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Comments at The Daily Grind are down again; Dreamhost have disabled the scripts. This time around they’ve sent personal and quite informative emails explaining themselves; I’ve no complaint with their actions, which are clearly intended to ensure the stability and of the (shared) server, and maintain something like quality of service for my co-sharees.

I’ll need to poke around a bit and see what I might do to avoid being so darned popular with the spammers. Quite frankly, if this is what being in the top 200,000 blogs is like, heaven help the top 20,000… but anyway, in the meantime, save your thoughts, they’re not going anywhere.

Back in June last year, I wrote a post while whistling up the East Coast Main Line, but then refused to cough up the couple of quid necessary to actually publish from a moving train. Thanks to one of those happy accidents of ticketing, however, I’m today travelling first class. Thus, there is no escape from my meandering.

This week, I meandered back to Dublin, where we signed off the last couple of shows in the series. There are still two to finish onlining and one show to dub, but that’s all stuff I’ll have to leave to one of my directors – to all intents and purposes, I’m finished. Which, finally, has given me that end-of-project bitter-sweet ennui I enjoy so much.

From Dublin to London, where I briefly caught up with the quite barking Jack, who has spent the week filming no squirrels for CBeebies, and his splendid girlfriend Cassie, who appears to be collecting basins from Blue Peter. All too soon, however, I had to hoof it across London to pick up the SciCast gear…

…via Regent Street, and a pilgrimage to the Apple Store. There, I:

• Compared the various laptop screens. I’m not entirely impressed with the display on the MacBook – the viewing angle is rather shallow, particularly vertically, and I wondered if this was a side-effect of the glossy coating. However, looking at MacBook Pros with and without the gloss, side-by-side, it’s clear that it’s the MacBook’s screen itself, and not the surface treatment. Viewing angles on the larger Pro screens are significantly better, and indeed contrast on the glossy screens seems much better.
• Fiddled with an Apple TV demo unit, which was fairly impressive – particularly on the display Sony Bravia telly via HDMI, which was very lovely. However, I was less than impressed by the quality of the videos. I know I’m a tough customer, but I’d expected less compression noise. Freeze frames were pretty bad, and while the quality was considerably better than, say, Torrent Xvid downloads, it certainly wasn’t DVD standard, let alone HD. I should have asked what the sources were – I wonder if I wasn’t seeing pukka HD H264? Stills looked a little over-sharpened but otherwise very impressive indeed, and the interface is quick enough and very clear. Impressive, but I’d need more convincing about video quality.
• Bought some cables. Ah, what joy to find the whole spread of miniDVI/DVI/VGA/TV/etc output cables, along with Apple’s very funky thin FireWire stuff. They do an ultra-short very thin 6-pin cable for a tenner, which is a Great Thing.

So: I’m now on a train, lugging three cameras, three MacBooks, most of a radio mic kit (minus a crucial cable, uh-oh…), and a few other bits & pieces up to Glasgow.
100 miles/hour and 20Kb/sec, just North of York. Really rather impressive.

Quernstone Technologies Ltd. today announce the forthcoming availability of their latest breakthrough software: TransLoading. “Uploads in disguise,” as the technique has been dubbed, breaks the asymmetric barrier to deliver a significant improvement in ADSL upload speeds.

“The technique is, at its root, absolutely facile,” said Quernstone Technologies’ Chief Grinder and Interim Graphic Design Lead Jonathan Sanderson. “Recent breakthroughs in ADSL provision have led to download speeds in excess of 8Mbit/sec, yet upload rates have long been pegged at a tiny fraction of that. TransLoading revolutionises the broadband industry by offering a middle ground between download and upload.”

The patent-pending TransLoading technique is believed to involve a simple web application acting as a proxy to a custom upload script. When invoked, the web app begins streaming random data to the client, with the client comparing the downloaded bytes with the intended upload, and signaling when a match is found.

“Since download speeds are typically more than eight times greater than upload rates,” explained Sanderson, “it’s trivial to deliver 8bits of download data and use merely one bit of upload to signal a successful or unsuccessful match. With current ADSL technology offering up to 32 times more download bandwidth than upload, TransLoading: Uploads in Disguise can offer upload speed gains of more than 400%. By… um… downloading instead.”

The radical ‘download everything your upload could be, then tell the server which one you meant’ approach of TransLoading will initially be offered as a proof-of-concept implemented as a TextMate bundle.

“We pretty much live in TextMate,” Sanderson said, “implementing TransLoading in anything else just didn’t make any sense.”

Full commercial licenses and industrial partners for the TransLoading initiative will be announced on a subsequent date.

“We see this as a breakthrough product,” said Sanderson, “And we’re going to have a shitload of videos to upload this year, for which ADSL… uh… really blows. So we’re praying this works. If not, we’re going back to posting DVDs to mates who have proper bandwidth.”

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.