March 2007 Archives

I've been trying to buy a flight from Dublin to London for next Thursday. It's not been easy. First, I want to avoid Ryanair, because their website sucks and they're just plain unpleasant. Then, there's a really simple thing about Aer Lingus that winds me up massively – they're called 'AerLingus.com', but aerlingus.com usually doesn't work, requiring 'www.'. Ugh. So... British Airways, right? And, as it turned out, last Thursday they were quite cheap too. Great.

Ah, but then their website refused to take either of my payment cards, claiming that the payment card type selected didn't match the payment card number. I double- and triple-checked, and finally rang the telephone bookings line. 'Oh, the website's gone crazy, it's all a bit mad - try again in an hour or so, I know they're trying to fix it. Terribly sorry.' OK, fair enough, it happens.

Friday: same story. Hmm.

Today: tickets have more than doubled in price. Merde. Worse, however: the same thing happens. I call again. 'That's odd,' they say this time. 'I'll put you through to our web support department.' And this is where the customer service took a nose-dive.

See, I have a particular problem with groups called 'technical support.' Or rather, I don't have a problem, I just don't see why I should ever have to talk to them. I'm not a technical resource, I'm a user and/or customer. 'Tech Support' is entirely the wrong approach. Make it easy for me, not the systems, thanks. So 'web support' isn't a great start. And the chap I spoke to seemed to consider it his job to defend his system against my charges of lack of clarity. Which is apparently what they were.

It turns out that there wasn't a problem on Thursday, or at least, not one that was affecting me. No, the problem is that I'm trying to buy a journey starting outwith the UK, and I can't use a VISA debit card for that. Only a credit card. When I suggested that 'VISA Payment Card', as written on the site, didn't exactly make that distinction clear, the chap went a bit ballistic.

"It's a perfectly clear error message -- the card type you've selected doesn't match the number. VISA isn't the same as VISA Debit at all. Completely different. That's one of the most clear error messages on the site, nobody has a problem with it."

"I have a problem with it. It doesn't tell me what's wrong."

"Yes it does, it tells you exactly what's wrong."

"No, it gives me a partial diagnosis that doesn't help me fix the problem. It omits the crucial detail that you can't process the card at all. It suggests an error on my part, rather than a lack of capability on your part."

"It is an error on your part."

My pointing out that the cards just say 'VISA' on them, and that 'payment card' isn't a synonym for 'credit card', simply added an octave to the man's invective. As did my observation that he was questioning my reading comprehension skills, and I didn't particularly appreciate that.

Ultimately, we agreed to disagree on the appropriateness of the error message. That is, I agreed that he thought it was fine... and then I bought a ticket with Aer Lingus.

I haven't flown BA for ages. I was rather looking forward to it. Oh, well.

Almost there... almost there!

Ten down, two to go. This afternoon we had a viewing of the fifth programme in the series, which rather confusingly is the tenth to go through post-production. It's the show based around the new Danny Boyle film Sunshine, and I must say I'm absolutely delighted with it. Brian Cox rocked up for an interview at dawn, bless him, and somehow mustered the energy to enthuse about physics with the sun rising behind him -- it's all very beautiful. The Futureheads get excited about sliced bread, there's a bizarre and rather charming use of Silly Putty at fusion physics research centre JET, and then Boyle himself takes his own film with a refreshing pinch of salt, and takes the piss out of Brian a bit.

It's all very chummy and approachable -- despite some extreme physics in places -- and I'm absolutely delighted with the tone set by director Christine. It's irreverent without being flippant, pragmatic but not cynical. A fun show, that romps along and looks lovely, and the Big Bosses loved it.

Two more to go.

Biggs, Wedge, let's close it up.

Adobe today announced the eventual availability – staggered through the year – of their 'CS3' suite of applications, including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Premier Pro, Contribute, After Effects, Soundbooth, Photoshop Extended, Bridge, Encore, After Effects Professional, Photoshop Extended Again, Web Design Production Master Encore Professional Edition, and Would You Like Fries With That? Pro. Upgrade pricing options are available from earlier versions of all Adobe and Macromedia products, except the ones you actually own. Prices range from a few hundred dollars up to 'My God, you could buy a car for that! And not a Daewoo, either!'

Adobe also announced a new training and certification process, by which a new breed of Adobe Solutions Specialists can attain detailed knowledge and understanding of the bundling, upgrade, sidegrade, crossgrade and retrograde pricing options. This training process is anticipated to take rather longer than the shelf-life of the CS3 packages, and should allow certified Adobe Solutions Specialists to charge about as much as the Professional Production Showcase Additional Extended Web Extreme Workgroup Pro Bundle Edition Plus Suite, for all client purchases.

Adobe's CEO Bruce Chizen was quoted in the New York Times:

CS3’s prices may seem steep compared to other shrink-wrapped software. But Adobe customers — particularly graphic and video artists with deep-pocketed corporate clients — spend money relatively liberally compared with average software buyers, Chief Executive Bruce Chizen said.

“Our customer is not typically price sensitive,” Chizen said last week. “The cost of the tool isn’t what’s critical — it’s the productivity and what their output can be. They want to pay for value as long as we deliver innovative features that allow them to be more productive and creative.”

Users who just wanted Photoshop for Intel Macs might as well look at The Gimp.

We're planning to film with a helicopter tomorrow, and with my production manager gone I've been delving into the whole insurance murk, always my favourite job. Our production insurers have, however, sent me a neat little checklist pointing me towards some of the stuff I need to think about for risk assessment purposes (which is all rather charmingly laid-back in Ireland), along with a pro-forma letter requesting a routine information exchange and indemnity with the helicopter operator's insurers. Which is all fine, except...

...it's in Comic Sans.

So, so wrong.

I'm wrecked. Scope has been hectic, trying to get the last bits done, and while I'm officially down to three days a week as it 'tails off' (ahem), I'm also starting to do some work for SciCast. Which, it turns out, is going to formally launch at the end of April. Which means there's a mountain of stuff to do for that. Most of which is on poor Katie's plate, but getting what passes for the website spec written is evidently my bag (quite how I ended up designing user interaction for a website I'm not sure, and it's a bit worrying).

I was in London the other week, ostensibly doing SciCast stuff but in fact spending half the time sorting out Scope nightmares and seeing a preview of Sunshine, around which we're basing a show (and on which more anon -- short version: I think it's considerably flawed, parts of it made me roll my eyes, but it's so beautiful to look at I really didn't mind, and in fact rather enjoyed it). Oh, and it was my birthday last week, by happy coincidence on a day when Flossie was over in Dublin. Hurrah.

I arrived back in Glasgow on Friday night to find a relatively monstrous tax bill (ulp), and... well, that's about all I remember of the weekend, to be honest. I seem to have slept since then, pretty much. Sunday evening and I'm now mostly back in gear, with merely two days'-worth of 'stuff' to do before I return to Dublin... tomorrow night.

Back home Friday, Dublin for a couple of days the following week; London the week after (probably a day trip); Cardiff via Leeds after that; thence to Goole, Malton, Hull and Rotherham for the first batch of SciCast workshops.

...and my PowerBook's buggered. Great.

(If you're wondering why I'm not blogging much, it's because none of this is really very interesting. Well, I mean -- it isn't, is it? Really.)

Further evidence that TextMate is the new Emacs: a Twitter bundle. Oh, for heaven's sake!

Great interview with Vinay about his Hexaurt project; here. Vinay's CV currently starts 'Tech guru turned whole systems thinker seeks to save the world.' Bold, but absolutely flat-out the truth. He really does. He's just skint. And, improbably, in Iceland right now.

My PowerBook is borked.

It's a little over three years old, and it's seen ridiculously hard use; moved around pretty much daily, it's recently eaten its second battery (down to about 40 mins life), and the keyboard reflects the half-million-or-so words I've bashed out on it. It's been amazingly solid and reliable, having crashed probably less than a dozen times since I bought it -- I think it locked on me in late January, when I hadn't restarted it since early December, but I don't recall the time before that. The LCD panel is showing the dreaded White Splotches of Doom, but unfortunately it doesn't fall within the serial number range that's supposed to be affected. Huh.

However, I fear its days are numbered, for the display has started glitching. Badly. I'll be working away then it'll suddenly freak out, displaying an overlay of little blue or red rectangles. When both come together, it looks like a tartan filter. If I whack the right-hand palmrest just right, it goes away again -- or I can sometimes correct it by wiggling the lid, or refreshing the screen.

So, my first thought was that the display connection through the hinge is fatiguing, a common problem with heavily-used laptops. But get this -- I can take screen captures of the problem. No, really. And it shows up on an external display, hooked up over a DVI->VGA adaptor. Which means the corruption is in the frame buffer, not the screen itself. Also, the problem shows up less when the machine's running hot.

Loose VRAM, do you think? I'm not even sure it's socketed on this machine, and I know it's a bastard to get into, but... there's hope. Maybe.

When I get back to Glasgow my friendly local Mac repair shop are going to have a new customer, and if I'm very lucky they'll be able to peel poor Quern apart and wiggle a cable. If I'm unlucky... I'll be exploring these options, none of which I can really afford. Ouchie.

(Incidentally, the last time there were that many refurb MacBook Pros around, the range was refreshed a couple of weeks later. Not that I want The Daily Grind to turn into a rumours site, you understand.)

For all the hype about Rocketboom, I've always found it overly-long and pretty much unwatchable. 'The Show' with Ze Frank, however, was much more palatable, even if he never seemed to blink. Short, direct, and pithily witty, it was compulsive viewing. Or at least, it was when he wasn't heading off into bits of Americana that went over my head.

Sadly, however, it's all past tense: Ze's called it quits after a year, and he's been having meetings in LA with all the big-wigs. He has an audience, he has talent, and I hope good things happen. I'm only concerned that, in a few years time, we might realise that what Ze did was perfect the one-man-and-his-vlog format, but that three minutes of him was about right for any one sitting. We'll see.

If you want to catch the teary-eyed final show, it's here.

Munching on some Emmental tonight, I found myself wondering if the holes are exactly spherical, or elongated. I suspect X-ray or MRI analysis would be tricky, since the cheese itself is moderately soft (and, one presumes, low contrast), but slicing the cheese sufficiently thinly should allow one to reconstruct the hole profile.

That led to my considering automating the slicing process, and feeding the slices into a scanner of some description, eventually allowing a three-dimensional digital reconstruction of the cheese. Invert for density, and one would be left with a number of holes hanging in void space, whereupon their spheralicity should be readily discernible.

With reference to the Visible Human Project (Wikipedia), I name this the 'Visible Cheese Project."

Future developments will involve an exploration of the vein structure in various blue cheeses.

[For the record, I'm assuming the holes are predominantly spherical, given the nature of their formation as bubbles of carbon dioxide. But I could be wrong.]

Attention hostees! Dreamhost are moving the mail server we're on, tomorrow night. Downtime should be 2 hours. Figure on more.

[note: no email should be lost, blah blah blah]

"I'm the Urban Spaceman" on a kazoo. Played through a wah-wah pedal. No kidding. Also: the Doctor Who and Rainbow themes, ditto.

The full name of the my country of birth and normal residence is complex. More complex, indeed, than seems reasonable for what is -- functionally -- an oddly-crinkly splat of land off the West coast of Europe.

See, until the Acts of Union 1707, we had the Kingdom of England, and the Kingdom of Scotland (don't ask about Wales right now, just roll with it). The Acts styled the new, single state thus, in article III:

III That the United Kingdom of Great Britain be represented by one and the same Parliament, to be styled the Parliament of Great Britain.

But here's the thing; at this point in history, capitalisation rules were not the same as they are now, and the word 'United' is commonly held to have been descriptive. Thus, the long-form name of the country created by the Acts was the 'Kingdom of Great Britain,' or -- for short -- 'Great Britain.' These are the forms used in legislation post-1707.

This does not, of course, tally with the opinion of many Britons, who think of their country as 'The United Kingdom'. Now, that form came into use with the Act of Union 1800, enacted at the start of 1801. Wikipedia is quite clear and consistent on the issue:

1707-1800: "Kingdom of Great Britain"
1801-1927: "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland"
1927-: "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland"

(Note that it took five years from 1922 to change the country name. There's a natural inertia to such things, apparently).

However, clarity and consistency do not imply a lack of dissent, and the Discussion page for the Kingdom of Great Britain article becomes a knock-down, drag-out, even (bizarrely self-styled, by one participant) gladiatorial contest. It's a cracking read, if only to gain an insight into what rational people have to go through to make Wikipedia what it is.

Personally:

1. I'm persuaded by the argument therein that the current (protected) Wikipedia stylings are reasonable.
2. The distinction between the state from 1707 and from 1801 seems rational and useful.
3. I'm glad I'm currently in (the Republic of) Ireland, and don't have to worry about this stuff so much.
4. Let's not mention the name of the national flag, eh?

I'm in London Tuesday and Wednesday this coming week, sorting out a bunch of SciCast stuff. On Tuesday evening I'm at a NESTA networking event; Wednesday hopefully at a preview of Sunshine. Anyone else in town?

I'm slightly appalled that none of the Robot Wars gang appear to have built this, since it's rather neat: self-balancing scooter board thingy. In Norwich. With QVC piss-take end to the video.

[Hat tip to the good Dr. Bartos, erstwhile of this parish's comments]

[update: link to the builder's own site]

Lawrence Livermore National Labs have won the contract to build America's first new nuclear warheads in 20 years. Damn, I should have pitched for that work, if only to get the rejection letter.

(via Kottke)

Legend has it that one of the ways things worked on Tomorrow's World was that a researcher, when they thought they might have a story, would immediately write a script. Only when that was done would they start making calls and trying to work out what the story was. At which point they'd update the script. Iterate until done.

While borderline barking, one of the points of working like that was that, at any given stage, there was a script that a director could pick up and go and shoot. Early in the process it was likely to be nonsense, but at least there was something workable -- and it helped focus the iterations. It's a dangerous approach, because it's easy to get trapped in a blind alley, but nevertheless it's still sometimes a good way of working.

This article about Adobe's development model for Photoshop CS3 sounds remarkably similar. Interesting.

Supposedly, I'm down to three days a week, from around now. It's not going to happen in practice, of course, but I do need to start nicking bits of time from the TV project to write a couple of conference sessions for later in the year, and to get back into the schools/web video project that starts up again in April.

The trouble is, I have -- and always have had -- a serious problem coping with shifting contexts. My brain feels like it turns to mush, and I end up being entirely incapable of focussing on either the project I'm switching out of, or the one I'm attempting to switch into.

My suspicion has always been that this is to do with the complexity of the projects, but I may be flattering myself there. Certainly, the conference things really aren't that hard. Well, OK, one of them is an overview of copyright law, but most of the content is stuff I sorted out for SciCast last year, so its not...

Er...

What was I talking about?

See, I can't even construct a coherent blog post. Bleurgh.

The attached may give you an idea of why posts here have been rather sparse of late. That's the production schedule for last month, as it finally ended up -- it changed on a more-or-less daily basis. Managing it is starting to get a little easier, in that we've now only about nine days' filming and about six/seven shows in progress to juggle around. That said, March is looking rather similar, and... I'm supposedly down to three days/week. Yeah, right.

Anyway -- if you were wondering what TV production looks like, this is what it looks like from my desk, when it's not looking like a backlog of scripts to review or when I'm not in one of the edits or dubs or whatever.

Fun!

Finally, a use for UGC: a cash cow for creative types. Genius.

Ever had that 'oh monkeys, I've just reset my router to factory defaults and now I've no idea what the admin password is' moment? This handy-dandy list of router passwords would helpfully bail you out... if only you could configure your router so you could reach it.

(as an aside: from my work desk, a MacBook can see between six and nine wireless networks. Three or four of them use the default ssid (helpfully 'Linksys', 'Netgear', or 'Belkin'), and are still on the out-of-the-box administrator login and password.)