Working on the train

Damn, I’ve got a lot done on this train journey.

Well, that is to say, I’ve hit ‘k’ (“mark all as read”) in NetNewsWire a hell of a lot. But hey, I’ve also tweaked some Movable Type stuff over at the SciCast blog, with the help of the MT mailing list, and I’ve been fiddling with a few other bits locally. Yes, I have a copy of MT running on my MacBook. Woohoo.

As Vinay has pointed out (in the IM conversation burbling on behind all this), I’ve been having a deeply 21st Century day.

Race condition

Oi! Blog writers! Yes, you Scoble!

How about you work out roughly how frequently your feed subscribers are snagging your feeds, and make your feeds long enough that there’s overlap? Like a good netizen, I have NetNewsWire set on four-hour refresh, and some blogs (Make, Boing Boing, Scoble. Particularly Scoble) post so much stuff that the feed has churned round completely in way less time than that. result: I miss stuff.

If it carries on like this we’ll start hearing ‘RSS is broken’ stories.

[I’m writing this on the train. Ah, the joys of GNER wifi, power sockets, and quiet carriages]

Neglecting you

I’m about to jump on a train to London, to go to a big shindig about children’s TV. Which is odd, because to my mind that should read ‘children’s media,’ and I suspect there’ll be hissing and booing if I say that out loud.

Hence, I was rather hoping to print out a bunch of recent OFCOM documents so I could snuggle up with a good PDF on the train. Sadly, my printer exploded about three months ago, and I’d completely forgotten because I’ve not needed it since.

That’s about it, really. See, you’re not missing much.

Oh – that last post was sent directly from my N95. I managed to convince it it’s a generic European handset, and hence have the software updates Orange have been denying me. Six months’-worth of updates. Result: it’s waaaaay happier. I still think the UI is a bag of spanners, but at least it actually does stuff now. Like, makes phone calls without (so far) crashing.

Mind you, saying an N95 is useful and productive is like saying that DOS was useful and productive. It’s technically true, but remembering which button is ‘quit’, and when, isn’t something that should be inflicted on end users.

[not quite sure why this post has a ‘continue reading’ link. There isn’t any more. Oh, how we long for MT4.1… coming soon to a download server near you…]

[oop! And now it doesn’t have such a link. Durr.]

On the radio

I’m – probably, could all change – on the radio in a couple of hours’ time. On Thursday morning I recorded an interview about SciCast for BBC Radio 4’s iPM programme; the result should be on between 5:30 and 6 tonight.

Absolutely bricking it, I am.

Oh heck, look at that. They’re gone and put a bunch of stuff on their blog about SciCast, too. Eek! Running order; Piece from the journalist who interviewed me. I see they’ve bounced me down the running order, which is probably fair enough, and a cautionary note.

iPhone fonts

Chairman Gruber tackles the issue of text antialiasing on the iPhone (yes, some people actually care about this sort of stuff. Turns out, I may be one such person). The issue has been whether the iPhone does standard greyscale antialiasing, or colour-fringing subpixel antialiasing.

Gruber concludes that it’s standard greyscale. This makes perfects sense, because subpixel shenanigans depends on the renderer knowing the arrangement of the display elements. While the iPhone renderer clearly could know this, it would also have to cope with the screen rotating. So… what does it do? Does it switch from horizontal-subpixel rendering to vertical? Surely that would mean the look of the type changed subtly between portrait and landscape modes? Which might be fairly ghastly.

If you run with standard antialiasing you don’t have these problems; a pixel is just a pixel, and the problem doesn’t arise. As long as the pixels are square, of course (that’s a problem that’s still causing problems with web video, incidentally).

Besides, is it just me who hates the colour fringing with subpixel antialiasing? I turn it off on my Macs – can’t bear it. Perhaps I’m particularly sensitive to chromatic aberration effects or something, but that little outline of colour speckle makes my eyes crawl.

(Oh, and yes, I turn it off on my Windows boxes too. I know people speak very highly of ClearType, but I think it looks at least as dreadful as ‘best for LCD’ on OS X.)

PRS going after workplace radios

Today I find myself listening to quite a lot of Radio 4, though that still doesn’t quite explain why I currently have Feedback on. Nevertheless, one piece of interest: the Performers’ Rights Society have gone beyond the Kwik-Fit case (I can’t find out what happened there – it may still be going through the Scottish courts?), and are cold-calling businesses around the country and informing them they need a public performance license for letting radios play in the workplace.

Some of those contacted have been in touch with Feedback to find out what gives; Feedback asked the PRS to explain their position, but they sent a somewhat flannelly statement instead, that sounded remarkably like this (undated) press release.

Interesting situation. From my reading of the PRS tarif (linked from here), the minimum fee for playing a radio eight hours a day, 355 days of the year, for a small business (fewer than 25 people) would be just shy of four hundred quid. Ouch.

This comes down to one’s interpretation of the phrase ‘public performance’, and the PRS are being clear that they include anyone listening to music outwith the home or personal environment. At least one intellectual property lawyer disagrees, but if you follow the PRS interpretation, I’d best be careful listening to Feedback in my home office, lest I accidentally catch a snippet of the Archer’s theme tune afterwards.

Also of note: the PRS doesn’t have authority to collect royalties on all music, only on that originated by its members. I had the ‘pleasure’ of talking to the PRS the other week, and they were very clear about this… but only after I’d specifically asked.

Anyway: the music on SciCast films is entirely outwith their remit. Whatever its source, it’s published under a Creative Commons license and you’re free to play it to as many people as you like, so long as you’re not directly making money out of doing so. The PRS have no claim over our work there.