Month: August 2006

My sporadic claim to be a Yorkshireman is usually viewed as being mildly tenuous, on the grounds that Kingston-upon-Hull is only historically a Yorkshire city. I counter by explaining that when I was born, it really was in the East Riding, the nonsense that was Humberside only staggering along a good while later, but frankly all that’s by the by: I’m a Yorkshireman, and there’s now’t you can do about it.

It’s with some pleasure, therefore, that I discover – via a circuitous route commencing at the erudite Mr. Coates‘ blog – that one famous son of the city was John Venn, of the Diagram. Most excellent. I have to wonder, however, why we never covered him on Local Heroes. He invented a cricket bowling machine? I feel a demo coming on…

Say the BBC, further relating due deference to that whole ‘nobody told us it was impossible, so we bally did it’ British wartime zeal. But of course, what we really want to know is how he’s going to deal with the tricky issue of Guy Gibson’s labrador. Oh, and will it still feature that orchestral theme?

Nice little video here chatting to the people behind Technorati – well worth a watch if you’re interested in that sort of thing. I don’t use it anything like as much as I reckon I should, in part because it still feels like the UK blog world is rather small and closed. But I can see that changing sooner rather than later.

It’s also worth watching to see what Kevin Marks, erstwhile of this parish’s comments, looks and sounds like. Tee-hee.

Following-up to my musings yesterday on Vista and a MacBook: The short version: it dun’ work.

Longer version: Boot Camp is wonderful. Vista installation is fairly smooth and simple. But installing drivers in Vista… ugh ugh ugh. It doesn’t like one of the drivers on Apple’s CD, but the ‘yes, I know it’s unsigned, please do it anyway’ dialogues don’t tell you which driver they’re for! Seriously. So when it craps out after a few, displays a meaningless error code dialogue, rolls back the install, and then (five minutes later) bluescreens, there’s not a lot I can do.

Unfortunately, Apple’s driver disc is all rolled up into one nice big InstallShield package, with which there’s no interaction. While it does extract the individual drivers, the ‘it’s all gone wrong, rolling back’ exit deletes most of them again. Though, curiously, it leaves behind the drivers for the hardware I haven’t got (Nvidia and ATI graphics cards, for example).

So at the moment I have Vista in 800×600 (stretched), with no graphics acceleration. Ugh. Oh, and for all the moaning we Mac-heads do about bouncing ruddy dock icons, at least there’s some indication that something is happening. Driver disc autorun takes about seven minutes before opening a window (!), during which time there is no sign that anything’s going on. Nor is there any visual indication that the system has registered an application icon double-click (cf. Mac OS’s zooming rectangle, and OS X’s translucent flying icon thing). So it’s very easy to end up with three install processes on the go, which doubtless doesn’t help.

Somehow – and despite Vista claiming to roll back the installs – I now do have wireless networking enabled. So I may be able to find drivers online somewhere – it’s all standard PC hardware, after all. But I’m not sure I can be bothered. Oh, and those infamous User Access Control dialogues? They’re hilariously bad, giving little indication of what’s about to be done. Click the ‘tell me more’ button, and you’re presented with a few lines of config.wibble\serial number\blah gibberish. Hopeless, frankly. I’ve seen more civilised spyware.

On the one hand, I’m not too discouraged by all this; it’s a test release, and I know that the driver disc is intended for XP SP2. However, hardware heterogeneity has clearly led to a driver nightmare situation for Windows users, and it’s not getting any simpler. Drivers have been an ongoing disaster zone on my Windows XP box, and I suppose I was hoping that Vista could somehow wave a magic wand and solve all the problems. That’s crazy talk, obviously.

But… see what happened here? By defining a strict subset of PC hardware, Apple have been able to at least start addressing one of the fundamental problems of Windows. Which is that it simply doesn’t work ‘out of the box.’ That’s bizarre, but actually rather clever. If I bought a Dell, Toshiba, Sony, whatever now, would I have any assurance that it will run well with Vista? Where will I get suitable drivers – by scrabbling around online and trying to work out if I have a C-Media 5650 or 5650pi or…? I don’t think so.

Or I can spend about the same amount of money on a Mac, and cross my fingers that Apple will roll everything up neatly for me, by around the time Vista ships. Which seems plausible, given that this current driver disc allegedly does work just fine with XP SP2.

I’m slightly gobsmacked by this. The MacBook, right now, doesn’t work with Vista. But I have bizarrely greater confidence that it will, eventually, than I do that my bona-fide, currently-running-XP PC will ever stand a chance. That’s… oh, my brain hurts.

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a quandary. To the right, a MacBook that’s not doing very much at the moment (odd but true — and no, you can’t have it). On the left, a DVD of Microsoft’s Windows Vista pre-RC1 release, since inexplicably it seems that 100,000 people haven’t downloaded it from this page. But I did, just now, and burned that disc. In the background, on my Power Mac, Apple’s BootCamp beta1.1; for the unfamiliar, this allows one to put the thing on the left into the thing on the right, and for something moderately sensible to happen.

The quandary is this: now I’m in a position to do this, can I actually be arsed? It’s not like I really have the free time, but… gee, you know. It’s like the future, and everything.

What do you think? Should I? Really?

Five years ago, I made a series called Science Shack. It was fronted by Adam Hart-Davis, but what really happened is that a gang of us made ridiculous contraptions and pointed cameras at them. What took place in the workshop and behind the scenes was often frustratingly better than what we managed to shove on telly. I wasn’t involved in the second series, and the ‘engineering posse’ approach did expand a bit, but I always maintained that the BBC made a big mistake in seeing the show as a vehicle for Adam.

A shame, really. We could have made something rather similar to Mythbusters, only we’d have got the science less wrong and been three years earlier. In fact, there were many attempts to get just such a show off the ground, often involving Science Shack engineer Jem Stansfield (and, in at least one case, Alom, Gia, and I think Daily Grind comments frequenter Patrick too). Sadly, none of them amounted to anything more than untransmitted pilots.

Until now. Men In White is Tiger Aspect‘s take on the idea, for Channel 4. And it stars… er… Jem. Huh. Fancy that. But hey, I’m just pleased that the show has finally been made. Jem – who’s usually self-critical to the point of openly dissing his own shows (you should have heard him talk about Zero to Hero…) – speaks very highly of it, and indeed the YouTube-driven pump-priming trailer is quite amusing. Even if they have ballsed up the widescreen thing, durr

.Jem himself, meanwhile, was a tad worried about over-exposure when I spoke to him yesterday. Men In White is on C4 on Sunday afternoons, in the Scrapheap teatime slot, for six weeks. Then he’s Bill Bailey’s sidekick in a new using-engineering-to-put-eco-stuff-right show… in the same slot. For another twelve weeks. Then Scrapheap starts again, with the guest judge in the first episode being… Jem Stansfield.

Rock on.

The thing that amazes me about this list of ‘TV shows only available on the web’ is that it’s so short. I remember lists like this of ‘all the websites’, circa early 1994, when Gopher was still much more useful than this new-fangled www malarky. You know, before WebCrawler, when Veronica ruled. And there were dinosaurs on every street corner, hawking knock-off Boyle air pumps.

While I don’t think we’re going to see quite the same sort of explosion with video – it takes so much more time than simply bunging up text – I’m amazed that even a modestly comprehensive list can still fit on a single page. Savour the moment, because it’s not going to last.

In some ways, right now is a bad bad bad time for me to get immersed in a broadcast TV production. On the other hand, I don’t have any real choice in the matter – I’ve been setting wheels in motion all year, and it’s time to plain earn some dosh. It’s just that it’s going to be frustrating to watch the world move on while I’m doing the old-fashioned stuff. Heh.

Meanwhile – hint for somebody keen to get into TV presenting: start doing a weekly ‘what’s on’ guide. Be rude, witty, charming… and above all brief.

There ought to be a word to describe the mood engendered by the particular set of circumstances thus:

1. Working from home.
2. Thus, spending much time staring out of the office window, watching the world go by on the street below.
3. Awaiting a delivery from Amazon (or 7dayshop, Firebox, Interfauna, etc.)
4. Delivery van pulls up, and…
5. …makes delivery to neighbour.
6. Repeat #4-5 until fed up.
7. Make tea.
8. Watch another delivery van pull up.
9. Watch delivery chappie buzz another neighbour’s door.

Harrumph.

So… assuming I wind up working in Dublin in the near, I’ll likely be in the market for cheap phone calls between Ireland and the UK, in both directions. One option is, of course, Skype – the SkypeOut and SkypeIn possibilities both look like they may be useful (the former allows PC-to-landline calls, the latter the reverse).

Or… there’s Gizmo. Anyone have any experience with doing these? I mean, really doing these? Well, obviously, millions of people have, and I’ve used PC-to-PC Skype briefly myself (great sound quality – rubbish echo cancellation, both compared to iChat AV).

How well do they really integrate with old-fashioned telephones? Voice chat tends to have rather poor latency by modern phone standards – how distracting is it? And do people ‘get it’? Or do you end up spending so long explaining the concept to your family, you might as well just give them your mobile number and be done with it?

Somewhere in the process of reading the Wikipedia article on the RIM Blackberry, I managed to spawn a browser tab for Who Wants to be a Superhero?, a current (US) SciFi Channel show hosted by Marvel’s Stan Lee. It is, quite possibly, the silliest TV format of which I’ve ever heard. It starts silly… then gets progressively funnier.

What really cracks me up, though, is the section about ‘controversy and criticism.’ There are, it seems, dark mutterings that the show may not be a bone fide ‘reality’ format after all. Oooooh! Noooo! Really? D’ya think?

Shocking, I’d say. Damned funny concept, though.

Trouble is, now I really wish I’d managed to make somebody listen to my punters-as-crew-in-Star-Trek idea…