An Exercise in Irrelevance

Been to so much recently, that I’ve hardly had time to keep up.

Waiting for Godot was on at to Royal Theatre. Looks impressive but is not a good venue. The acoustics are bad and the seats are uncomfortable. Still, it was Ian McCellan and Patrict Stewart on one bill, with Simon Callow and Ronald Pickup thrown in for good measure. What can I say, really. The cast made the occasion. The play was funny and engaging, even if it makes no sense. The set was wonderful. Seeing Mr X and Magneto at the same time, though, what more could you want? Well, apart from comfortable seats, that is.

Show of Hands. Yep, great. Barn storming, folkie-inspired, throw some politics in. They really filled the hall (Sage one which is famously hard to fill, being cold and antiseptic). Heard about them many times before, but as it happens, never seen them or heard any of their stuff. Good introduction, this was.

Swing Out Sister, finally — not my choice, not really my sort of thing, but I am a music junkie, and always willing to try anything. Besides which, they were fun in the 80s and compared to SAW were a relief. Live, they were great. The music is upbeat, engaging, entertaining. The band were fluent and the night really, erm, swung. They started off with two of their big hits (Surrender and another one I forgot the name of) which seemed curious; as well as these, they had a few stand-out songs, although even on the more pedestrian numbers, it was all very listenable and enjoyable. The encore was the inevitable Breakout — “when you’ve found a good thing make it last” – Swing Out Sister seem to have done this, and I’m glad.

Posted by hand from my old blog site.

Today, iplayer tells me "You have download 2.22 of content" with a checkbox saying "Do not show this message". Robbed of a unit the former looks messy, robbed of "again" the latter looks a bit "Do not press this button again".

Download times have come down a bit. Still — 4 hours now for a 60 min programme. I even managed to get something to play today; the frame rate appeared to be about 5/second.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Managed to download a file; it doesn’t block so badly at 5pm. Can’t get the file to play in any way, shape or form. There is, however, a solution. What you do is click on the "download to windows media player" link. This gives you a straight forward URL from which you can http download. This is actually better, in many ways. You can use what ever download manager you like, including a vaguely capable one. You don’t have to guess which file is which as you did before. And as soon as some one has worked out how to pull the URLs out of the BBC’s UI, we should be able to circumvent the entire process of going to their website.

So, perhaps it’s not all doom and gloom after all.

Originally published on my old blog site.

What a flurry of posts? I went mad today and joined twitter and friendfeed both at the same time. Gosh, what a time waster this stuff all is.

Right, just got to twitter about posting on my blog.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Did the update. RC1 is out which is a reasonable time. If I updated on the release day it would have taken for ever; last time, it took something like 2 hours. This time the whole process was over and done with in an hour. It’s all been relatively painless. So far only two problems. Obviously my marble mouse configuration stopped working again, and I had to change all my HAL scripts; luckily, this is now better documented than before. A great relief because following through the myriad pieces of advice on how to do this every update was getting taxing. And, secondly, they’ve introduced something called "screen-profiles" which is colour schemes for screen; very nice, I’m sure, but when it seems to be kicked off when I start screen with an aliases, asking me lots of questions. Uninstalled it; problem gone.

And Jaunty? Well, it looks nice enough. Boot time is definately faster, although my windows box still beats Ubuntu (there is less on it, to be fair). Login screen looks very cool. Other than that, well, all ahead as normal.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Just been forced to "upgrade" to this, despite having no desire to. It’s very impressive. It will only do a single download at a time and is current reporting 10 hours left for a 1 hour programme; the old BBC IPlayer would download in about real-time, certainly after 10pm in the evening. I did manage to download one programme in 5 mins, but sadly the file was only 32k at the end and it wouldn’t play; really, really broken. And, of course, it’s ditched my existing programmes despite promising to keep them.

Apparently, they have ditched P2P for IPlayer Desktop; good idea, if you ask me. Lower CPU load, no upload traffic generally good. But you have to upgrade your servers, guys. And, of course, the entire internet, to avoid the slowest link effect. Very poor indeed. The message boards would be floods of moans; lucky that the BBC had the foresight to close them down.

Ironically, they’ve gone high definition; it was announced on the website. Great idea; a week to download 5 mins, but looks great when you do.

Very poor; has to go down in history as one of the worst damn squib launches I’ve known. I wish I knew how to upgrade back to the old iplayer.

Originally published on my old blog site.