Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Goodbye Humph.

I think it's a good time to link to a long list of closing quotes from ISIHAC.

...a rant about the abomination that is the BBC iPlayer.

I'll hold my hand up and admit it. I thought the BBC iPlayer was going to be a good idea. I wasn't too fussed about the DRM - the regulatory environment the BBC has to work with wouldn't have let it do anything else. All I wanted was a way to watch my favourite shows on a laptop halfway over the Atlantic.

I got on the the beta last week, along with pretty much everyone who'd signed up. I should have given up as soon as I got the convoluted installation instructions in my email. Go to this site, enter this password, download this application, go back to download a program, install an ActiveX control, start again, and then wait for the slowest P2P download ever to deliver a copy of Top Gear to my hard disk. Oh, and then not to get the right licenses so I couldn't actually watch the programme I'd downloaded. No Jeremy and No Star in Moderately Priced Car for me...

Read more at IT Pro.

And another thing - enough with the letter "i-" prefixing everything that's meant to work with internet. It was cute with the iMac, but that was 1998. I thought we'd learnt our lesson last bubble with "e-" this that and the other...

Not quite what one should use for a report of a safe landing, especially post Challenger and Columbia.

[Update: They've now fixed it to the much better "California landing for Atlantis"]

Just how long is a parking metre?^*

"Using a dollar coin is more convenient in parking metres, it's more convenient at the subway kiosk, it's more convenient in vending machines," he said.

The inspirational typo was spotted in this BBC news article on the return of the dollar coin.

^*I suspect not very long when parallel parking in my street...

Nineteen Ninety Four was a rather fun BBC radio comedy drama that took 1984 and dumped it in a future ultra-privatised Britain, where everything was run by the Ministry of the Environment. It was witty, literate, and very very funny. It was followed up a sequel, Nineteen Ninety Eight and a couple of novels.

One of its high lights was the shoddy servant robot, The Fetcher. It wasn't very stable - and would beedle-beedle around the room, go clunk, and then announce "I've fallen over". One scene in a high class restaurant had a waiter Fetcher point out "Merde, je suis tombée!".

Now someone seems to have built one...

The BBC has put every episode of the Sky at Night since December 2001 online.

Now that's what I call nifty.

[Real Player only, sadly...]

A familiar face will be returning to the TARDIS in the next series of Doctor Who: Sarah Jane Smith.

Looks as though the second season could be as good as the first...

The BBC is releasing some of its internal development projects as open source. The first batch of projects includes video codecs and 3D interactive environments alongside more specialised broadcasting specific tools.

Yet more signs of the public service elements of the BBC's charter in action.

Good for them. And for us...