Last year's much-fêted Top of the Pops revamp seems to have been a disaster as the programme is about to move from BBC1 to BBC2 for the first time in its 40-year history.
I don't think it's been the same since it moved from Thursdays to Fridays. Thursday evening watching Tomorrow's World and Top of the Pops. That was the defining TV of my childhood.
The BBC makes a lot of its output available as Real Audio streams on its web site, both as a programme is being broadcast and also for (usually) a week later.
The BBC techs have done a lot of work to make this all nice and seamless. There's a BBC Radio Player web application that does its best to hide the fact that it's actually Real Player doing all the work.
Of course, there are those of us who would be much happier just listening to the feeds in Real Player. There are even some of us who would like to save a stream and convert it into an MP3.
But it can take a bit of work do get to the actual stream URL. It's not actually difficult, but there's a bit of work involved. And it gets a bit boring and repetitive if you want to listen to a few of them.
So I spent a couple of hours last night knocking up a program that would do away with all this drudgery. get_streams spiders the BBC radio web site and extracts all the Real Audio streams that it finds. I've run the program and dumped the results to a web page.
There are a still a few bugs. Or rather there are still a few inconsistancies in the BBC's HTML that I need to work around (currently it's not picking up the Today Programme feeds, which is a bit of a major hole) but I thought it was useful enough to release anyway.
Share and Enjoy.
Update: The Today Programme problem is fixed. I think we're now getting all of the feeds. There are just a few problems left with the labels.
Fifteen years ago I certainly wouldn't have taken bets on Shane MacGowan still being alive now. But he is and he's being interviewed by the Guardian about the forthcoming Pogues revival. The classic Pogues line-up (yes, including Cait O'Riordan) are back together for the first time in almost twenty years and they're playing gigs next month.
And in two weeks time, all of their albums are re-released on remastered CDs with extra tracks. All of my Pogues albums are either on vinyl or in the large pile of cassettes that I threw out last year so these will certainly be added to my wishlist.
This morning there were women standing outside Tottenham Court Road tube station thrusting free condoms into the hands of anyone who walked past them.
Is it national safe sex day or something like that?
The Oxford St christmas lights this year look like klieg lights. It makes me think that we're expecting an air raid. And air raids are obviously a central part of the traditional British christmas. All it needs is a Zeppelin or a V2 flying overhead to complete the illusion.
Oh, and the gantries that the lights are mounted on are covered in posters advertising Harry Potter. Because christians love wizards. Or wizards love christmas. Or something like that.
To the moron who sat beside me on the Northern Line between Waterloo and Clapham at about 6pm yesterday,
Yes, the tube in the rush hour is overcrowded. Most of us just accept that and make the best of it. The fact that you wear a nice pinstripe suit does not make you more important than the rest of us and definitely doesn't give you rights to more space than us. If you were really as important as you seem to think you are then you company would send a helicopter to take you to and from work.
Of course, whilst you were complaining about anyone who dared to object to your behaviour, I just did that British Thing and concentrated harder on my book. I realise now that I should have got involved as the two people who said something to your were both "only women" and therefore you're probably thinking that their opinions don't count for anything.
Well you're wrong. You were exceptionally rude. Please learn some manners before you try to engage with the general public again.
Web analysis company OneStat.com have published a report showing that Internet Explorer's usage share has dropped to under 90%. The combined usage of all Mozilla-based browsers (which includes Firefox) is at 7.35%.
Probably the most important point in the report is that IE usage has fallen by 5% since May.
Update: The BBC are also running this story.
There should be a law against people writing drama about subjects they know nothing about.
Last night's Spooks was a good example. It was all about a computer "hacker" who was holding the British Government to ransom.
His plan went like this. Although email has been around for decades, it didn't really take off until thirteen years ago because people didn't trust it as it was too insecure. What changed this was the invention of an encryption key (not a technology, note, just a single key) which was used to encrypt all email.
The "hacker" had got hold of this key and that enabled him to have access to any email and thereby allowed him to get into any computer system using the information in the email he read. As a demonstration of his new powers he switched all traffic lights to green and diverted all 999 calls to sex lines. He wanted £100m (in diamonds) and the British government wanted the key.
In the end, the plucky boys and girls from MI5 sorted it all out. They gave him diamonds but they were coated in a contact poison that killed him. One of them then took the laptop containing the encryption key and threw it in the Thames.
Pointing out the obvious nonsense in this story is left as an exercise for the reader.
I love it when people write about computers. They always get it so wrong.
I admit I never got on well with Apple computers. I have a Powerbook but as far as I'm concerned it's the computer of last resort[1]. I just can't get on with the user interface in OSX and I'm far happier working on a PC running Linux and Gnome.
But I do know a lot of geeks who have succumbed to the lure of of the Apple. Since OSX was released probably half of the serious geeks I know have switched to some kind of Apple computer as their main system. And these are generally very intelligent people. So I'm sure it's a problem with me rather than a general problem with the Apple software or hardware.
But even the most manic fans I know weren't stupid enough to queue for hours to get into the new London Apple Shop over the weekend. A few of them did wander down but either wandered off again when they saw the queues or went on Sunday when the crowds were far smaller.
I really don't understand why anyone would queue overnight to be one of the first customers in a new shop. And that's all it is. A new shop. People are treating it like it's some kind of holy shrine. But that's probably an extension of people seeing Apple as some kind of holy grail of computing. Which it isn't. It's just a computer. Next time you get an Apple fan telling you how wonderful their system is, ask them to tell you their hardware failure stories. Every Mac user has them.
[1] Ok, that's not strictly true. I'd use that before I used a Windows PC.
Over the weekend I did some work on the stylesheet for my main site. I cleaned it up a lot and made it look far simpler.
Of course, as I was making the changes, I was testing them on Firefox. IE doesn't work on Linux so I couldn't test them on that without using someone else's computer. And I'm far too lazy for that.
But later in the day, I found myself with a Windows machine in front of me, so I tried out my new design in IE. And it was horrible. Completely broken. Not quite unusable, but pretty grim.
So I wonder if I can be bothered to fix it. I'll have to see how many of my visitors still use IE.
But in the meantime IE users can switch to one of the older stylesheets. Oh wait. They can't because IE doesn't have stylesheet switching built it.
Look, if you're still using IE then you're mad. Just upgrade to Firefox. You'll make everyone (including yourself) much happier.
A slight case of synchronicity.
Yesterday we had a discussion about what we would do when people stop making VCRs. We have hundreds of video tapes, both bought and recorded from the TV, and it would be a pain to not be able to watch them again once our last VCR hits the dust. The popular solution seems to be to buy a recordable DVD player and dump all of your tapes onto disk. That would be a major undertaking with our collection.
And I'm still waiting for a sub-£200 recordable DVD player with a built-in Tivo. Oh and it needs to have wireless connectivity so recordings can be watched on any TV in the house. I reckon I have another year or so to wait.
But then this morning there's lots of news about Dixon's announcement that they will stop selling VCRs when their current stock has run out. So the death of the VCR is closer than I thought.
Well I finally heard the new version of Do They Know It's Christmas yesterday and I have to say that I was distinctly unimpressed. It's even worse than Band Aid 2.
So if you want to support the Sudan but refuse to pay money for that terrible record, here's a suggestion. Until January 9th, the British Museum have an exhibition of artifacts from Sudan. The exhibition is free, but there are Oxfam collecting boxes outside.
So don't buy the record, go and visit the exhibtion instead. And on the way out drop to the money you would have spent on the record (or even more!) in the collecting boxes.
Normally I'd be happy if my web sites got high Google ratings, but this is a bit weird.
Many years ago I bought the domain ars.org.uk. I used it to host an Agency Rating System where IT contractors could share opinions about recruitment agents they had worked with.
After a few years of operation it became obvious that the system was open to too much abuse and left me open to potential libel actions so I took the site down and replaced it with a page just saying "this page intentionally left blank".
But I've just had a phone call from a very confused woman who works for a company called Jacobson Fund Management. If you do a Google search for the company name, the first hit you get back is for ars.org.uk.
Now if they were a recruitment agency and someone had once said rude things about them on the site I could understand it, but they are fund managers. And, as far as I can tell, they always have been.
I wonder if I've made the situation worse by mentioning both the company and the web site in this entry :)
I'm currently reading How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World. It's a very interesting book and I'll be writing about it in more detail when I've finished it.
But last week I read a section which talked about the "Monkey Trial" that took place in Tennessee in 1925. For those who don't know the story, a biology teacher was prosecuted for teaching the Theory of Evolution in class. A law had been passed a few months earlier banning the teaching of "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible".
I was thinking that if I was an intelligent American filmmaker who wanted to show up the nonsense of the fundamentalist christianity that seems to have taken hold in the USA then I'd seriously consider making a new film based on this story that would show the creationists to be the morons that they are.
Those lovely people at FaxYourMP have released a new set of stats showing how well MPs respond to faxes sent through the system.
The average for all MPs is 63.15%. But my MP, Martin Linton, does much worse than that. He responses to 57.62% of the the faxes he gets. Are you listening Google? That's Martin Linton, MP for Battersea. He's not very good at replying to faxes.
On the plus side tho', I have managed to persuade his webmaster to remove all the blinking text on his web site.
I've been an digital cable TV customer of ntl for some years. When the system was installed I was told that interactive TV services weren't available in my area but that they would arrive in "about six weeks". This was something like four years ago and we still don't have interactive services.
A bit of history about the cable TV market in the UK. Many years ago the government split the country up into areas and gave each area to one cable operator. My area was run by an operator called Videotron. Over the last few years all of these smaller companies have been take over until there are only two companies left running all of the cable TV in the UK. Each company has a complete monopoly in the areas that it serves. The competition element is supposed to come from the fact that people can also get digital TV from a satellite dish (from Sky) or through their aerial (from FreeView).
Over the years that I've been failing to get interactive services I've been asking ntl cosutomer services what the status is. At first I got a lot of "it'll be a few months" but eventually I started to get something closer to the full story. It seems that the original Videotron network was built on a bit of a budget and it doesn't have the capability to carry the two-way traffic required for interactive services. Providing my area with interactive services would entail a major upgrade to the network infrastructure.
All this time, ntl have been careful to market interactive services as a free of charge extra service which means that we can't even claim a rebate for not getting the service.
I emailed their customer services again earlier this week and got the same story in reply. This time, reading between the lines, they seemed to imply that in might never be cost effective to upgrade the network. I replied asking them to clarify this and telling them that if I was never going to get interactive services then I would consider switching to an alternative provider. This morning I got a response saying that they were "in the middle" of upgrading the network and that there was a "provisional" release date of November 2005.
I really don't want to switch to Sky (because it's a Murdoch company) and Freeview doesn't carry most of the channels that I want to watch, so it looks like I'll just have to wait and see.
But it's a but annoying when I'm watching a TV program and the presentor says something like "digital viewers can get more information by pressing their red button now", knowing that I'm a second-class digital viewer whose red button is useless.
There's another piece about Firefox in this weeks Guardian Online. Once again it emphasises the fact that Firefox is only one of a number of pieces of open source software that organisations should be investigating.
The significance of these developments becomes clear from research published in August by the British Computer Society. Among those Britons who had used a computer, the top three applications were the web browser (73%), email (68%) and word processing (68%), well ahead of other categories. This means that the open source trinity of Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org now meets the principal needs of general users, whether they run on a Windows PC, Macintosh or GNU/Linux. In fact, moving to the free operating system becomes much easier when the main applications are identical on all platforms - yet another reason for Microsoft to fear Firefox and its friends.
Firefox has had a lot of press this week - possibly more that any other piece of open source software. It'll be interesting to see if all this coverage has much effect on browser usage stats over the next few weeks.
Ben Hammersley talks about a new kind of comment spam that he's been getting. I've been getting exactly the same thing here and my theories run along very similar lines. I've been nuking them.
Today's Guardian leader has a very nice piece about Firefox and how it's slowly but surely eating away at IE's market share.
Firefox deserves to succeed, but even if it does not it will have highlighted the astonishing success of open source, well known inside the web community but not outside. Among other services, it has its own operating system (Linux), an acclaimed alternative to Microsoft Office (OpenOffice), and its own encyclopedia (Wikipedia) with a million entries. The open source movement has become one of globalisation's unexpected treasures.
It's good to see such positive reporting in such mainstream media.
Update: There's also a story on the BBC News site.
Update: Hello to anyone who has found their way to this page from the Queenzone forum. Sorry if my review upsets you, but it's just my honest recollections of gig that I didn't enjoy.
As I say below, I'm sure that these problems have all been fixed up in the DVD release, so there's no point looking for them there.
It seems that Queen have released a "new" live CD and DVD called Queen on Fire. It's not really new as it's a recording of a 1982 concert at the Milton Keynes Bowl.
I've only ever seen Queen live once. And it was at this concert. I'm sure I'd already made up my mind that I didn't like Queen much so I don't really know what I was doing there but anyway this was the day that I became certain that I had no future as a Queen fan.
They were terrible. It was the Hot Spaces tour. And you'd have to go a long way to find a Queen fan that didn't think that was their worst album by some considerable distance. And the show was full of songs from it.
Three things stand out in my memory.
I'm sure that all of these fluffs will have been patched up on this new release. And I'm sure that the Queen fans will love it. But it can only remind me of one of the worst gigs I've ever seen.
One last round-up of US election stuff and I promise we'll be back to our scheduled programming.
Firstly a site where intelligent Americans apologise to the rest of the world.
In today's Guardian Simon Schama writes about the divisions in the USA and names the two nations Worldly America and Godly America.
Worldly America, which of course John Kerry won by a massive landslide, faces, well, the world on its Pacific and Atlantic coasts and freely engages, commercially and culturally, with Asia and Europe in the easy understanding that those continents are a dynamic synthesis of ancient cultures and modern social and economic practices.
Godly America, on the other hand, rock-ribbed in Dick Cheney's Wyoming, stretched out just as far as it pleases in Dubya's deeply drilled Texas, turns its back on that dangerous, promiscuous, impure world and proclaims to high heaven the indestructible endurance of the American Difference.
And here's a table of American states listed by IQ and who they voted for.
Might be a good time to reread The Handmaid's Tale. The US is in danger of waking up and finding it has turned into Gilead.
The BBC have put up a "have your say" page asking Americans why they voted for Bush. The answers make for some very depressing reading.
There are an incredible number of people who mention the fact that Bush is a christian in their responses. I'm constantly astonished by the number of Americans who see this as an important issue. I don't care if people want to talk to imaginary friends in private, but I really don't think that getting guidance from invisible sky pixies is a reasonable way to run a country.
Some examples:
"I voted for Mr Bush because he stands for the values as defined by the word of God"
"His faith and dependency on the almighty God have won my respect"
"It boiled down to Bush being Protestant. I agreed with many of Kerry's policies and liked him very much, but in decisions that would require going on faith, I felt less secure trusting Kerry" (Kerry is a catholic)
"Gay marriage and abortion are a threat to our culture and security"
That last one doesn't explicitly mention religion, but that's usually what drives opinions like those.
Update: a couple more that I've just noticed. These are non-religious but no less stupid:
"Will never sign the Kyoto insane Protocol"
"He is intelligent. He graduated from Harvard Business School. They don't give out free passes there"
Anyone who can say that Bush is intelligent while keeping a straight face is in need of serious help.
This one deserves quoting in full
I voted for George W Bush because he has a moral compass and a strong faith in the living God and these things are evident by his words, actions and deeds and they resonate with my heart. It does not matter how intelligent you are if you're wise in your own eyes and it doesn't matter how well you are able to speak if your words are clanging cymbals but it does matter who you worship and serve. You are unable to lead and serve others if you do not serve God first.
See that? "It does not matter how intelligent you are if you're wise in your own eyes". Intelligence doesn't matter. You just have to believe you are wise! Well, Penny from the USA I have news for you - no matter what you think, you are not intelligent or wise. You are very, very stupid.
The news sites are just starting to run stories saying that John Kerry has conceded defeat in the presidential election.
If I've learned anything from the last 12 hours, it's that the large number of intelligent and decent Americans that I know only represent half of a bitterly divided country. There are just as many (or perhaps just a few more) Americans who are happy to fit into the stereotype of the boorish, greedy and stupid American who thinks it's acceptable for their country to bully other countries when things don't go their way. Who don't care about what the rest of the world thinks of them as they have no interest in what goes on beyond their borders.
More than anything it feels like the 1992 UK general election. When we all knew that the Tories' time was up. We were convinced that they were going to lose. Except, of course, they didn't. And we had to put up with them for five more years.
Who knows what damage Bush and his cronies can inflict over the next four years.
For a few months now I've been getting a lot of pleasure out of reading Dadblog. Today Lloyd excels himself by coming out in support of John Kerry (not that that was much of a surprise to anyone) in an entry that includes this:
But if you believe the government of the most powerful political entity the world has ever seen should be trusted to someone who invests decision-making power in a superstitious psychosis backed up by documentation whose provenance is unknowable and whose authors are a mystery, then be my guest. You might as well vote for Osama bin Laden. He thinks the same.
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