DazBlade

England v Ukraine streamed on the internet but at what cost?!

Well, this is absolutely disgusting and just another way of cutting off football fans. The match should be on TV and not limited to the internet. Anyone interested in football want to watch the game on their (big screen) TV and not sit in front of a computer to watch the game and pay up to £11.99 for the priviliege. What a big rip-off.

It is not good – I like to watch the England football team as I support them! In fact I like watching most international football, so this monetary rip-off sucks big time!! – I only hope they don’t get the million subscribers they are hoping for and every football fan just boycotts the shameless rip-off!!

Do not pay rip-off “streaming” fees to watch something that should be primarily broadcast on the TV. By all means put streaming sporting events on the internet but do not do that instead of broadcasting them on TV – the internet should be used as a secondary method of showing the event and not as the sole method.

Want to know what all the fuss is about? Then visit this link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/internationals/8286886.stm

Well it was great to watch the Australian GP, the first of the new 2009 season. For us UK folks, it was refreshing to have it back on the BBC as that means no commercial breaks and no more missing parts of the race – don’t know why the BBC ever let it go in the first place.

It was also nice to see Jenson Button win his first GP since he won in Hungary. Jenson has been in the wilderness a bit these last few years so it will be nice to see if he can compete at the top level for the rest of the season – he deserves to win at least one world championship. The reigning world champion, Lewis Hamilton, came through in a respectable third place.

System: Fedora 10

Software: aMsn

Problem: After upgrading my server from Fedora 8 to Fedora 10, when I now
start aMsn, I get the following error: “Loading TkCximage failed. This module
is needed to run aMSN. Please compile aMSN first, instructions on how to
compile are located in the file Install.”

Now, the aforementioned “INSTALL” file is very basic and not really that
helpful unless of course you happen to be a LINUX guru OR you use it as a
reference during or after following my solution.

Synopsis: Obviously Google is your friend in these situations and I found lots
of people all with the same error. The problem was that they were using
earlier versions of Fedora, up to version 4 and their fixes did not work. I
also found solutions for different flavours of LINUX – from Debian to
ArchLinux to Ubuntu and Gentoo. I could not find any specific solutions to my
specific situation. So I did what any techie would do and I studied the
various solutions, even trying some of them, put them through the grinder and
eventually created a solution that fixed my specific issue. I hope it helps
other people whether or not they have my exact error.

Solution: Ok, lets get cracking on. To start press any key…. oops no sorry
was daydreaming for a moment. Start by opening a shell and login as root and
then let the fun begin…

$ su -                             # Logs you in as root. You will be prompted for password
$ cd /home/username    # Move to our home directory. Substitute username with
# your own actual login username.
$ yum remove amsn
$ yum remove tcl            # This will remove tcl and tk and other dependencies

# Time to rebuild it – can we fix it? Yes we can!!

$ yum install amsn          # This will re-install tcl and tk and other dependencies.
# Re-installing aMsn is not the important bit here we are
# just doing it to get the relevant tcl and tk dependencies.

# Now some extra packages that should be installed – Remember you get information about
# any package by doing ‘yum info <name>’ and I recommend you do so to read the descriptions
# which should hopefully make it clear why they are needed.

$ yum install tcl-devel
$ yum install tk-devel
$ yum install tcltls
$ yum install imlib
$ yum install imlib-devel

# Now we are going to backup the aMsn directory. Please note that this step
# is entirely optional.

$ mkdir a-bak
$ mv /usr/share/amsn/* a-bak

# Now we need the aMsn source tar ball which you can download and move here any
# way you like. I am going to use WGET because I know the link to the latest
# version at time of writing. The source package is used to build a binary
# for your Linux distribution, Fedora 10 in my case. I’m also going to move
# into my Download directory because that is where I generally store my
# downloads – username is your login username.

$ cd /home/username/Download
$ wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/amsn/amsn-0.97.2.tar.bz2
$ ls -lth amsn*
-rw-r–r– 1 root     root     3.3M 2008-07-25 16:14 amsn-0.97.2.tar.bz2

# As you can see from the listing command our aMsn tarball downloaded just
# fine. We now need to unpack the tarball.

$ tar -xvjf amsn-0.97.2.tar.bz2

# By the way if anyone knows how to extract files, with tar, into the
# current working directory then please let me know. So, we now
# have to move into the newly created amsn-0.97.2 directory.

$ cd amsn-0.97.2

# The installation now consists of three commands. The first step verifies
# your system. It stops if a required package cannot be found. The second
# step builds the application. This step could take 2-10 minutes, depending
# on your system. The final third step installs the actual files.

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

Job Done! Start aMsn and enjoy chatting to your mates again.

I scoured the internet for a Fedora 10 specific solution but to no avail.
Maybe mine is the first =;-)

I cannot take all the credit though because I came up with the solution by
looking at what other people, using other LINUX distros, did to fix it. So I
have taken bits from their solutions and sorted the wheat from the chaff and
created a solution that works on Fedora 10 and possibly earlier versions of
Fedora too. Enjoy!

Have great 2009

It was edge of seat stuff and my heart sank when Vettel overtook Hamilton on the final 2 laps. All I could think was that all his hard work had gone down the drain and for the 2nd season on the bounce he would be stripped of the title on the last race. I was literally screaming at the TV and just crying out for something to put Lewis back on track…. and then it happened, Timo Glock made the unfortunate decision to stay out on ‘dry’ tyres and as the rain poured down he had no choice but to fall off the pace and it was just the break that Hamilton needed to take back 5th position at the final bend of the Brazilian (Interlagos) Grand Prix and become the youngest Grand Prix World Champion in history. It is no more than he deserved considering all the hard work he has put in all season with some excellent races and more importantly the consistency and composure that an F1 champion has to produce to be the best.

My commiserations go out to Felipe Massa who drove an excellent race and did everything he had to (just like Lewis) but on the day it just wasn’t enough to seal the championship. Massa fully deserved to win that race in front of his home crowd just a pity some of the crowd could not be a bit more sporting as they aimed inappropriate jeers at Hamilton. Congratulations to Massa to pushing season to such a climax and congratulations to Lewis Hamilton on becoming the youngest ever F1 World Champion.

Have you heard about Mr Ross and Mr Brand and their prank phone call to Andrew Sachs? What the hell has this got to do with the prime minister and parliament? those arty farty prats can hardly string together a coherent sentence never mind condemn two of the funniest blokes around today. Fair enough, it may have a been a tad out of order and juvenile but they have apologised for godsake!!! Move On! Get Over It!! Stop making such a fuss over nothing you bunch of birks.

Hmmm, 10,000 complaints? – yeah right, did you see the handful of people on the news who were interviewed following these alleged complaints? Yep you guessed it, all old age pensioners – what a surprise, NOT!! These geriatrics have nothing better to do than find something to complain about to fill up their dull and boring lifes – “Mr Ross has been a very naughty boy and should be sacked” — yes yes very quaint you old dear, now go take your tablets and find something else to occupy your dementia!! I’d actually be surprised if anyone under 60 years old complained or even raised an eyebrow at this so-called situation.

All I can say is that Mr Ross & Mr Brand will be laughing all the way to the bank with the extra publicity and media attention – what do I say? Good luck to both of them because they have not done anything wrong – you people need to get a grip on reality and start dealing with real issues instead of making mountains out of ant hills. Get a life, move on and let it go – you’ll feel much better and be doing the rest of us a favour when we no longer have to listen to your pathetic nonsense!!

O dear – not up to much this year. As far as I see it there are only 2 contenders with a realistic chance of winning and they are Laura White and Rachael Hylton. I think Alexandra Burke has an outside chance but she needs to fully pronounce the words when singing, so with some improvement she could stop Hylton and White from running away with it. Ruth Lorenzo sounds like she can sing but she needs to realise this is an English competition so by singing in Spanish she is not doing herself any favours. Please, Ruth, sing using English words and lets see how good you really are. The rest are just pub singers at best. I think the 16 year old Eoghan has got potential but will probably need to wait a couple of years before his time comes – possibly one to look out for in the future.

Where do they find the audience from for this show too? They have got to be the biggest bunch of brain dead morons on the planet. A judge says something positive and they cheer! A judge says something negative and they boo and hiss! These people are worse than sheep. They have no affinity to any particular judge or contestant. These people are diabolical at best and mentally challenged at worst. Stop spoiling the show with your impromptu jeers and cheers and actually let the judges speak and that way you may learn what intelligent conversation is like for the rest of us. If the Xfactor is going to survive they need to either get rid of the brain dead audience or only allow people in that can actually form an opinion and preferably have more than one brain cell!!

Ok, on to my prediction. I have to go for Rachael Hylton. Forget about her background, this girl can sing, is confident and emotive in her performance and looks to have the edge (only just) over Laura White. However, the surprise “dark horse” called be Ruth Lorenzo but I am backing Rachael all the way.

Me and my brother went to visit this small site. It was a nice day and got chance to play around with some of the settings on my Nikon D40X Digital SLR camera. I was mainly setting the F-Spot, ISO and shutter speed and consequently the photos do vary in quality, look and feel, especially the sky photos.

We also got some nice close-up shots of spiders, flowers, gnats and even horses…

Anyway, please visit the Photos section or click here to go directly to the Gallery.