Planet Bods Blog

Switzerland Day 1 - London to Meringen in several easy train filled steps

2008-08-26T14:28:42Z

Tell people you're going on holiday to Switzerland and the standard response is "Cool!". Tell them you're travelling by train all the way there and you're then met with one of two reactions.

The first is to continue the "Cool!" response, to say it sounds fantastic and mean it. These people seem to be the minority.

The majority have a different response - the eyes almost glaze over as they try to contemplate going to a different country without using one of those plane things that hover in our skies.

Why on earth would you want to do that, seems to be the unasked question.

My unanswered response is along the lines of "Well, because you can, and because it's better".

Lets face it - air travel sucks. First of all, all the airports are in the middle of nowhere and take forever to get to. Then when you finally do get to the airport (inevitably two hours earlier than you need to be there, because "you just can't trust the traffic/tubes/train not to be delayed") you stand in a long queue to check in.

Then you walk down a long windy corridor past hoards of shops and into the security queue. There you stand, slowly moving, for an eternity, have to take your shoes off for no apparent reason, go through a metal detector and wait for your luggage whilst someone interrogates the stressed looking woman carrying a crying baby about that mysterious white liquid in a bottle that she has.

When the security person has finally finished reducing her to tears, they then riffle extensively through your luggage, stare at you and then decide there is something dubious about your asthma inhaler.

Eventually you're released to go and wait your time in a glorified shopping centre which never has enough seats (because seats mean less time shopping), before you wander down another 15 miles of corridor to go and board your plane. Then you sit in another area waiting until you can then go and join yet another queue to actually board the plane in the first place, only to find your seat is in the middle of three, with a large man on one side with bad BO.

There you sit in a cramped seat, unable to move for several hours whilst airline staff occasionally fling nuts or an appalling prawn cocktail at you, before you get off the plane, walk down yet more endless corridors in order to stand in yet another slow moving queue where someone in a large glass cubicle does their best to intimidate you, before finally allowing you to go down even more long corridors to the baggage collection area, where you wait three hours for your luggage to spin round on that carousel thing, so you can walk past (guilty looking) customs officers before boarding the queue for the ticking machine so you can travel an hour down the road on a train.

If your lucky.

There must be another way

For some reason the British have this idea that air travel is the quickest and best. The belief tends to come from the fact that the actual journey itself is actually the quickest, whilst ignoring the fact that you spend most of the rest of the time barely moving. Planes good, everything else bad. It even seeps into the thinking of successive governments who decide that having even more planes in our airports is a really good thing.

But for a lot of travel in Western Europe there is, of course, a good alternative. And it's called the train.

There can't be anyone who doesn't know about the Eurostar, but what many don't realise is that whilst Eurostar doesn't go direct to many locations, it connects with the wonderful French TGV network. And the TGV goes to many places. Including Switzerland.

London to Paris

St Pancras station, by AK Foto. Released under Creative Commons licence

And so it came to pass that at 6am one Saturday morning, we boarded the Northern Line to St Pancras International - a lovely station and no mistake. And a station with just one slight flaw. All those nice quicker journeys you can now make on the Eurostar are eaten up for me by the fact that we can no longer get off the tube at Waterloo! Oh and a word to London Underground. Yes, your new look Kings Cross St Pancras is lovely. But why oh why did you design the main ticket hall without ramps? International rail terminal? People with heavy luggage? Stairs? I rest my case...

Anyway our train was due to leave St Pancras at 7:30 and with it being early on a Saturday morning, the Eurostar check-in was heaving but as every, efficient. It took around ten minutes of queuing and we were through the gates. A few more minutes waiting for security to quickly and efficiently x-ray the bags and we were in. Now that's what international travel should be.

We ambled into the spacious terminal and eventually found a spot in the heaving terminal. And were happy to do so - such spots were rare. Well until I took a little walk and found out that everyone (and I mean everyone) had gone to the right of the terminal. One quick walk to the left, around the travelator to the platforms, which divides the waiting area, and the place was deserted. Rows and rows of empty seats. Even at one of its busiest times, and there's loads of space to stretch out and relax. Not that we had much chance to as the train began boarding moments later.

Before long we were zooming through the countryside along the full route of High Speed 1. This was the first time we'd used the Eurostar since it began operating at the full 186mph on all its route from London to Paris. And it glides down. The only downside to the old, cramped route into Waterloo is that you no longer get London landmarks to admire as you travel - most of the journey in the centre is via a tunnel, and once you pop out its pretty industrial. Still, who cares when you're travelling like trains should be?

A stopover in Paris

It was around 10:45 when we got to Paris Gare du Nord where we effortlessly got off the train and into the main station. No passport checks (they're all done at St Pancras), no customs worries, no problems. Our only problem was what to do with the hour and a half our travel agent had given us in Paris before our next train. In that time, all we had to do was travel to Gare de L'est. We'd been given Metro tickets but it was a nice day and Gare de L'est is barely a ten minute walk so we took the scenic route and even found a park next door to Gare de L'est to sit back and enjoy the weather - a most agreeable way to relax mid-journey.

The time to board our TGV Lyria train to Zurich came perhaps too quick, but then we had another country to go to.

In fact the three and a half hour journey to Basel seemed to fly by as we sat in a modern, sleek and comfortable train, complete with cupholders. No more bringing down the entire seat table just to rest your Cafe Creme. There was one slight oddity with the train - each seat seemed to have two numbers - one illuminated and one not. Clearly they could change the numbering system if they needed to, although quite why they'd need to was not something I could particularly fathom.

Switzerland here we come!

The journey may have flown by due to the fact that I'd loaded my iPod with all eight series of Red Dwarf, but soon we were alighting just over the Swiss boarder in Basel. Slightly surprising was that no one bothered to check passports or customs (despite the TGV Lyria website claiming that we'd be checked on board).

We had just seven minutes to change to our next connection. Thanks to the ever wonderful Deutsche Bahn, we knew we had to merely change from platform 8 to platform 11. Our only battle was the raft of incredibly slow people who were dawdling with their luggage.

We needed have worried - Basel is a sleek, modern station with wide platforms, lots of escalators and lifts and easy access to trains. We found our penultimate train with ease.

Basel to Interlaken

Our two hour journey to Interlaken would be on another sleek and modern train - the giant double decker intercity train owned by Swiss national rail company, SBB CFF FSS (which, as I'm sure you all know stands for Schweizerische Bundesbahnen - Chemins de fer fédéraux suisses - Ferrovie federali svizzere. Or, to translate into English, Swiss Federal Railways - Swiss Federal Railways - Swiss Federal Railways). Switzerland is of course, multi-lingual and the railway company name is in three languages).

Basel train station, by MrUllmi. Released under Creative Commons licence.

These are serious beasts of a train. Comfortable, efficient and long. They run at around 10 coaches, and often have single deck coaches also coupled to them. So roomy are they that they feature dedicated family coaches, a coach which is a bistro downstairs and a restaurant upstairs (complete with non-fixed seats) and toilets which you can't work out how to flush because the button is on a panel above the sink which doesn't look like a button.

It was also late due to technical difficulties apparently. I say late. By late it actually left three minutes after scheduled departure time and soon made that up. And what's more, being on the upper deck we had fantastic views of the Swiss countryside. Two hour journey? Felt nothing like it - and that was without Red Dwarf.

Interlaken to Meiringen

It was about six in the evening when we finally hopped off the double decker and frantically tried to find out next train - a "local" service operated by Die Zentralbahn. It's a narrow gauge line (1m wide tracks, compared to the standard 1.435m). The service we were on ran up from Interlarken Ost to Meiringen - a journey of just 30 minutes. Yet even this service warranted a whopping six coaches on the train. This is a country that loves its trains.

It's a scenic route and used by many tourists - the result being that the locals get a great service too with the line running a 30 minute frequency. Soon we were at the end, ready to stretch our legs. Not too far though - our hotel was sited just at the end of the station platforms...

12 hours of travelling, but yes, we were there.

And is that time so bad?

Want a contrast? Well according to our Travel Agent, if we'd flown (to Zurich), the connection there would have been 2.5 hours. BA lists a journey time of 1 hour 40 minutes flight time to Zurich, so that's 4 and a half hours in itself. Add to that time to get to Heathrow (easily 90 minutes for me), check-in time (45 mins minimum, but realistically we would have ended up being there around 90 minutes early) plus all that waiting around for baggage, passport control, customs etal and you're easily looking at 9 hours travelling. Minimum. And hey, most of that you wouldn't even be moving at all.

And hey, how often can you easily do three countries in one day?

Hope for the North

2008-08-13T12:22:59Z

The story today that a think tank believes some Northern cities are beyond revival and that those living there should move to the South East is one that fills me with some interesting conflicting emotions.

Now I live in London and know the South East to be a madly crowded, expensive place, and that really the UK needs to stop crowding in this area.

But I also was one of those people who came from the North to London - doing exactly what that think tank suggests.

It's nearly nine years since I arrived, fresh faced in London, purchasing my first weekly travelcard from Euston Underground station. I came here after utterly failing to find any work building websites in the North West - what few jobs there were were very low paid, and rare to find on the jobs websites and mailing lists.

Every now and then I get spammed by a Manchester recruitment agent who has completely failed to remove me from their books like asked, and receive job specs for the kind of work I was then looking for. Even for experienced developer jobs, the going rates I've been sent were often about half what someone could earn in London. What's also noticable is how few jobs come through.

Whilst there are limited employment oppertunities in certain areas, there will be people who leave - either by choice or necessity. Indeed, one of the reasons I continue to be reluctant to join the BBC exodus to Salford is a real fear that I'd be trapped in the BBC for the rest of my life because it will be difficult to find work elsewhere.

Manchester is a big place, but my own research hasn't exactly persuaded me its overflowing with employment oppertunities in the internet area (it's certainly not going to be for interactive TV - that really is far too niche!). I could be wrong of course, but you can only go by what you see - and a scour of job sites for Manchester jobs in my field haven't been particularly fruitful.

Okay, I work in one area of business which is quite focused on London. Unfortunately lots of industries are focused on London. And whilst certain industries are focused on one area you'll get people congregating there, whether its internet, or financial or whatever.

And whilst that congregation of industry remains, so does the congregation of people - and lo the South East keeps getting bigger and bigger to the detriment of the rest of the country.

Can you solve it? To move people, you need a critical mass of employers in a specific industry for it to happen. It's all very well moving to a location for one job, but uprooting your life every time you want to change employer is not a particularly practical option if you have a partner (and hey, maybe kids). And why would any employer want to try and start creating a new critical mass.

That's the charge no doubt of the BBC's move to Salford, but will it actually boost the software industry in Manchester enough to stop people going down South? Can it ever actually do that? And similarly, would one major financial institution moving away from the City of London, and setting up camp in Sheffield, suddenly see Sheffield become a new rival financial capital?

Is there actually a solution to either of these problems - a boost to the North, and a shrink in the South?

Personally I think there is, and it was one I heard some time ago from Plaid Cymru MP, Adam Price.

His suggestion was to move Parliament out of London. Lock, stock and barrell. Empty Whitehall, build new buildings - the lot. Split the financial and political capitals of this country. The financial capital won't move - why should it? But the political capital could be moved.

Where to put it? Actually his suggestion wasn't Wales as some might cynically think. He suggested making Liverpool the political capital of the UK - the logic being that it has the space, and could do with the boost.

The new Out-of-London political capital would have huge numbers of employees, and have a critical mass of jobs for people to move around in - civil servants would have similar options to move around as they do in Whitehall now. And anyone wanting to become a civil servant (and many people do leave university with that ambition) just need to head to a different city.

At the same time, a whole host of political related industries also relocate - lobbying, some elements of the media - and would have huge advantages to the whole of the surrounding area.

True it would be expensive, but the rewards would be absolutely huge. London and the South East would get more space, whilst the rest of the nation would have less cause to worry about everything being London centric, and power would be more evenly distributed.

Which is why it's such a shame that think tank Policy Exchange came to the conclusion they did. There are always ways. There's always hope. It just needs some imagination...

The Balcony Food Zone

2008-08-10T15:56:13Z

Regular readers will know that I like my food, and I'm keen on quality. I've baked my own bread for around two years now (and indeed, as I type, there's a malthouse loaf proving in the kitchen), and I like to eat good quality food.

Most of the veg we buy is organic, ready meals almost never appear, I don't use pre-made sauces (although I do buy pesto and curry paste) and I always make my own salad dressings and mayonnaise with good quality organic eggs (where does this notion that mayo should be white come from? Mine is always a lovely shade of yellow!) Living with a vegetarian means meat doesn't play a huge role in my home diet, but I have a policy of not buying chicken when out unless it's at least free range.

This year I've added to the mix by growing some food of my own.

There's been a lot on TV recently about growing your own food, including Jamie at Home and River Cottage Spring but the idea actually came to me some time ago whilst watching another Jamie Oliver programme - Jamie's Great Italian Escape.

In that programme was a bit of a throwaway comment about how Italians living in flats often grow beans on their balcony, and let the beans wind their way round the railings.

Hmm, I thought. I have a balcony. I have some railings. Hmm...

Now I have grown herbs on the balcony since we moved in in 2004, so the idea of going for some veg was inciting and whilst in Sainsburys earlier in the year, I picked up some runner bean seeds. And some lettuce leaf seeds and some rocket seeds for good measure.

Later on when it came to hanging basket time, I decided to go one further. Instead of having two baskets of flowers, I decided to do one of flowers and one of tomatoes.

The rocket has been a bit of a disaster, barely doing anything at all until recently when a few leaves started spurting up (this is in sharp contrast to my drive at the front where rocket can be clearly seen growing in some of the cracks!) But apart from that, the signs have been promising and now with August here, we're finally beginning to reap the harvest.

The effort involved has been pretty minimal - the runner beans just needed a little training to go round the rails, and the lettuce just needed the odd tidy to help it on its way. Other than that, all I've had to do is the inevitable watering, and scare the odd pigeon away which was sat on the tomatoes.

Of course the yields are so far not huge - we've had about six runner beans and three tomatoes, plus some lettuce leaves - but there's much more growing on the plants themselves and I'm expecting that we'll get to September and have a few meals out of them.

It's been a great exercise and one I'll repeat again next year hopefully - Catherine has requested sweet peas! With the tiny space we have, I'll never be able to grow enough to keep us away from the organic box scheme, but it's nice to know that what you're eating includes something you've seen go from seed to your plate, and without a tonne of food miles. Who wants tomatoes from Kenya when you can quickly pick your own?

Heritage Lines and random railway memories

2008-08-06T21:42:41Z

When you find out a normal part of the National Rail network is called a "Heritage Line", it puts certain phrases in mind.

An excuse just to run dilapidated trains to save cash, was the one that sprang to mind when I heard about the Lymington branch line, which is run by two slam door trains.

In contrast, when Catherine and myself used the line about two months ago, nothing could be further from the mind. It's actually like going back in history a bit - even if it is not that long ago that slam door trains were finally evicted from the rest of the train network (the Lymington trains had to be adapted to meet modern safety requirements).

Over on flickr, you can finally see some of the photos I took on the line as we enjoyed a far too short journey on a nice train named Farringford.

It actually reminded me of my childhood where I used to ride the slam door trains from the station near home, into Manchester. The trains then weren't quite in the state that they are in on the Lymington branch line - the seats were very springy for starters, and my sister and myself used to bounce up and down on them as the train trundled along.

You can't make pointless memories like that up. Nor the fact that I can distinctly remember the introduction of the slam door trains on the Glossop/Hadfield line in the early 1980s.

Prior to that, we'd had what felt like very modern trains which had automatic doors. As a seven year old, I felt some confusion at the time at what seemed like a big step backwards. Like all seven year olds, you try and put some logic to the changes, and I remember a friend saying his brother had heard all the trains had been vandalised, so they'd put the slam doors on.

Of course these days I have the internet and finally know that the real reason was that the Manchester to Glossop line (originally part of the Woodhead line to Sheffield) was originally electrified as 1500V DC. Which, as I'm sure you all know, is a completely non-standard railway power system. The Woodhead Line was the only one to run with that system, and in 1984 the power was converted to the normal 25kV AC which required some new rolling stock, drafted in from Glasgow.

And those amazingly modern trains with their flashy automatic doors?

Well they were built in 1954! And the slam doors that replaced them? Well they were at least six years younger...

Just goes to show two things. One is that just because something is newer, doesn't mean it's better.

The second is that I have far too much time on my hands if I'm spending it digging out information like this...

Phew! It's live!

2008-08-12T14:02:03Z

Just a few weeks ago, I didn't think I'd be writing this post. I thought I'd be I'd be writing something more apologetic.

Thankfully it didn't happen, and I can now breathe a huge sigh of relief as the Freesat Sport Multiscreen arrives on the old BBC red button just in time for the Olympics!

Press the old red button on any BBC channel, select Sport Multiscreen, wait a few seconds, and lo, you'll get up to six different sports to chose from at any one time, as well as getting text stories, tables and more.

To say I'm glad to get this one out of the door, is an understatement. It's been a pretty manic release, and everyone on the team has been busting a gut way way way beyond the call of duty.

Actually, coding it turned out to be relatively straightforward - so much so that the Sport Multiscreen was put up in a cloaked mode a few weeks ago.

Instead, the real fun was getting it working properly with the set top boxes - we kept finding little issues where set top boxes didn't like the nice code that our tech team had written. On occasion, in spectacular fashion. It's not hugely surprising. The code did a few things that we've never done on Freesat before, and naturally that caused some bugs in the set top boxes to be found.

Cue herculean efforts to get things resolved, and allow us to launch. And we wanted to make sure we launched.

Because the Olympics is big. In 2004 the BBC's red button service got used by 10m Sky users alone - almost 58% of them pressed the red button. That's a lot. This year we expect it to be even bigger.

To be in a situation where people couldn't press red on BBC channels on Freesat was not a scenario we wanted. That would be bad.

But thankfully we're there and we're away. And that can only mean one thing.

That we can put our feet up for a bit and relax. For a short while anyway...

Ironically the author of this piece doesn't really like sport, and as such, will actually be spending much of the next few weeks completely ignoring the service he's spent months working on

Safety on the tube

2008-08-02T11:38:41Z

Every now and then you come across some statements that are quite interesting. One that caught my eye today is from the British Transport Police:

While passenger perceptions of safety while travelling on the Underground and DLR are high, we strive to always increase this through highly visible Neighbourhood policing.

British Transport Police policing plan for London Underground/DLR, 2008/2009

Apparently, according to the same document, 80% of us feel safe at London Underground stations, and 82% of us on London Underground trains.

Actually the tube has some way to go because on the DLR a whopping 98% of us feel safe on stations and on trains. Which is actually really interesting when you take into account the fact that most DLR stations are mostly unmanned and is a contrast to Ken Livingstone's plans to increase staff presence to make things safer on the London Overground. Not saying stations shouldn't have a staff presence, but the BTP's figures just go to show that you don't necessarily need a staff presence to feel safe.

Either way 80% of people feeling pretty good on the tube feels pretty good to me. It's not as good as it could be, but hey, that's pretty good. The figures also seem slightly at odds with Boris Johnson's continued emphasis on safety on public transport which has again and again cropped up in his short time in the Mayorhood. And that raises an interesting question for next years figures - will a mayor who seems to be constantly harking on about making the tube safer, actually us think that there's more problems than there actually are, and therefore make people feel less safe?

We'll see next year I guess.

Food, glorious BBC food

2008-07-16T12:56:55Z

By chance I noticed the an interesting case of BBC related database overload. And it's in the form of recipe databases. Boy, is there a lot...

bbc.co.uk/food is perhaps the most obvious one. It's licence fee funded and is where you'll find recipes related to BBC TV programmes. But not all TV programmes because they don't always have the rights.

Then there's the BBC Good Food website - that's commercial, is owned by BBC Worldwide and is linked to BBC Good Food magazine, and it's various offshots. The magazine often includes recipes taken from celebrity chef books, where the books are based on BBC TV programmes. The website doesn't seem to from what I can tell. The website also includes recipes from Olive which is also owned by BBC Worldwide.

Not BBC branded, but still with a BBC connection is UKTV Food - owned by UKTV, which is owned by BBC Worldwide and Virgin Media Television. It contains recipes from TV programmes which may have appeared on BBC television, but not, as far as I can see, those shows where the BBC has the rights to put recipes on bbc.co.uk. So Rachel's Favourite Food on bbc.co.uk gives 16 recipes, whilst on UKTV Food you'll find 91.

We're not quite finished yet because there's also BBC Food - the BBC Worldwide global TV station which is commercial and not available in the UK. Yes. They have a recipe database too.

And just for good measure, there's the Open University's Ever Wondered About Food pages as well with some more, for good measure. Ever Wondered About Food is a BBC production for the OU.

Just think of the recipes that various bits of the BBC own or licence in various ways… Just think how amazing that would be if it was all joined together… UKTV Food has more than 10,000 recipes in its database alone - goodness knows what's in the others. True there would be some duplication, but wow, what a collection.

Of course it won't happen, for good reasons - rights implications, seperation of licence fee funded content from commercially funded content etc and all that jazz.

Mind you, it probably would also include about 300 different versions of macaroni cheese...

The Pit

2008-07-13T13:19:54Z

Anyone following my microblog updates yesterday may have noticed a certain anger with the trauma centre that is iTunes. I've never been a huge fan of iTunes, but after yesterday I now hate, loathe and despise it.

The detail I haven't got the motivation to go into but lets leave it with these messages for Apple - switching to manual manage mode should not result in everything being removed from an iPod. That's just dumb.

Oh and, for goodness sake, an iPod just an MP3 player. It doesn't need iTunes. If someone wants to have the "rich" or the "easy" iPod experience, then they can plug it into iTunes.

But I'd put money on 75% of your users not caring about the "rich" experience. Good example? Microsoft Word. I rest my case. There is no justifiable reason to try and lock down iPods to iTunes, and there is no justifiable reason that iTunes shouldn't be able to cope with tweaking an iPod that has been synced using another tool.

The sooner you get into that mindset, the sooner you'll start making iTunes a better product.

Anyway, that's enough of the product management principles, lets get back to yesterday evening for, after some time of thumbing my nice and study Ikea desk, and hurling abuse at inanimate objects that can't fight back, the first thing that sprung to mind was a certain similarity on this occasion to one Homer Simpson and his attempts to make a barbeque pit...

Remember the physical before we regret it

2008-07-05T11:21:25Z

I sometimes feel that there is an inherent contradiction in parts of my life.

Take technology. I like technology. Technology is cool. I like the convenience of my MP3 player. My photos have never been better since I got a digital camera so that I can see what I've taken, and improve instantly. My PVR hoovers up TV programmes and gives them to me in a nice menu.

But surrounding me is a plethora of "stuff". Almost every piece of music on my MP3 player is associated with a physical CD for example. Digital music has benefits, but what if my hard drive fails and I lose all copies of my music?

I have the fear that the technology that surrounds me, will fail and let me down.

That fear is most accute for my photographs. On Flickr there are nearly 3,000 of my photos from the last three years. Average it out and that's a 1,000 photos every year. 1,000 memories. 1,000 nice views. 1,000 good days.

I'm paranoid about my photographs - and indeed the metadata that surrounds them. When I last evaluated photo management software on Linux, I discounted them all - partially because they didn't integrate with Flickr in a way that supported how I use it, but more because I couldn't see any easy ways of abstracting any meta data I entered into those applications.

If, for example, I used F-Spot now, what would happen in 10 years time and suddenly F-Spot was unavailable? And no one had built a tool to convert all my data into something else. For that reason, my photo management consists of me putting pictures into named directories, and putting data in an OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet - mapping filenames to descriptions, titles and tags. This then gets copied into Flickr. If push comes to shove and in 10 years time OpenOffice.org doesn't exist, at least I'll stand a far better chance of being able to get to my data.

Of course everything is in Flickr too. But will Flickr be around for ever? True, I've always got the originals (backed up regularly on DVD too). But say JPG disappears? Will I wake up one day and find none of my files work? Hey, I've got files locked down in Lotus WordPro format that I can't easily open. Thankfully they're not important…

What if technology goes under. What if suddenly there aren't computers - what if they're wiped out by war? What if, all of a sudden, aliens invade and enslave us?

Extremely paranoid? Moi? Err... Actually yes. Frequently I think about what will happen in not just 10 years, but 50. What will happen when I'm 80? Maybe actually having stuff - physical stuff - will be a good thing. If I was to get to 80 and suddenly find I didn't have any remnants of a huge chunks of my life, well that's just not something I want to contemplate. Maybe we should remember the physical before we potentially regret it...

Music sounds better with you

2008-07-01T18:36:16Z

Well if my Rio Karma wasn't broken enough already, one suspects it's in a worse state this morning. I was casually putting it away outside the office after the morning commute, walking at the same time as I have done hundreds of times before, only for me to drop it, where it then bounced on the floor, straight into the water at the bottom of the fountain.

Cue one drenched MP3 player, now also with a slightly cracked screen to boot.

Yes, well. As it happens, the Karma's replacement had already been ordered (online, not from Curry's obviously) but my hopes of the Rio having some sort of post-daily-use afterlife seem remote now, bar some minor miracle.

But that aside, finding a replacement wasn't particularly easy in the first place - for the simple question of a complete lack of choice.

When it got down to it, I had three purchasing criteria - one of which was Ogg Vorbis support, and frankly that seemed to be mission impossible these days, so it came down to just two - price and capacity.

Disk space really is the biggy - the Rio Karma has 20Gb, and whilst it's not full yet, I've still got a few gigs of music files on my PC waiting to be sorted, and of course I keep buying more music so I'd be looking at 30Gb at least. But given most MP3 players do videos these days, I could easily fill that up with episodes of Red Dwarf or something, to help idle away the time on occassional long train journeys!

Unfortunately when it comes to high capacity MP3 players (well, above 16Gb), well there's not much out there. You're looking iPods and very little else. On the high street, PC World offer a 40Gb Archos for £199.99 - although this is a video focused device rather than music. Online at Dabs, you can have a 32Gb Creative Zen for £199.98 which compares less favourably with an 80Gb iPod Classic which comes in at around £151.28. John Lewis's website lists only Apple products above 30Gb. There's supposed to be a 40Gb iRiver model (with elusive Ogg Vorbis support) on sale, but I haven't seen it on sale anywhere.

It's a sharp contrast to the 1-8Gb level where there's a huge amount of choice, and a large battle for the money.

I've nothing really against the iPod, although I find scrolling through artist lists slower than my Karma. However I'm someone who has an irrestistable urge not to follow the crowd (hey, I use Linux!) and not wear those white earphones. Like everyone else is. But paying more, for less, just for that kind of principle is rather pointless.

Why is there so little competition in the high capacity market? I refuse to believe that everyone who has a large music collection are all Apple-heads. And I can't quite believe that someone couldn't undercut, or at least match the iPod price if they tried. I find it rather strange that few people are doing - and that if they are, no one appears to be selling them.

And if there's no choice, an iPod it has to be. An 80Gb Classic in black actually. Enough room for my music collection to grow, and enough space for more than a few TV shows to idle away train journeys to Manchester with. And maybe the odd episode of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue for good measure.

Of course I'll have to get it running under Linux - I can't stand iTunes. It's a slow, horrible, klunky application - I especially dislike the fact you have to add stuff to your music folder via iTunes itself, rather than just copying the files into the directory and have iTunes automatically pick it up. I recently synced the same files up onto my Karma and Catherine's iPod. The Karma was done in about four minutes - with the iPod it took about 20 minutes, and it was all iTune hassles.

iTunes obviously doesn't run under Linux - you can run it via Wine, but Wine doesn't allow applications access to USB devices, so you can't sync an iPod on it.

Now there are ways of getting recent iPods running in Linux, but when I tried it last with Catherine's iPod, it "wiped" the hard disk off. That said online instructions appear to have been improved drastically in the 8 months since I last tried it, then so I will be giving it another go.

Of course all this is a distraction from the one true question that has been outstanding. The name. Everything has to have a name. After all, my main PC is called humbug; the old laptop is muffin; the Rio Karma is gouda; the new laptop is edam; my gym MP3 player (a recent addition - more on that later) is called sprout. What do you call a black iPod then?

Fishy cables - new post at the BBCi Labs blog

2008-07-01T15:53:17Z

Over on BBCi Labs right now, you'll find my first contribution. The importance of fish in interactive TV development is on a topic I'd been meaning to write about here for some time, and is in response to someone asking me about two years ago - it's all about the physical audio/video infrastructure we use to develop our code on.

And if you're wondering about the fish reference... well you'll just have to read it and find out...

When you're out to con, there is another way...

2008-07-01T15:53:51Z

Not long ago, I reconfigured the way my email was handled - previously everything sent to a planetbods.org or a bods.me.uk email address just got lumped in together to my main email address. I've now seperated them out, and they're each handled separately by Google Apps.

Part of the reason was to allow me to start consolidating my email addresses - I've used so many over the years for different things that I just don't know what's what and what's where any more, so now I can quickly and easily see what's going where.

What has been most interesting to watch has actually been the spam situation. I do occasional trawls of Google Mail spam folders for any false positives (I went through a period of having quite a few) and one thing has been very noticeable for the last month or so.

Roughly 50% of all the spam for bods.me.uk consists of phising attempts for NatWest customers, repeated over and over and over again. Of course they're sent to different email addresses on the domain, but then so could any spam email and it's been interesting to notice that no other spammer or phisher is blanket-bombing the domain's email addresses as comprehensively as the phoney NatWest crew. Well, of those that get through to my spam folder anyway.

Why NatWest I wonder? (Or even, National Westminster as some of the phishing attempts quaintly report themselves as, despite the company not having used that name for what, ten years now?) Why not Barclay's, or Lloyds TSB or Halifax? Are NatWest's customers particularly gulliable? Or do the phishers just have no imagination?

Still, at least it makes a change from phishing attempts for US banks. I mean, if you're trying to con people, you're only going to make yourself look more of a prat and alert your potential conned public to the fact that it is all a con, by bombarding them with bank detail requests from organisations which they'll never have heard of. Still, logic and cons don't always go together...

The end of my karma

2008-06-28T14:15:34Z

After three and a bit glorious years of usage, it looks like my beloved Rio Karma MP3 player is on its way out.

Whilst still playing, the scroll-wheel on the side of it (a glorious old fashioned dial which allowed fantastic speed) on it seems to have now stopped working - I guess three years of near constant usage have taken their toll, and whilst there is an alternative method (the red "RioStick") of moving through menus, it's a lot slower and designed more for precision than speed.

Hoping that a fix would be simple, I whipped off the Karma's case and took a look, but to no avail - indeed I made the situation worse by managing to disable the Lock button! Having had a look on the t'internet, it may be that a simple application of plastic glue may solve it, but then, knowing my repairing skills, it may not.

So it's replacement time. Alas. Cos actually I always liked my Rio Karma. Scrolling through a list of artists was very zippy compared to, say, the iPod.

But perhaps the one thing I'll miss isn't even that important - it's a matter of principle and nothing else. For my Rio Karma supported my favoured music format - the open source and patent free Ogg Vorbis.

Ogg Vorbis has been my music format of choice due to its open nature for years, and the fact that I could buy a Rio Karma and have the same benefits was a huge boon.

Unfortunately Ogg support is rather sketchy in most other players - in the cheaper end you'll find many cheap ones do support it, but not in the upper end. Given Ogg Vorbis is free to implement, it does seem rather surprising - but then with most people probably using WMA, MP3 or AAC, then probably not. Secretly I always knew it would be an issue - which is why I've been ripping CDs in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis format for the last few years.

Now you could argue that's a complete waste of time, effort and hard drive space. And you'd be right. It is. Completely and utterly. I now have every album duplicated in two formats, simply so I can say to anyone who cares (which, and lets be brutally honest here, is actually next to no one!) that I'm using Ogg! It will be a rather redundant choice in the end - and with a heavy heart, I'll probably just delete the directory of Oggs...

There were other things I liked about the Rio Karma. You could sync it via Ethernet - very useful when I first got it, as my old PC didn't have USB2 support. Plus it had Linux support, in the form of a Java applet which allowed you to upload files (this was before most MP3 players started just appearing as removable storage devices) - although truth be said, I often ran into problems with recent versions of Java, and ended up doing it via the Windows client instead.

Still, all good things must come to an end. It's 20Gb hard drive was getting a bit on the full side so replacement was kind of inevitable. However sometimes you have to mourn first...

Dear Curry's

2008-06-27T17:52:27Z

Thank you Curry's. You have reminded me why I don't do much of my electronic based shopping in stores any more. It makes me annoyed. You have made what should be a pleasant experience, a plain awful one. You have made me annoyed.

Very annoyed.

You see you just don't get it do you? You think purely of the money. You pile the pressure on. You simply must sell that extended warranty.

Funnily enough I am my own man. I know what I want. I say I don't want the extended warranty. I then insult the extended warranty. I call it a complete and utter waste of time.

Yet still the persistence. So much so that I have to reveal that I have walked out of stores before now over extended warranty hassles. Yet still the pressure. I have to invoke the f-word, and threaten to cancel the transaction and walk out of the store right that moment, because I've done that before. And I have. And I will again.

There is a pause. There is a fleating moment when I suspect I might just have to walk out. And then I am reprieved. But annoyed.

You see Curry's, I could have bought what I wanted online. I would even have saved a couple of quid. But I decided I couldn't be bothered to wait for the post. I knew deep down it would be a mistake. I knew it would all end in tears. But hey, you were there.

And after all, it was a simple transaction. How could you screw it up?

I knew my mind. I knew what I wanted. You could have made it easy. You could have made it simple.

But you didn't. And you've annoyed me. You've reminded me why I don't buy things like that in stores.

Cos you see Curry's, when I buy online I tend not to get annoyed and angry. I certainly don't swear at human beings. I get my purchase and I am happy. I jump around and leap excitedly! Look at what I've got! Woo! Yay!

Instead I'm sitting here doing something different. Look at this idiots! Look at these morons. Look at these people who are so indifferent to their customers shopping experience that they annoy them. They frustrate them. That they remind themselves of why they don't do it.

Now that, my dear, sweet Curry's, is not how one gets repeat business...

Without Wimbledon

2008-06-25T11:22:22Z

So Wimbledon started on Monday, and not being a tennis (or indeed a sport) fan, all Wimbledon really means to me is that I miss out on most of my favourite TV shows. The ones that aren't being disrupted by Euro 2008 anyway…

From a work perspective, it feels a little weird because Freesat is missing something that's become a key part of the Wimbledon experience - the ability to choose which match you want to watch. Every year, Wimbledon Interactive draws in millions of users keen to choose their tennis court from up to six options. There's many people who think that that's all BBCi is.

So when you don't have it on Freesat, naturally people ask questions like "Why isn't it there!?!", sometimes followed by "Couldn't you have planned your work better?" or "Why is it taking so long? It's only switching between different video options for goodness sake!?!"

The answer is, naturally, if we could have, we would have. Unfortunately nothing is ever as simple as it seems - templates have to be built, content feeds have to be plumbed in, servers configured, configuration systems have to be connected, it all has to be integrated into the existing service and codebases, and of course everything has to be tested thoroughly too. Oh and don't mention the asimux changes (what asimux changes? - Ed I told you not to mention them…)

Although interactive sport will be available in time for the Olympics, there's no doubt going to be a few more "Why?" questions as time goes on - there's no denying that BBCi on Freesat is behind the other platforms - we're trying to catch up with other services which have grown over years. The backlog of missing features and services is, well, rather long to say the least, but we'll be adding more every couple of months.

Although that's not much consolation to someone who really wants to use it now...

BBCi Labs Live

2008-06-24T21:19:03Z

With one chunk of the department working like the clappers to ensure Freesat is ready for the Olympics, and another busy with the roll-out of the BBC's revamped interactive sport service, perhaps now wasn't the best time for it to be launched - but launched BBCi Labs has.

BBCi Labs is a new blog from the team I work in and will be a space for the team to write about what we're doing, show off some of the things we've done and various other stuff. Similar to what our colleagues have been doing over at Radio Labs (and they did provide the naming inspiration.) As you might expect, I intend to be popping up on there myself as and when I have something vaguely relevant to say.

It being early days, it's naturally a trifle sparse at the minute - to pointlessly use a gardening analogy, it's currently a seedling, but seedlings tend to grow, blossom, and be admired by the world (if this was a group blog, there's be a "Lets leave that there shall we? - Ed" comment around here).

So anyway, if you're interested in the exciting world of interactive TV and its technology, why not pop over?

In future I should do more of...

2008-06-13T13:43:02Z

At work it’s appraisal time. I don’t like appraisal time. Cos that means I have to write everything up that's been said so it can sit in the old virtual filing cabinet for 12 months until this time next year when it can be dusted off and I can sit with my line manager and see what I've achieved off my last set of goals, so that I can get a new one and write that out. At which point I'll end up writing another of these blog posts telling you all how I hate appraisal time.

Or something.

I think it's because the BBC appraisal form is all woolly and well meaning. What should I keep doing? What should I try to do less of? What should I try to do more of?

It feels like those awful "Record of Achievement" things kids do at school. Where the kid has to write five pages of why they're crap at Geography, and what they're going to do to get better handwriting. You know the bit. The bit that the parents always ignore because frankly they don't care about what the kids think - they just care about the three lines the teacher has written at the bottom of the page.

But maybe that's not the point. Maybe the whole point of school "Record of Achievements" is to prepare you in life, and build up your skills so that you can sit in an office and do the same thing for the next 30 odd years of your life.

And perhaps the reason why I hate appraisals so much is because I lack those skills, thanks to my secondary school deciding that actually the old Record of Achievement was actually a complete waste of time, and as such just did the old fashioned report instead. You know the ones - where they write huge essays about how crap you are ay Geography, how your handwriting is illegible, and how you're not achieving anything because you're constantly staring out of the window.

It probably all stems down from that. What I actually want is my line manager to sit down and write "Andrew could achieve so much more if he didn't spend so much time web surfing and blogging in company time. Especially when he should be writing his appraisal. Could try harder. B+" instead.

Mind you, that has a flip side. Now that I actually have some line managees myself, I'd have to write their appraisals for them… Hmm. Write four for them, or one for myself… Perhaps there is some merit in this system after all…

Everywhere you go, always take the BBCi Freesat Weather Service with you

2008-05-29T16:34:50Z

I seem to be making a bit of a habit of missing the BBCi Freesat launches. After being away for the initial launch due to being on holiday, I missed the launch of the new Freesat Weather service on Tuesday due to being ill with a chest infection.

There's clearly a greatness to my lateness. Honest. Indeed, I even joined the BBCi Freesat team later than most of the team - about a month or so in to the project. I'd been consulting the Freesat team on a very limited basis - giving them a few editorial pointers whilst the recruitment process to find a producer for the project churned on - however it was firmly on a very limited basis.

As such, I missed out on most of the early pre-planning sessions where the team looked at the work that needed to be done, and tried to decide what they could do in the available time.

When it comes to BBCi, the corner stones of our service are News, Sport and Weather. They're used regularly, and in significant numbers. So I was naturally a bit disappointed when I found out that the team didn't think they'd be able to fit Weather in for the Spring launch.

Even worse, when it comes to usage figures, the corner stones are Weather first, followed by Sport and then News. We were to launch without our most popular content. Not good news.

To call it frustrating is an understatement. My early site maps featured the optimistic hope that the team would find things much easier than they'd expected, and could include at least some integration with the Weather publishing system for the spring launch. But it was not to be. There was no way round it - Weather would be missing.

(Of course, actually there was a way round it - we could have built Weather first. But we wouldn't have been able to finish off News and Sport in time for launch either, leaving BBCi on Freesat as being Weather and little else. In contrast, if we did News and Sport first, we'd get Business, Entertainment and Community thrown in for free - so whilst it would still be Weather-less, we'd have a much more rounded service)

Actually when it came down to it, the team's estimates were unnervingly accurate. The initial release was up on our live satellites exactly when it was supposed to be - BBCi on Freesat appeared in April and was running silently in the background until the formal launch in May. Meanwhile, work on filling in the Weather gap got started.

Improved map graphics were sourced, icons were positioned, templates were built. Feeds were found, publishing systems were adapted, and appropiate shades of blue picked.

And lo, it was finally ready. And today it all launched. Weather is go - late for the party, but ready to join in and boogie.

As a nice bonus, you can also punch in page number 155 and get all the comments for Question Time too - by popular demand, this was added a month ago to the other versions of BBCi. As we were busy preparing for launch at the time, it we didn't have chance to put it in for the initial launch but it's there now and ready to enjoy.

With Weather out of the door, there's just the simple matter of the Olympics. For BBCi, the Olympics are huge - back in 2004, nearly 9m people used the BBCi Olympics service on Sky alone - and this year it's expected to be even bigger. And on Freesat too.

The best of Eurovision

2008-05-27T15:50:02Z

It's very easy to be negative about Eurovision, so lets accentuate the positive! Yep, here's goes. This is my favourite Eurovision song ever and it's from this year. It's highly credible and just a great song. Oh and it's French. If you didn't watch Eurovision this year, then you might think that such a thing is not possible, but it is I tell you!

So here it is - from the land that brought Air and Daft Punk, it's Sebastian Tellier, with Divine.

Of course, great as Sebastian is, he's not quite as good as what should have won Eurosong...

The Year the Eurovision Song Contest Stopped Being Fun

2008-05-25T11:47:04Z

There was a telling moment during Eurovision last night. Right at the end of the programme, Terry Wogan was talking in rather depressed terms about the state of the contest, and that his producer was leaving the BBC.

There was a pause. A noticeable pause. A pause which sounded very much like he was deciding whether to announce publicly that he would stand down.

In the end he didn't make a firm commitment, ending instead with the less committal

He and I have to decide whether we want to do this again. Indeed, western European participants have to decide whether they want to take part from here on in because their prospects are poor.

And he's right. He's absolutely right. For the first time ever, I seriously began to doubt the value of us bothering to enter the Eurovision Song Contest.

The previous reasons were there

In previous years when we've done poorly and others have cried foul (the never-ending accusation that it's all related to the Iraq War was growing increasingly tiresome), I personally have been able to point to something valid to justify why we did poorly.

And let's not beat around the bush here. Scooch in 2007 was a truly awful song. Daz Sampson with dancers dressed as schoolgirls in 2006? Embarrassing. Javine in 2005? Poorly performed due to throat issues.

This year

The excuse this year? Err... I can't come up with one. There is none. Andy Abraham's sang it well, and it was a good song. I confess I never thought we'd win, but I was very hopeful of a reasonable result - to pick up a few points here and there.

In the end we got just two votes and came joint 23rd. We got the same points as Germany who, and let's be honest here, had one singer singing off key. We got the same points as that scary-looking woman from Poland with the unfeasibly white teeth.

We can't even use the excuse that songs early in the running order do worse than those later on, as the frankly dreadful dirge that was the Romanian entry were first on and they got three times the votes we did. Spain - with an unmemorable and frankly dull song, sung by someone with a ridiculous wig - did substantially better than us.

Then there's the matter of that this is a song contest not a spectacle contest. Ours was one of the few entries even to have a band on stage. For the rest it was dancing, costume changes and, for some unknown reason, ice skating. What does this have to do with music?

Location, Location, Location

Of course, we can't deny that location plays a part in the voting. Whilst Russia did pick up votes from across the Eurovision community, almost all their big scores were from the east. Let's not witter on about "oh they only vote for their neighbours" - it's a cultural thing. I've been to Russia, and I've heard the music on their local radio stations, and frankly it's a world away from what you hear in Western Europe. And that clearly is reflected in the votes they received.

Of course there have always been musical differences in the Eurovision area. We can't deny it. And therein the problem. Eurovision has grown - the musical differences between countries too varied. We're talking about an event that now stretches from Iceland in the Atlantic, to the furthest tip of Asia and the Pacific. Whilst we're all part of one global community, we all have differences to and musical taste is one of them.

Time for action

Frankly something now has to be done, because for my mind, if you're going to enter a song contest, you've got to have a chance of winning. And no one in the west now has a chance of winning. I've denied it in the past, but the evidence is now damming. Look at the results for the last few years - it's obvious. This year, just one country from the west came in the top 12.

The trouble is that nothing is done. There was a tinkering of the voting this year, with the aim of making it fairer, but the results were still the same. Sadly I fear that nothing will truly happen until someone makes a stand.

And that has to be us. We have no chance in hell of winning Eurovision. Even Morrisey couldn't have saved us this year (sorry Mozza). It has become a waste of time and money us entering - as Terry Wogan rightly alluded to.

Of course countries withdraw from Eurovision all the time - this year Austria didn't bother - and it doesn't change anything. The UK not bothering would however send some serious signals.

Send the signal

We are one of the big four. France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom all get guaranteed entry into Eurovision on the basis of the fact that we are all the biggest contributors to the European Broadcasting Union. Without the financial contributions to the EBU (which, incidentally, do get us far more than Eurovision! I certainly wouldn't advocate leaving the EBU) that the big four make, the Song Contest would find it difficult financially.

Which means the withdrawal of one of the big four will send shockwaves through the establishment. If one of your biggest funders no longer wants to play, you have to take notice. We don't have to stop showing Eurovision in this country, but shouldn't enter it.

Somehow I doubt this protest action will happen - at least not for now. But ironically the fate of Eurovision in this country may sit very firmly on the shoulders of one man. Sir Terry Wogan.

It was clear last night that he is getting fed up with it all now, and even if he sticks with it for a bit longer, it seems clear that he will stand down sooner rather than later.

Whilst some in this country complain about Wogan's Eurovision style, there can be little doubt that he is one of the reasons millions of people actually tune into watch the Song Contest in this country, and the BBC would find it very difficult to replace him.

If this was the song contest of old, and it wasn't all so predictable, replacing him would be an easier task. However in this environment it won't be. Replacing him with someone who takes it seriously would inevitably lead to a ratings flop, and finding someone who can moan about it to the Wogan caliber, would be very hard.

Without him, the Song Contest in this country could easily begin to wither and die - giving us enough of a reason to pull out.

It could take years for the point to be made, but it would finally be made.

The solution?

Even if the point is made, what is the solution? Some have suggested returning to the jury system with experts to make the choice rather than the public. It may help, but at the loss of telephone vote revenue. Chances of it happening seem slim.

Another suggestion is not to tell the world whose entry is whose although it's difficult to see how that could work in practice - songs would have to be chosen behind closed doors.

Reducing the style of the event too may help - songs happen with musicians but you'd be hard pressed to see any at Eurovision these days. Instead it's all about "impact" - angel wings and dance routines. We'll never remove that, but at least insisting the people playing the music more at the forefront of the performance, it could reduce it.

But personally I see little option other than splitting it apart - draw the line down the middle of Europe. East vs West with those in a central region able to pick which contest they wish to enter into. Bring it back to the contest it once was for Western Europe, and have a new one for the East. After all, that's all it's become now. The west seem now to be little more than bystanders, and eventually more countries will withdraw.

Sadly I can't see anything happening soon. Which is a shame because a contest which was about bringing Europe together, is slowly being torn apart.

Tweet Tweet - connecting with Twitter

2008-05-24T14:18:23Z

Martin Belam has recently been experimenting with Twitter, and has blogged about his month long experience of using it.

I was particularly interested in his decision not to integrate Facebook and Twitter so that Twitter tweets appear as Facebook status updates. As he mentions in his post, the two are different micro-audiences so he didn't.

It is a decision that's the opposite of the way I decided to attack things when I joined Twitter in February this year.

For me, it was actually increasing frustration and annoyance with Facebook that made me start looking elsewhere.

The one thing that I did like about Facebook was the status updates, and I quickly subscribed to a feed of them in Bloglines and soon was only going into Facebook to do my own.

But then there was the great Facebook application arrival and very quickly I was getting rather fed up with ploughing through several invites to join pointless and useless applications, profile pages that were about 20 meg in size, and just the sheer time to do anything.

Knowing of Twitter of old (I think a colleague at work mentioned it to me about two years ago) I decided to take a look, however for me integration with Facebook was a key criteria as a substantial number of my close friends use it, and use the status updates (you'd be amazed at how regularly conversations start in the pub based on them). The Twitter Facebook application solves the problem nicely.

The readership

What happened next was interesting, unexpected (by me) and ultimately inevitable. The audience changed.

Whilst in my mind, my updates via Twitter were still going to various friends and colleagues (or indeed colleagues who are friends), going "public" suddenly saw the arrival of several new readers. Out of my current Twitter followers, half are people I know and have spoken to (mostly in the flesh, but a couple only electronically). Then there's another half who I have no concept of who they are.

Some of them are obviously "serial" followers - when they follow 45,000 people (in one case) then they're clearly not that interested in what I write there. But most are just normal people who follow a reasonable (i.e. less than 100) number of people on Twitter, and I am one of them.

This is clearly a direct contrast to my readership on Facebook which is completely controlled by me. But whilst I could lock down those who read what I Tweet on Twitter, there wasn't much point because of what I had thought about doing.

Blog integration

I'm a fan of integration. Frankly I'm not that keen on having goodness knows how many different "pages" on the internet. I have a website; I have a domain name; frankly I might as well use it.

So it made sense to me to try and give my micro-blog updates to the widest audience as possible. Which meant integrating with this blog as well.

Which is why, if you have a recent browser with JavaScript enabled, you'll see my latest update in the sidebar of this blog.

I thought through several ways of presenting my Twitter updates on this site, but decided in the end that as micro-blogging is a very "right here, right now" activity, just putting the latest update on this site made sense. Facebook style basically. Those that wanted more could click through for more, or use the feed.

Whether anyone has even noticed it, is of course another matter. But it's there and it's on my own piece of the web.

Writing style

One of the problems with integrating Twitter and Facebook was writing style. Facebook's third person, Twitter tends to be first person. Obviously this blog could be either.

For some time, the Twitter Facebook app prefixed all updates with "is twittering: " meaning you could happily launch into the first person on Facebook. However that recently changed and left me with a quandary because first person on Facebook doesn't look good or read well.

After some contemplation, I compromised. The presentation style of Twitter means that if you put third person, it doesn't look too bad. Noticeably a handful of other people are doing similar too. It's not perfect, and frankly I'd rather go back to first person - it's much more liberating. But until Facebook allows me to go that way, third person it is.

Compromise

And that compromise does rather sum up the experience. By sharing the same text between blog, Twitter and Facebook you compromise - both on style, audience and technology. Twitter for example, has a nice reply feature. However it looks rather odd on Facebook or when put on your own website, so a key part of the Twitter proposition is removed from me and I'm not exactly making the most of the technology available to me.

However that's the sacrifice that I've taken. I'm not personally going to be able to move my Facebook contacts onto Twitter, and why should I duplicate text between different services when they can all be used together?

The result ain't perfect, but it will do...

Installing Linux on an elderly laptop

2008-05-17T11:37:48Z

It was a couple of months ago that I finally grew weary enough of Catherine's muttering about the slowness of our seven year old HP laptop, that I dug around online and ordered a new one. And verily did it arrive, complete with Vista. And lo, it seemed slower than the old one did... And I did mutter something about putting a nice copy of Ubuntu on it, but never did.

At the same time there have been a couple of changes in the household. Catherine has been increasingly using the new laptop wirelessly downstairs rather than sat at the twin desks upstairs. The fact that we currently only have one desk chair has also not helped. And whilst my desktop Dell, with its Wacom tablet and nice monitor, is a good PC, sometimes you just want to lazily slouch on the sofa and check your emails there. A spare wireless laptop would be handy...

The HP Omnibook XE3 - known to friends as Muffin the Wonder Computer

The old laptop, a wonderfully rugged Omnibook XE3 (known here-on-in by it's name - Muffin) obviously doesn't have wireless built in, but it was recently furbished with a dodgy Wireless USB dongle which worked well enough in Windows.

But Windows was slow, and whilst I felt that re-installing Windows XP might help, Muffin is only a 900Mhz Celeron with 384meg of RAM and a 20Gb hard drive. And I don't like Windows (although XP is far better than Vista) - I'm a Linux user and have been for years. And it was time for Muffin to get a conversion.

I knew Muffin would be a reasonable machine for Linux to run on - the reason I'd originally got that model was a friend telling me that HP tended to use good, solid, commodity parts that would be well supported by the 2001 versions of Linux. Indeed for a bit, Muffin dual booted with a copy of Mandrake Linux.

The dreaded USB wireless dongle

I was more cautious about the Wireless. I tried plugging it into my desktop PC (called Humbug since you ask) and using ndiswrapper, managed to get it working using the Windows drivers. One snag was that it seemed to conflict with my Wacom tablet, but the mouse was fine.

Next to find an appropriate Linux distro. My demands on Muffin would not be particularly arduous - a simple beast for checking email and surfing would be the main thing. Mail could be handled via the web using Google Mail, hence a copy of Firefox or Opera would suffice. Word processing would be a maybe for a few tasks. Google Docs was a possible, but I'd prefer something else for offline times. The PC would be mostly networked, so huge amounts of spare hard drive space weren't a priority - most file storage would be on Humbug instead.

I normally run Ubuntu and love it too bits but keeping in mind the age of the PC, a lightweight Linux distro would be a good bet.

I dug a few out and prepared to go.

Vector Linux

The first try was with Vector Linux which had recently appeared on a Linux Format cover disk and was apparently supposed to be a very good lightweight distribution. It's based on Slackware. I downloaded a recent Live CD and gave it a whirl.

The Live CD seemed okay, although with some performance issues that I attributed to being run that way. The Wireless dongle didn't seem to work properly in Live CD mode, so I hit the install option and went on my way.

Install seemed to be fine, until it came to writing the boot loaded. This completely refused to install - in the end I worked out that the installation script was trying to install the boot loader onto the CD-ROM! There seemed no way to force it to actually use the hard drive instead and my attempts to do so via the command line continually failed.

Not deterred, I downloaded an installation copy of Vector and tried that way. This time, installation worked a lot smoother and we were in.

Wireless also worked fine - a nice Wireless Wizard guided me through installing the Wireless dongle's Windows drivers using ndiswrapper and within minutes I was connected to the net. We were off!

The working wireless however was about all that worked well. Vector continued to be dog slow for me - far worse than Windows was on the same machine. Using the web was also rather tortuous, with both Opera and Firefox suffering glitches were chunks of text would not be rendered unless you tried to highlight them.

With a heavy heart, it was back to the drawing board.

Ubuntu and SuSe

Riffling through my DVD collection, I decided to shove in a copy of the Ubuntu 7.04 Live CD I happened to have just to see what happened. My thoughts about it potentially being a bit slow proved to be founded, but knowing that the Wireless should work, I installed from the Live CD anyway. Unfortunately installation failed on every attempt with the install crashing during a hardware probe.

Similarly I found a recent copy of OpenSuSe off a Linux Format DVD. SuSe was the first Linux distro I ever tried back in the late 1990s (and the one where I managed to trash my Windows setup losing all my data). I've tried it recently but have always found it a bit awkward in configuration, but decided to give it a try none the less.

Here I met some off problems where I managed (probably my fault) to end up in the frankly horrible FVWM window manager, and my attempts to change it refused to work. Trying to install some new packages meant I had to wrestle with YaST's package management which would throw up confusing and cryptic errors about conflicts and missing packages without helping me through the process of finding and installing them - someone at SuSe needs desperately to look at how Debian handles these things and learn some serious lessons, because the package management alone was enough to make me give up there and then.

CD writing problems

The switch at this stage from lightweight to conventional distros was a purely practical one - they were what I had lying around, as, for reasons best known only to it, my desktop PC had suddenly stopped recognising blank CD-Rs when I inserted them. Still isn't doing - blank DVD+Rs fine, bit not CD-Rs.

At the same time, when I burnt ISOs from the new laptop, they were proving to be unbootable from the old one (but would be fine on the new). In the end, I found out it was something wrong with Roxio Creator which was installed on the new PC - changing to a different DVD/CD burning programme, the same ISOs suddenly became bootable again.

And with that, I tried two off the best known lightweight distros - Damm Small Linux and Puppy Linux.

Damm Small Linux

Damm Small Linux is just that. It's small. Very small. But it packs a serious punch and upon inserting the Live CD, it booted fast. Very fast. In fact the whole thing just zoomed along - a joy to use and was the fastest disto I tried out. The initial set up, complete with dark colour scheme, even put up a laptop monitor on screen with useful stats like battery life.

Although designed as a Live CD, DSL can be installed so I did just that. As it's less than 50 meg, installation was very quick and very soon I was in there trying to set up the wireless.

Wireless was where things began to fall down. For starters, the GUI config tool would only use WEP encryption for wireless whilst my network uses WPA (which is more secure). My hunt for details of how to configure via the command line didn't help. You also had to know the name of the network, rather than a nice tool searching out what was available. Not surprising given the small size of the distro, but I would have preferred to have had a wireless network scanner.

However that wasn't the end of the problems because every time I tried to use ndiswrapper to use my wireless dongle's Windows drivers, the keyboard completely locked up. Even trying to configure it by the command line caused the same problem. The only cure was a reboot.

Puppy Linux

With DSL out of the frame, I had high hopes for Puppy Linux which is another small distro intended to be run from a Live CD, but which also has an install option.

Again the Live CD seemed a trifle slow, but with nothing to lose, I installed anyway.

On the Wireless front, things seemed more promising. The wireless dongle drivers were installed correctly, and had a little tool to show me available networks in the area. Connecting to a neighbours unsecured network (whoever you are, you really shouldn't do that...) worked fine.

Connecting to my own (secured) network however was not as forthcoming. Every time I entered my network's password, Puppy told me it wasn't valid - it wasn't long enough and that it needed to be at least eight characters long. Unfortunately for Puppy, my password IS eight characters long exactly.

I did contemplate changing the password to a longer one but decided not due to other problems with Puppy - namely that it was slow and would randomly pause every 30 seconds or so. Just a few seconds pause, but incredibly frustrating and frankly unusable.

Why this should be the case, I've no idea. I know other people who run Puppy with no problems, and the problem also existed before I installed the Wireless dongle so I knew it wasn't an ndiswrapper related problem.

Sadly I was getting no where fast.

XUbuntu

Everynow and then, you do something and you think... well why didn't I do this before?

I'm an Ubuntu fan - I've used it on my main PC for about two and a half years and it just keeps getting better and better. Things have an amazing tendency to work nicely - configuration is usually easy. In short, I like it.

Ubuntu however would be too heavy for my elderly laptop - just not enough RAM, so I'd downloaded a copy of XUbuntu 8.04 - a spin-off which is less resource hungry.

I'd originally downloaded it early on, but it had got caught up in the CD burning issues, and also I'd read that XUbunutu's memory usage was still a tad high so I'd put it on the backburner.

However these were desperate times. Nothing was working. So it was time to burn a new, bootable CD, and give it a go.

I loaded it up from the live CD. Boot time was a tad slow but it loaded and performed okay. As I'd recently read (or thought I'd read!) that Ubuntu live CDs didn't allow access to some USB devices, I hadn't bothered plugging in the USB dongle, but on the off chance, I plugged it in to see if I could get it working.

Within seconds, XUbunutu had recognised the dongle, installed the drivers and was searching for available networks. Within a minute I was connected and on the internet.

I was stunned. Nothing I'd seen on other distros had even suggested that there was a native driver for the device (a Talk Talk branded monster, which is actually a re-badged Phillips device) - every time I'd been pointed to use ndiswrapper and load up the Windows drivers. But here I was, surfing the web, checking my email.

Why on earth hadn't I done this before?! I couldn't help but think about all the fuss and hassle I could have avoided. It didn't take me long to decide to wipe the hard drive again and install it.

Conclusion

And so it came to pass - Muffin the wonder computer has been running XUbuntu for about two weeks and is going strong. Memory usage is still a tad high - after just booting up, it's using about 130meg - about a third of what's available in the PC. There's some tweaking to be done on that front - however performance is fine. Firefox 3 runs slightly slow with about ten tabs open, so I might change over to something lighter, but even so, my seven year old laptop is giving the new one a good run for its money. So much so, that it's convinced me that the new laptop needs a copy of Linux running on it as soon as possible.

In fact the only problem I've had with the old laptop since installing Linux is that, by sheer coincidence, the battery died. But spending £30 on a new battery is a lot less wasteful than spending a couple of hundred on a whole new laptop.

Muffin is unlikely to cope with some of the demands I put on computers - sorting out my photos and video tends to use lots of RAM, but for checking email and writing the odd document, she runs well. And here's to her running Linux for a few more years yet too!

If you're interested, Muffin is joined in our house by my main Dell PC, Humbug, and the new HP laptop which is, for reasons I can't recall, is called Edam. You might notice some sort of theme in that - especially when I tell you that my MP3 player is called Gouda. Actually I've always wanted to own two servers and have them sat on top of each other. The top one would be called cheese. The bottom would be toast...

Forgetting about, but not being forgotten about

2008-05-16T22:03:53Z

Like the world and his giddy aunt, I'm on Facebook. And for various reasons, I'm rather hidden on it - if you don't know me, you won't find my picture; you can't see my friends list. You can find me, but you can't find much out about me.

Err. Yes. When you think about it, it is a rather odd policy. After all, on this very website, the whole world can read all about me and what I do, then pop over to flickr to see that wedding I went to recently, before rushing headlong first to last.fm to find out what frankly wonderful stuff I'm listening to (Simon and Garfunkel right now).

But frankly, I hide myself away on Facebook for one reason - to keep it to people I know and care about.

Not for me the random acquaintance I met once in a pub in Barnsley. Nor for me, the long lost school friends from primary school who probably never liked me at the time anyway. Maybe there's a really good friendship in the making out there. But chances are that there isn't.

As a policy it kind of works and I don't think I've had a single friend request from any long lost person from primary or secondary school. Until this evening when one popped in.

And lo, the name just drew a complete blank. Even the picture didn't help. I had absolutely no idea who she was. Only by going through her friends list and spotting a few familiar names, did I work it out. And she's not the only one. I seem to have completely forgotten most of the names of the people I spent seven years being educated with. I can remember all sorts of random junk, but tell you the names of half of the intake of '82 - blimey, it seems to be gone.

I guess it's partly down to my time at primary school. It wasn't hugely memorable. I didn't have that many friends during it and my memories consist of little more than throwing a chair at a dinnerlady (oh the happy memories!) and "getting married" to Jacqueline in the juniors.

Unlike most of the school, I didn't go from Godley County Primary School to Longendale High, and at that point - bar a few people I knew from the church youth group - I said goodbye to everyone and put it out of my mind.

Which means now, twenty years on, I've forgotten most of them. And frankly, I'd rather expected that they'd forgotten me. But clearly someone didn't.

For whatever reason, someone remembered. And I'm just hoping it's not for the whole chair incident...

Incidentally, in the unlikely event that said friend-to-be is reading this, I really do apologise profusely. I blame getting old...

BBCi on Freesat Launched!

2008-05-09T07:38:19Z

Yep, it all happened smoothly and BBCi on Freesat is go.Although I'll let you into a little secret - we'd been broadcasting it for several weeks anyway, so the only way that it wouldn't have launched on the 6 May is if our Controller had run into our office area shouting "For the love of Gawd, pull the service NOW!" Which he wouldn't have, as he doesn't speak like that.

So if you're the one person who has been eagerly awaiting a detailed blog post about it all, well you can now have it. Just not here.

Instead you'll find it in the form of "corporate blogging" on the BBC Internet Blog, complete with gratuitous mention for my boss John Denton as he insisted (and indeed, he wrote that bit himself thanks to my initial attempts to comply with his wishes for a mention being far too un-subtle and therefore not escaping the savage cuts made by the Internet Blog's editor, Nick Reynolds!) and an extremely dodgy photograph of me which makes me look like I have a dicky eye.

And lets be honest - those are the only two things you lot really care about when all is said and done!

Anyway, pop over there, read it and indeed comment too!

It launched! Or did It? I dunno. I wasn't actually around...

2008-04-30T22:21:23Z

Well it's 6 May 2008 and that can only mean one thing. Yep, it's the day after May Day.

And of course it's the day that Freesat officially launches, and that means the day that BBCi on Freesat launches too. That is, baring any last minute technical issues or problems.

I say that because actually I have absolutely no idea whether it's gone live or not, because cunningly, on launch day, I'm not actually in the office. Cunningly several months ago, I booked some annual leave to go walking up a big hill, and it just ended up that the day we picked ended up being launch day.

Funnily enough, back in my developer days I used to regularly do projects with a producer in the Communities team. He was a great producer to work for, and was one of a few people at the Beeb who (knowingly or not) got me interested in product management in the first place, and gave me some experience in the field.

A great person. With just one, very big flaw. Every time launch day came around, you could guarantee that, without fail, he would be on a two week holiday.

Not that he ever planned it that way - or at least I presume he didn't. He always booked his leave well after the project of the moment was supposed to go live. It's just that for whatever reason (some internal to the team, others reasons not) his projects always went up later than planned. Which generally meant that whilst he was off sunning himself somewhere nice, the rest of us were running around like maniacs trying to actually fix all those last minute teething problems that have a tendency to only crop up when you let the public lose on it.

That particular producer has left now, and given my own amazing sense of timing, I can't help but worry that I'm picking up where he left off...