06/23/09
Let me guess, you updated Pidgin because you couldn't connect to Yahoo Messenger anymore and now it won't work at all. If you try to start the program from a console you get the following message pidgin: symbol lookup error: pidgin: undefined symbol: gst_registry_fork_set_enabled
That's what happened to me, the fix was simple, update gstreamer and gstreamer plugins to the latest version. Running "yum update gstreamer*" got me new versions of gstreamer, gstreamer-tools, gstreamer-plugins-base and gstreamer-plugins-good.
I'm running Centos 5 but I suspect others including Redhat EL5 users are running into the same problem, I hope this helps.
06/19/09
Updated 7:05 p.m, sorry for the goof up with the formatting.
Unlike the case with the Masters this time a search for US Open live streaming Canada returns TSN's homepage as the number one result. Of course the first time I clicked the link to the Video on Demand Friday coverage it returned an error but that seems to be fixed now. The problem not is it doesn't appear that TSN is providing live streaming of the US Open, at least not today, what we get is highlights only. I guess Canadian golf nuts will have to find a TV. I have heard that if you want to watch U.S. only streaming services like Hulu or the U.S. Open that Witopia.net is well worth the $24.95 a year fee.
06/06/09
Through my association with the Argonotes, The Toronto Argonotes Band and my position as Deputy Conductor in Training I was invited alog with a few other fans to have lunch and chat with CFL Commissioner Mark Cohon and some of the other people in the CFL offices. We all spent a couple of hours with with Mark and some of the other CFL staff eating pizza, seeing the mockup for the new CFL website, getting a sneak peak of the video the CFL is working on to follow up last years well received "This is Our League" and discussing the state of the league and football in Canada. The new video continues in the vein of "This is Our League" with a mixture of the old and new celebrating the history and tradition of the CFL. The new website has a fresh clean design with a strong emphasis on video and will strive to be the place to go for in depth information and highlights for the games. Best of all it's wide and takes full advantage of the wide screen monitors that are becoming more and more prevalent.
We heard about the CFL's plan to do the official challenge replay from the league offices to improve speed and consistency of the review. How the Commissioner's desire is to make sure the 8 (or 9 with Ottawa) teams are financially stable and adequately funded before the league considers expansion.
Everyone we met, Mark Cohon included was interested in hearing what we thought about the wide ranging topics covered in the two hours we spent at the CFL offices. I even spent a few minutes I spent sitting in the power seat at the Commissioner's insistence.
Just before we left we all gathered around the Grey Cup for a groups picture.
Notice the woman in the picture? Her name is Lori and she is the president of the Argonauts Fan Club. I ended up with the Argonotes bass drum sitting in the passenger seat of my car on the way back to the office after lunch. It's position made it easily visible and the large blue A would be instantly recognizable to any Toronto CFL fan. While stopped at a stoplight on the way home with my windows open because of my long dead car A/C the man in the next car over shouted to me "Is Lori in there?", "No she isn't but I had lunch with her" I replied. Before the light turned green he told me that she was his sister-in-law. In a city of 2.48 million people what are the chances you will end up at a stoplight beside a relative of someone you just had lunch with?
In keeping with my recent tradition to write about either websites or Linux I will pass on a useful website that relates to this story. Through some strange cut/paste error I managed to delete the pictures I took at the CFL offices before I got them off the camera. Googling like mad I ended up at cardrecovery.com. I suspect that there is a cheaper alternative but when you have just deleted your priceless pictures of your visit to the CFL offices $46 seems like a small price to pay to get them back. If you ever do something stupid with your digital camera you can download the software and see thumbnails of what you can recover for free. All my now recovered CFL visit pics can be seen here.
05/30/09
When I was looking around for a replacement for Flickr, I came across Cooliris. Cooliris is a browser plugin that allows you to view pictures in a picture wall style interface on Cooliris enabled websites like Flickr and facebook or on your local computer. A complete list of Cooliris enabled sites can be found here. Cooliris also has a embeddable Flash widget which you can see in action below. The widget and Cooliris use a Media RSS feed to determine which pictures to show.
Unfortunately the small size of the Flash widget doesn't do Cooliris justice but you can get the flavour of it.
When I do put my pictures up here I'll be making then Cooliris enabled. The only problem I've found so far is that the Cooliris plugin requires Glibc 2.7 and Centos the Linux distro I use is still back at 2.5.
05/24/09
After saying such nice things about Adobe and Linux with respect to Adobe AIR I found out yesterday that a problem I attributed to my trying to run Flash 10 on the EEEPC is actually a problem on all version of Linux using Flash 10. Here is the text from the Adobe security announcement.
"Starting with version 10,0,2, Flash Player will not permit use of camera or microphone, or display of the Settings UI, when any of the following conditions are present:
* When the window mode (set with the HTML "wmode" attribute) is "direct" or "gpu"
* When the window mode is "transparent" or "opaque" (Linux only)
The Settings UI is the inline UI visible when users right-click or Control-click on SWF content and choose Settings."
Emphasis added by me. Adobe is incorrect, the settings UI pops up when you visit a site using window mode "transparent" or "opaque" but can't be dismissed. If you right click on Flash area it will also pop up and stay there. There is no way they can pass this off as a security enhancement when the behavior only occurs in Linux. Come on Adobe admit it, it's a bug. You introduced a new mode but decided not to implement it properly in Linux. This behavior makes it extremely difficult to use Linux on Netbooks because they are so useful when you want to use sites like 12seconds.tv, tokbox.com and the like.
Click the images to see them full size.
There are two workarounds, only one of which I would recommend. Go to http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager06.html scroll down to the site you want to access and click always allow.
Here is a list of sites where you have this problem from ubuntuforums.org if you try to use your camera. Please add anymore you find in the comments.
- megavideo.com
- supernovatube.com
- stickam.com,
- ustream.com
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