December 2007 Archives

The BBC have an interesting report on the baby who was mauled to death by the family rottweiler. The story talks about the child's mother's reaction to the death. It's interesting because of the way that they report what she says.

The quotations from the mother in the story obviously come from two sources - one is is probably a spoken interview and the other is things that she has written on her Bebo profile.

In the spoken interview, the BBC reporter has translated what she has says into standard English. So she's quoted as saying "My boy was my world. He is loved by many. He will always be in our hearts, never to be forgotten". But the Bebo page is quoted verbatim, so we suffer the full force of the mother's illiteracy - "RIP my lil angel mummy knows your still here love u always and foreva".

Oh, I know what you're all thinking (the less cynical of you, at least). You're thinking that I'm being too harsh. That people should be allowed to be illiterate in their grief or that this kind of language is raw or even poetic. I say nonsense. If there's one time in you're life when you want to hang onto whatever dignity that you can, then surely it's when you're in mourning. Going through something like the loss of a child is bad enough at any time. It can only be worse when you're going through it in the public eye as this family are.

Which makes the way that the BBC has reported this seem a bit strange to me. I'm not sure that "woman writes about her dead son on social web site" is really newsworthy anyway, but if you're going to report it you could at least spare the poor woman the embarrassment of her obviously tenuous grasp on the English language.

Or perhaps I am just being too harsh.

I'm shocked to hear of the death of Kevin Greening at the ludicrously young age of 44. I wasn't listening to the Radio One Breakfast Show when he was presenting that with Zoe Ball but before that, back in 1991, he introduced the Breakfast Show on the sadly-missed Greater London Radio - one of the best shows on the best radio station I've ever listened to.

Nothing much in it yet. All of the old content was on a disk which seems to have failed and I don't have a backup (please don't bother telling me how stupid that was - believe me, I know).

There's still a chance that I'll be able to get the old stuff back so it might get backfilled at some point. In the meantime, it's strangely liberating to be starting again from scratch.

Oh, and installing MT 4.01 from scratch was really slick. They've certainly done a lot of work on making that as easy as possible.

The BBC Radio Player is no more. The Listen Again streams have all been rebranded to be part of the iPlayer. See this page for more details.

But it doesn't look like very much has changed. From an initial glance it seems that my BBC streams pages are still being built - so my HTML parsing code is still working. That's probably a nice demonstration of the power of CSS. I'll have a closer look over the next few days and make sure that it's all still working as expected.

Of course, the initial idea for the BBC streams pages was to make a place where it was easy to find all of the BBC's radio streams on one page as the BBC didn't have such a page themselves. It's possible that this change may have also added a more easily searchable catalogue page which would render my pages redundant.

I'll poke around and let you know what I find.

You'll have noticed (I hope) that this site (along with a number of other sites I host on this server) went missing for a few days earlier this week. It just dropped off the internet at about Saturday lunchtime and didn't reappear until Tuesday evening.

I'm still trying to find out exactly what happened, but I think it's safe to say that 1 & 1 Internet are off my christmas card list for this year.

Update: Also, I know that the search box isn't working. For some reason some bots became really attracted to it and were constantly making search requests which were bringing the server to its knees. I'm planning to replace it with a Google or Technorati search box when I have a spare minute or two. In the meantime, I've just turned off the execute bit on the search program. Unfortunately, this also stops the tag cloud from working.

An interesting story in today's Telegraph. Apparently the photo that proved that John and Anne Darwin were together in Panama was found by someone searching for "John Anne Panama" in Google.

I've just tried it and it still works. Searching for "John Anne Panama" in Google image search brings back a picture of them from the "Our Customers" page on MoveToPanama.com.

The picture has been removed from the page now and even the direct link no longer works. But it will stay in Google's cache for a while.

Here's a handy tip. If you want to pretend you've died so that your wife can claim your life insurance and you can both start a new life in Central America, then it's a really bad idea to allow a picture of you both to be put on a web site. The world wide web is international, you know. The clue is in the name

I saw The Golden Compass last night. In summary, I thought it was a pretty good adaptation. At times it moved a bit faster than I wanted it to, but that's only to be expected from a two-hour film based on such a complex book.

If you read on, there will be spoilers for both the book and the film. But if you're a friend of mine then I fully expect that you'll have read the trilogy years ago.

It started badly with a voice-over that gave more details about multiple universes, dust and the alethiometer than I thought was strictly necessary. The terms "alethiometer" and "golden compass" are used interchangeably in the film which I also found pretty annoying.

The next scene was also a disappointment. It was a scene that didn't appear in the book and served to introduce Lyra, Roger and the Gyptian children (particularly Billy Costa). Whilst Dakota Blue Richards impressed as Lyra, it's a shame that the other child actors weren't up to her standard. The only thing I found occasionally annoying about her performance was her "yokel" accent. But that's a fair translation of the book where I found Pullman's use of "ent" instead of "isn't" in Lyra's speech to be just as annoying.

After that the film manages to tell most of the story of the book. There are obviously some simplifications. For example, they don't mention the fact that the Panserbjørne can never be tricked, so Lyra's tricking of Iofur Raknison (renamed Ragnar Sturlusson to avoid confusion with Iorek Byrnison) isn't as impressive a feat as it should be. Other scenes were missed out completely. Two that I particularly missed were Mrs. Coulter's party (so we didn't get to meet Lord Boreal) and Iorek Byrnison cleaning his armour once it was retrieved.

At this point let me reiterate the spoiler warning from above.

The most surprising change was the ending. The film misses out the last part (one or two chapters I think) from the book. The film ends with the children freed from Bolvangar and Lyra heading north to meet Asriel. In the book, she meets Asriel, stuff happens and Asriel successfully opens a portal to another world which he and Lyra both go through. That's all missing from the film. I have no doubt that it will be included at the beginning of The Subtle Knife, but I was very surprised not to see it in this film.

On a more positive note, the special effects are very impressive. The daemons are a very important in these books so it was vital that they were portrayed realistically. And I think the film-makers achieved that. The daemons are very convincing, even when Pantalaimon is changing shape. It helps tremendously that they have such a strong cast of voice actors for the daemons. Even Asriel's daemon, Stelmaria, who speaks about two lines is played by Kristen Scott-Thomas.

And what about the portrayal of religion? How much of that was cut out? Well, there's really very little religion in Northern Lights and I didn't notice any of it missing. The Magisterium is still the Magisterium. The Authority is still the Authority and Asriel's theories about dust are still described as heresy. So, no, in my opinion there's nothing important removed there - because there was nothing that needed to be removed. It'll be interesting to see what they do with the other two books where the religion is far more explicit.