared. I was ging to buy a new pair last year because I thought my old boots were too heavy and hard on my knees but I waited too long and there were no more winter boots available. As it was there were only two styles to choose from in my size. Who would steal a 20 year old pair of Kaufman steel toed winter boots? I may take a picture of my new boots to illustrate this posting.

Is it my imagination or has the general level of driver competence decreased? Frequently as I drive around I see people who clearly have no clue on the route they need to follow. On Saturday I got caught behind a driver who at a stale red light decided he needed to turn right. The problem was that he was in the leftmost lane of through traffic and needed to get across another lane of stopped traffic to to get to the right turn lane.

It looks like Studio 60 is dead. NBC has decided to pull it off the schedule on week early to let the Black Donnelleys into it's time slot. The speculation is that NBC will burn off the remaining shows later, sometime in the summer. Bye, bye Studio 60, I'll watch the last episode tonight with a tinge of sadness and longing.

Summer is coming, the Toronto Argonauts released their 2007 schedule this week. The Argonotes are already planning our big Grey Cup week for November when Toronto hosts the CFL championships. Hotel rooms are being booked so that we won't be distracted by family or work commitments during the Grey Cup debauchery.

Yahoo 360 still seems to think that I'd be interested in non-English Yahoo 360 pages. Someone should tell them that a guy who posts in English probably doesn't want to see non-English blogs in on the Interesting Pages on Yahoo! 360° section of his home page.

I've come to the conclusion that social networking is the "next big thing" on the Internet that will implode. It seems that every week that there is a new hot social networking site. MySpace, Facebook and then Bebo. The strange thing that I have noticed is that most of these sites cater to youths and that most of their social networking friends are people they have already met at school. This is why I have no cyber social networking friends I'm too old and most of the people I know don't belong to social networking sites. Maybe I should start a social networking site for old farts and fartettes.

Tuesday wasn't blog day because the son who bowls wasn't feeling well so he and my wife stayed home and I got to bail early and head off to my Tuesday night trivia game on time. Tuesday night is usually drive the kids to stuff night and I blog in the gap between drop off and pick up. Nothing like writing to deadline to get the words on the page.

I still love Studio 60. In addition to being a good show they usually have a musical guest on the show within a show. Last week the show had Natalie Cole on singing Say a Little Prayer for Me in support of her savemylife.org initiative. Savemylife.org links to charities that are working to help the AIDS epidemic in Africa. If you live in the United States and donate any amount you get a free download of the song. I bought my copy on iTunes and made my donation to CLWR who are combating AIDS in both India and Mozambique.

What else was I going to write about? The boys and I took advantage of the slightly warmer weather to clear the ice off of the driveway. The minus 10 to 20 weather we have had over the past week broke for a couple of days. The extremely cold weather has resulted in me going through podcast withdrawal because the cassette deck in my care really doesn't like the cold weather and ejects my iPod to cassette adaptor every 3-5 minutes. We built up a pretty good layer from driving over the snow instead of shovelling it. It's all gone now, I think I'll take a picture of the ice pile and use it to illustrate this article.

My sister had her surprise birthday party on Friday night but you probably aren't interested in that. If you are the pictures are on Flickr. I could complain about all the single drivers driving around in SUV's but that's old and nobody cares. I could whine about Yahoo again. The other day two of the three highlighted interesting pages they offered were in German. I could complain about Rogers trying to sell me their home phone service that would cost more than I pay for my Bell service but nobody would care about that either.

OK it's official, I'm dry. I'm going to head outside to take a picture for this entry but for now I'm out of here. Almost forgot to mention the movie I watched last night. Amelie I nice sweet French movie. Sweet for adults, not for kids by the way. Subtitled but there isn't much talking.

If you aren't interested in webcam drivers for Centos 4 then skip this blog entry and go to the next one, you have been warned.

This week we spent some time getting a webcam working on Linux. A camera that worked fine on Debian Etch using the the Linux kernel webcam driver called gspca wouldn't work on Centos 4.4 and by extention Redhat 4.4 because the kernel is too far behind the bleeding edge. Updating kernels from 2.6.9 to the 2.16.16 just seemed like too daunting a prospect. It turned out that when we compiled the latest driver version from Linux kernel webcams Driver SPCA / SPCA5xx there was only one unsatisfied dependency. A little more digging and we came up with the equivalent call in our kernel version. To assist those others who run into this problem I have copied the required change below.

// remap_pfn_range is not in the 2.6.9 kernel
// if (remap_pfn_range
// (vma, start, page >> PAGE_SHIFT, PAGE_SIZE, PAGE_SHARED)) {
// up(&spca50x->lock);
if (remap_page_range
(vma, start, page, PAGE_SIZE, PAGE_SHARED)) {
up(&spca50x->lock);

Thanks to all the hard working people who created this driver without much support from the camera or chipset manufacturers.

To assist those who may be typing their error message into a search engine I have included the error message text below.

/home/wayne/gspcav1-20070110/gspca_core.c: In function `spca5xx_mmap':
/home/wayne/gspcav1-20070110/gspca_core.c:2502: warning: implicit declaration of function `remap_pfn_range'
LD [M] /home/wayne/gspcav1-20070110/gspca.o
Building modules, stage 2.
MODPOST
*** Warning: "remap_pfn_range" [/home/wayne/gspcav1-20070110/gspca.ko] undefined!

On Tuesday night I try to write a blog entry in the 1 hour and 15 minutes I have while my youngest son is at Timberwolves. Timberwolves is the Baden Powell Scouting version of cubs. Baden Powell Scouting, at least our version, offers a traditional scouting alternative to Scouts Canada.

A few months ago I believe I promised you a poem of sorts. Poetry is not my normal form of expression but last fall when I was on a weekend camp with the Explorers I wrote down the following. I wrote the poem down on a piece of wet scrap paper that I had in my pocket that I first dried over the fire.

The Girl with the Sad Tired Eyes

The circumstances of our meeting have faded, time and place are forgotten, but I will never forget her sad, tired eyes.
As we chatted she told me she was tired because she couldn't sleep.
I wanted to ask her if whatever made her eyes so sad was what kept her awake but I didn't.
I wanted to ask her why her eyes were so sad but I didn't.
I wanted to hold her and comfort her until she fell asleep but I didn't.
Then I was awake, the dream done.
If we ever meet again I will ask why she has such sad, tired eyes.
We build walls to keep things in.
We build walls to keep people out.
Her eyes let me she through her walls.
Walls stop us unless we ask for entry.
I didn't knock, she didn't let me in.

Maudlin and trite? perhaps, but I leave the literary judgements to you. I think it came from being reminded by the end of the football season and the departure for Edmonton of one of the members of the Argonotes that I seem to constantly be saying goodbye to people. Every year the end of the football season means that the Argonotes that sprouted like mushrooms in the spring will disappear under the snow until next year. For any number of reasons some never come back. Goodbyes can be hard but not getting a chance to say goodbye can sometimes be harder. I think I'm just getting way too introspective in my old age. I think I missed my calling, if I was half my age I'd be playing guitar in an emo punk band. Now I know why the Yahoo spell checker want to replace the word blog with bog, I am sinking in the morass of my own, hmmmm, I can't use maudlin here since I already used it previously, moroseness. Now that alliteration, maudlin moroseness.

The picture at the top of this posting is from Secret Agent Sarah's flickr photostream

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What is with the Dell Optiplex 320? A little while ago I wrote about my experience getting Linux running on this machine. The other Optiplex 320 we got at the same time gives us Windows blue screen stop errors at least once a day. Why does Dell give you an express service code when all it does is get you to a guy who tells you that you shouldn't use it and instead join the long phone queue with everyone else? After waiting a very long time on hold and being walked through a troubleshooting procedure that had no hope of identifying a n intermittent problem like this we managed to convince the Dell support guys that we weren't going to swap hardware with our happily running Linux box and the best course of action would be for them to replace the three week old computer with another one. That reminds me, I was supposed to get some emails confirming the replacment and they haven't showed up yet. I wonder if that means that my replacement computer is lost in Dell Wonderland? I guess it's time for another trip through the looking glass.

I'm finally over my cold so maybe I'll write something longer later this weekend for my loyal readers. That reminds me that I bet get my Emusic downloads done before they run out.