Andrew Oakley

BBC iPlayer for Nintendo Wii: Answers to questions

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:55:55 GMT

In my first impressions review of the BBC iPlayer for the Nintendo Wii games console, I had a few unanswered questions. Here are the answers and follow-up observations.

• The BBC iPlayer is tied to UK geo-mapped IP addresses. So my sister in Holland would not be able to use the Wii iPlayer even if she had a Wii console set to the UK region, regardless of whether she had a British TV licence.

• Playback quality is significantly better than VHS for programmes which do not have fast-panning shots nor detailed backgrounds. If the programme isn't action-based and doesn't have moving tree foliage in the background, you can expect near-SD quality or better.

• English language programming does not have subtitles available. Programmes from BBC Alba, the Scots Gaelic TV channel, are broadcast with in-vision English subtitles rendered as part of the video. I highly recommend trying out Air An Rathad, their low-budget but high-enthusiasm motoring show which includes some beautifully filmed road trips throughout Europe. I don't think that BBC Welsh language output, which is broacast on S4C, is available on iPlayer.

• There are no live streams. You can't watch live TV.

• Most disappointing, the Search option does not support the officially Nintendo licenced Logitech Wireless Keyboard, nor any other wireless keyboard. These keyboards work perfectly in other applications such as the web browser.

• Resume from last position is not supported. If you exit a programme and return later, it does not remember where you left off.

I remain otherwise very impressed with the BBC iPlayer for the Nintendo Wii. The video quality is excellent and the convenience much easier than hooking up my laptop to your TV.

BBC iPlayer for Nintendo Wii: First impressions

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:35:00 GMT

The BBC released their iPlayer application ("channel" in Nintendospeak) for the Nintendo Wii this morning. For those not familiar with iPlayer, it provides the ability to play back recently-broadcast BBC TV and radio programmes on demand. I downloaded it this morning and my first impressions are:

• Downloadable free to UK users from Wii Shop Channels (0 points). It requires the Wii to be set to the UK region; if you bought your Wii in the UK this will already be the case. It isn't clear whether it also ties to UK geo-mapped IP addresses, so it would be interesting to see whether ex-pats in other PAL regions, such as my sister in Holland, might also be able to use this.

• Quick to download, takes up very little storage space - less than 50 blocks; even if you've already downloaded plenty of WiiWare games, you're bound to have space for it (the Wii initially has over 2000 blocks free; most saved data take up 1-2 blocks, entire downloaded games take up 100-500 blocks).

• Playback quality over WiFi on my 2 megabit ADSL line in a rural area was roughly equivalent to good VHS. There was no skipping, glitches nor audio dropouts for the 10-15 minutes I watched at 8am this morning. As with all digital video compression, programmes with lots of panning (camera moving about) or changing background detail (eg. trees blown about in the wind) do suffer from a little fuzziness or blockiness. No worse than the browser-based Flash player, and possibly slightly better; I need more time to judge. I did not notice a HD option.

• All BBC playback programmes are available as per the full iPlayer, including BBC 1-4, CBBC, CBeebies, BBC News, BBC Parliament and the surprisingly engrossing BBC Alba. Note to self, check to see if English subtitles work on BBC Alba's Gaelic programmes.

• There didn't seem to be any way to stream live channels. I may have missed this option. If you can't stream live TV, that would make sense - this should be legally restricted to British TV licence-fee payers, and the Wii iPlayer did not ask for my TV licence number.

• As well as browsing by channel, genre and date, there is a search option. Note to self, try my Logitech Wii keyboard (or any USB keyboard) to see if this works for entering search terms.

• Scrolling up and down long lists requires the user to click and drag the scroll bar, which is fiddly with the remote. You cannot use the D-pad up/down buttons to scroll up and down, as you can in the Wii Shop, Operations Manual or Internet browser. I quickly found this mildly annoying. This is my only criticism.

• There was no way to save content. Streamed content only. My ADSL contract gives me a whopping download limit, so I don't care. If you're limited to only a few gigabytes per month, you may need to watch your usage.

• I didn't check whether "resume from last position" was supported.

Update: I have answered these questions

Guilty as sin

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:38:34 GMT

The Gary McKinnon hacker case annoys me greatly. Yes, the UK:US extradition treaties are biased in favour of the USA. Yes, our Home Secretary could, if he so chose, exercise his discretion to lobby more strongly on McKinnon's part.

But none of these take away from the fact that the chap is guilty as sin.

The fact that McKinnon hacked into the US military computer systems is not contested. There are several main parts to the defence case:

1. McKinnon is a nutjob.

No he bloody well is not. Like most technical experts, McKinnon has some behaviour that fits into the autistic spectrum. But his behaviour quite typical of your average computer geek. He has an interest in UFOs and conspiracy theories. So do I. So do most of the programmers I've met, and I've met a lot. Heck, I jointly founded a paranormal research society. That doesn't make me mental, it makes me interested in investigating the scientific and historical basis, or lack thereof, for UFO and paranormal claims.

McKinnon is perfectly able to function in society, he knew that what he was doing was illegal and could get him lots of prison time.

If every computer geek with an interest in UFOs was declared a head-case, the IT departments throughout the land would be half-empty, and the half that would be left would be those obsessed by Tolkien. Geeks like sci-fi. Geeks like to find out stuff. Being a clever bloke is not an illness!

2. McKinnon's mental health has deteriorated as he awaits trial.

Well, duh. Everyone's mental health deteriorates when they await trial. It's hardly a stress-free event, is it? He is making it worse for himself by his own delaying tactics. That's no reason to delay a trial or deny extradition. Accused people get stressed, bears shit in the woods and the Pope is Catholic. Sort out your defence and face the music.

3. McKinnon's search for UFO material was not a threat to national security.

Bullshit. How can breaching the security of the command and control computers for our largest NATO ally not be a massive, huge threat to our national security? He's a threat to both our British national security and the US national security. They're our fscking nuclear-warhead toting allies, FFS. He's not being done for hacking some tiny inconsequential neutral or enemy force, like Russia or Cuba ~~or France~~. The British armed forces are so tightly integrated with the Americans that our servicemen literally shit in the same lavatories. We're the number one and number two NATO buddies.

4. He won't get a fair hearing in the US.

Codswallop. The US has a justice system heavily based on our own British system. It is as full and as fair as ours. Our extradition treaty states that the US will not seek the death penalty for any extradited UK citizens. The British government typically pick up the defence legal bill for foreigners overseas, too. There is nothing here to discuss.

McKinnon is not ill, he's just wrong. He knowingly did something blatantly illegal and blatantly against both our and our closest allies' national interests. What's the hold up here? Ship him to our allies for trial.

e-Wine trading

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:15:23 GMT

Inspired by Lee Chaos' FB wine dilemma, I think I have solved the "leftover decent wine" problem.

The problem is: You're going to a party at a friend's house. You spend ages picking out a really decent Bordeaux from your Dusty Wine collection in the shed, or make a special trip to Not A Supermarket to get something that costs more than seven quid. As you leave, you notice your decent wine remains undrunk and you know perfectly well that it will remain so.

Some people throw parties where bringing wine seems like a good idea, but in practice they'll have little opportunity to actually drink it. It's like the *idea* of having lots of decent wine is appreciated, but the actual wine just clutters up storage space. The wine becomes aspirational; showing off "this is the kind of wine I *would* drink if I wasn't expecting to be woken up at 4am because someone was too scared to use the potty on their own".

I think these wine gifts could be replaced by some kind of online wish list crossed with e-gold, where you could trade in real gifts of decent wine for more practical stuff like In The Night Garden DVDs without having the inconvenience of finding space for the actual bottle of wine in your own house. The bottles would still exist, but in some escrow agency's cellar; only their ownership would change hands. You could print off an ownership certificate for the purposes of wine-ponce discussion at parties. There's a Web 2.0 marketing opportunity there, I think.

Sort of like sponsoring an animal at the zoo, only with wine instead of a tiny species of mammal that none of your friends even knew existed.

If the recipient did eventually foresee an opportunity to actually drink the wine, the ownership certificate could, of course, be redeemed against the actual bottle of wine, which would then and only then be shipped at cost. A bit like the theoretical ability to redeem bank notes for gold or silver (a right long since rescinded).

Twins born yesterday

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 07:29:40 GMT

Jacob (left) 6lb7oz (2.9kg) born 13:29 Sat 5 Sept 2009 eldest by 1 minute; Beatrice (right) 6lb14oz (3.1kg) born 13:30. Non-identical twins. It all went a bit panic-stations towards the end, but mother and twins are now fine.

When a doctor decides to call a caesarian section because they're concerned that the erratic heartbeat might indicate a cord is tied around a baby's neck, they really don't hang around; total time from call to birth <15 mins. I got the impression that if they had been really, really worried it could have happened even faster. As it turned out, the erratic heartbeats were due to them fighting over who was going to get in position first. Jacob had been head down for a week or more, but when the birth was induced, Beatrice tried to push him out of the way. Result was, neither were in position which ground everything to a standstill.

Beatrice briefly had some laboured breathing due to fluid in lungs and was sent to special care for about two hours (exactly when maternal grandparents turned up, which must have been stressful for them). She returned safe and well. Both twins spent the night in a cot at mummy's bedside. Mel and the twins will probably stay in hospital for observation until Tuesday morning.

Adric - He was my companion

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:37:51 GMT

Two classic Doctor Who articles recently caught my eye, an oldie Adric: An Appreciation and this year's Re-Re-examining Adric (the second page of the latter is perhaps most pertinent to the point I'm coming to).

I have to be quite honest, I would have never got in to Doctor Who if it hadn't been for Adric. I was nine when he appeared on screen, and ten before I was a regular viewer. I'd seen bits of Doctor Who throughout the 70s, but despite it being billed as a family show, it never caught my imagination. Perhaps the 60s variants - William Hartnell and his educational remit, Patrick Troughton and his clownish persona - would have appealed to a ten-year-old more, but Jon Pertwee's Avengers-lite militaristic earthbound action hero and Tom Baker's bonkers-eyed space opera alien never piqued my interest. There was nothing for me to identify with, I couldn't imagine myself playing any of the characters; they were all adults. Doctor Who had become something for teenagers and sci-fi loving grown-ups, not for children.

I came to Adric fairly late, with "Castrovalva" in 1982. I think I had been retuning the black-and-white portable telly, that my parents had bought me to act as a monitor for my Sinclair ZX81 home computer, when I chanced upon what suppose I initially thought was All Creatures Great And Small. Instead, it was a science fiction programme about a boy in his early teens who had two pretty female friends (as with most post-regeneration stories, the Doctor spent most of the episodes off-screen being ill).

I identified with Adric almost instantly. He was small framed, was keen on computers, and enjoyed intelligence puzzles. He had a haircut that had obviously been imposed upon him by his parents. All the cool people thought he was irritating, but that was because all the cool people were stupid.

Now here's the key bit. Almost every TV sci-fi series has its Adric; the character who is there solely to draw in the 7-15 year-old nerd. Because there is no more loyal audience than the 7-15 year old nerd, and TV producers need a loyal audience. They are bedrock of sci-fi viewing figures.

R2-D2, Muffit the Dagitt, Twiki, Jar Jar Binks, Wesley Crusher and even Rose Tyler are all examples. They exist solely to attract the child/young-teen geek demographic.

And they are all, uniformly, reviled by non-child fans of the show.

Yes, yes, even R2-D2. Artoo was either overlooked or panned by critics in the 70's. Search through reviews of "New Hope" written at the time, and the best you can hope for is "insecure little computer on wheels" or "salty squatty robot". Artoo was as disliked at the time of "New Hope"'s release as Jar Jar Binks was for "Phantom Menace"; considered by the grown-ups as bringing a level of childishness to their serious space opera. And not to mention, an almost infringlingly carbon copy of the proper, serious robots in the proper, serious "Silent Running".

So, let's not merely give belated thanks to Adric's criminally under-appreciated Matthew Waterhouse. Let's give thanks to all the actors, writers and their characters, that were shoe-horned into shows to attract a new, younger audience to science fiction. And let us be on our guard, given the new Who producer Steven Moffat's darker direction style, since a family sci-fi show that forgets its children is a show that forgets its audience.

Adric died, of course, but by then, regardless of how fondly I remembered him or how much I wanted him back, he'd done his job. I was hooked.

Netbook reinstall

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:05:48 GMT

cd /home/wife && sudo chown -R wife.wife .* DOES NOT DO WHAT YOU THINK IT WOULD DO

Arse, arse, arse. So that was a complete re-install required for my netbook, then. On the plus side, it gave apt-cacher-ng a smugly satisfactory test.

Absolutely do not try this at home. chown -R whoever.whoever .* applies to .. , ../.. and so forth; it recurses DOWN the directory tree! Rather than changing ownership for hidden files and folders (eg. ~/.config/ ), it basically chowns every file on the machine to be owned by one user.

I watched helplessly as it changed the ownership for everything in /bin , /etc and so forth, erroring momentarily when it hit /dev and /proc ... arse-sticks. You really don't get a chance to hit ^C with an SSD disk drive, do you?

Unsurprisingly, Linux wouldn't boot after that.

And I then made a passing comment to the missus about her account being "unpriveledged"...

Barbie - The Magic Of Pegasus - DVD Review

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 08:44:09 GMT

This is a CGI animated made-for-DVD movie featuring a Vagnarian theme. The heroine is a tall Teutonic blonde princess, who is fond of high leather boots. The animation is of high quality, although sometimes her legs do seem to walk rather stiffly.

The heroine's bloodline rule over a large kingdom. Their enemies include a camp man with an eye deformity, a bulky man with dark coloured skin, and a jeweller/pawnbroker with an odd-shaped nose. The heroine's sister has been corrupted by these enemies of the state, and together with her shorter, dark-haired, jackbooted boyfriend (whose right arm is also animated rather stiffly), they outwit their enemies, who are always depicted as having lower intelligence, in order to return her sister to her genetic purity.

So far I've only watched it about half way through. There's no sign of the kingdom being invaded by any Americans yet. Maybe some Russians will arrive first.

My three-year-old daughter loved it. Also recommended: Bugs Bunny "What's Opera, Doc?", "Herr Meets Hare"; Mel Brooks "The Producers"; BBC TV "Allo, Allo"

Soundtrack is in English and German. Available from Amazon or Gloucestershire Libraries.

Update: Amazon have now published my review.

Thirteen shall be the number to which thou shalt count

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:57:46 GMT

When Doctor Who fan conspiracies collide... Okay, what if the reappearance of the St Johns Ambulance logo on the TARDIS (significance) combined with the series canon that a Time Lord can only regenerate 12 times (13 lives) means that the Beeb have realised that they're running out of regenerations and have decided to reboot Doctor Who? What if Matt Smith is the young William Hartnell? Would this account for why Doctor Who magazine quotes Steven Moffat as referring to the next series as "Series One"?

That'd be cool, for a few episodes anyway. But I do hope they keep the canon. The canon is what keeps it as a family show, as people from different generations can talk about ''their Doctor'' and how his stories affected the present storyline. The Doctor Who format - anywhere in space and time - is sufficiently flexible for this not to be necessary, and both Romana and the Master have already shown us that 13 lives is not necessarily the limit.

How Torchwood Day Five Should Have Panned Out

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:35:17 GMT

I've mentioned my dispair at how pants Torchwood Day Five was compared to the excellence of days one through four. Subsequent to Morph and Adrian's posts, here's how I thought it should have panned out.

Our heroes were facing an alien who claimed to have invisible ships, superior technology, rather nasty biological weaponry and a large number of fellow aliens supporting it. It had actually only demonstrated:

• A widespread but non-harmful parlour trick of getting all the children in the world to chant and point in unison, no more threat than a stage hypnotist.

• A small-scale lethal biological weapon whose effects quickly dispersed.

• An extremely primitive transmat (and here, as a Classic Who purist, I refuse to use the word "teleport") which looked highly vulnerable to interference.

• Dependence on a specific athmospheric environment which contained its movement to one room.

• Highly addictive dependent behaviour, from a drug supply controlled by humans (i.e. their children), with side-effects including spasms and nausea.

How I predicted Day 5 to conclude was:

• Somebody (possibly Captain Jack, after a dewy-eyed moment with his grandson) makes a heart-warming speech to the UN, US, UNIT, COBRA, whoever, and they decide that sacrificing 10% of the children would destroy society anyway, and commit to calling the alien's bluff at some point on Day 5. There is also a realisation that a drug addict will never kill his supplier so it must be a bluff.

• A faux-unofficial pirate TV / pirate radio / internet viral meme advises everyone to stay indoors on Day 5, ostensibly to safeguard the children (but actually this is a government scheme to contain potential virus spread). The BBC web department get to mock up some cool fake websites and the BBC World Service gets to make some cool fake pirate broadcast trails which are shown eminating from a various radios around the world including a tribe of nomads that they shot whilst on location in Dubai for the last Doctor Who special.

• The army turn up, ostensibly to collect the children (but actually to ensure everyone stays indoors; they don biohazzard suits at the appointed time).

• The bluff is called. Small outbreaks of virus deaths are briefly reported and stop within a couple of hours.

• A law enforcement representative of the alien's race turns up, arrests the alien and apologises for the inconvenience caused by the tiny minority of their race who have succumbed to drug addiction.

That is how an intelligent show like Classic Who or Quatermass would have done it.

Torchsoft

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:19:08 GMT

Well, the Torchwood finale was an utter let-down, wasn't it? There was me, four nights into thinking that "this RTD, I have misjudged him, this is excellent stuff, reminiscent of Quatermass and in a good way" and then he goes and throws in a Deus Ex Machina ending like he does EVERY FUCKING TIME so I don't even need to put this post under a spoiler-cut because that's what RTD does EVERY FUCKING TIME oh what's the point of even making the effort to critique it myself it iz exaktly wot Adrian sez.

A couple of days ago, I was genuinely thinking that Doctor Who would miss RTD. Now I'm reminded that he couldn't have fucked off fast enough.

Unenforceable Parking Restrictions in Cheltenham

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:47:02 GMT

Following someone else's Freedom of Information request and the subsequent Gloucestershire Echo newspaper article "35 streets where cars can park illegally" (their lack of capitalisation, not mine), I found the actual list of streets missing from the CBC FOI disclosure log. So I emailed CBC, and within a few days they replied with the list.

Since all FOI responses are public domain, I have now published the list of Unenforceable Parking Restrictions in Cheltenham June 2009 on my site. Enjoy your freedom responsibly, Cheltonians!

Last Chance To See: Sporadic E TV

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:44:56 GMT

I'd like everyone in Britain to take a few minutes this summer, for your last chance to see a very dear friend of mine, Sporadic E Propogation.

During a hot, damp, muggy day, take a moment to retune your old analogue TV and see if you can find some foreign TV stations!

Propagation is the term us radio geeks use to describe a radio signal that, due to the Earth's athmosphere, manages to travel a very long distance that it otherwise normally wouldn't. The classic example is skywave propogation, the way that AM-MW band on your radio allows you to hear foreign radio stations overnight. These often interfere with other AM-MW stations such as Talk Sport, Absolute Radio (Virgin 1215) or local independent "Classic Gold" stations. By day, the signal travels in a straight line, and what with the Earth being round, it disappears into space at the horizon, so you can't hear distant stations. By night, as the atmosphere cools, the ionosphere is at a lower altitude and reflects distant radio signals back to the surface. Radio Luxembourg, an overnight English station which ran from 1933-1992, is probably the best known example. As with all propogation, these signals tend to fade in and out, seeming to become quiet, loud then quiet again.

Sporadic E propogation is different. The heat and humidity allows radio signals to be reflected, or bent, by a higher ionospheric layer than would normally be the case, and affects much higher frequencies. This is not fully understood, but the end result is that FM-VHF radio and UHF TV channels can be received five hundred miles or further away from their normal reception area.

Although FM-VHF radio is going to be with us for several years to come (although not as long as you might think if Labour stay in power), analogue TV is not. Starting later this year, old analogue TV signals will be switched off in many areas. Digital TV cannot be manually retuned, you won't be able to simply turn a knob or press some +/- keys to retune your TV, it will tune itself automatically from the digital signal. Once the ability to manually tune analogue TV goes, you'll also lose the ability to witness Sporadic E Propogation and its ghostly images of fuzzy foreign TV channels from overseas. With most European countries starting to shut down their analogue TV output, 2009 may be your last good chance to receive long-distance terrestrial TV; digital signals aren't suited to being received in short bursts.

So, what are you looking for? Well, first learn how to manually retune your analogue TV. Typically you go into a setup menu and select something like "tuning", "frequency" or "UHF channel". The UHF channel numbers will be between 22 and 68. Don't use "auto tune", you need to manually check each channel yourself for the weak signal. You are most likely to see Sporadic E examples on the lower UHF channels during hot, muggy, humid days, particularly in the afternoons and early evenings. You're looking for a ghostly image, probably black and while (many but not all European countries use an incompatible colour system) with, most importantly, foreign language audio. It will fade in and out, and will probably last no longer than 20 seconds or a couple of minutes before disappearing completely.

If you're in the West of England, Welsh doesn't count, it's too close for Sporadic E, neither does French if you're on the eastern English Channel coastline. Having a TV aerial that faces the European continent (ie. south or east) will generally give you a better chance of success, although due to the bouncy nature of Sporadic E, you never know.

Here's some screenshot examples to get you in the mood.

Dragonmeet gaming convention, this Sun 28 June, Swindon

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:35:56 GMT

Just a reminder: http://www.dragonmeet.co.uk/
RPG & tabletop gaming convention, Swindon, this Sunday 28 June. 2 quid entry. CJ, Luke, Lloyd and I are already going. There may be spare car seats left if anyone else would like a lift.

See a list of games being run by a Sussex gaming club, or this forum thread. Also, Mongoose Publishing are doing a lecture on how to be a games writer.

There should also be a trade fair with dice, cards etc. It won't be big, but it should be fun.

Pick-up is 9:30am from near Enterprise car rental, Swindon Road, Cheltenham (near FCH). Return lift should arrive back in Cheltenham by 7pm if not well before. Email me: andrew@aoakley.com

More on minor parties

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 08:50:17 GMT

One thing I did see in another election leaflet for a minor party - Fair Pay Fair Trade - with which I surprisingly agreed, was the idea that all imports into the UK/EU should come from companies who have to abide by the same standards as our own companies. For example, their employees should be paid the same minimum wage as per the average minimum wage in Europe.

http://fairpayfairtrade.com/Home_Page.php

I don't hold with "immigrants are stealing our jobs" but I do have a lot of sympathy with "my job was off-shored to someone who isn't allowed to join a union, is paid a hundredth of my minimum wage and works in disgusting conditions". The problem isn't immigrants stealing our jobs, it's that British companies are exporting low-skill jobs. Not everyone is bright enough to go to university, and these people should have the opportunity of a fair job for a fair wage. Quite a few high-tech skilled jobs get offshored too, solely so that companies can avoid paying UK wages.

If the non-EU company fails to meet EU standards, then tax/duty should be levvied upon the imports to bring them up to an equivalent price as if they'd been produced under EU standards. We could use this extra tax revenue to reduce taxes for our own workers.

Another example, abattoirs. In the UK, farmers have to ship their cattle hundreds of miles to government-approved slaughterhouses. The approval requirements are so strict that almost all small local slaughterhouses have closed down. Rather than improving animal welfare, this has meant adding hundreds of miles of stress to the end of an animal's life. If you don't believe this is a serious problem, just think what happens when cattle try to stampede inside an articulated lorry. The animals often arrive looking like they've been in a fight, which, of course, they have.

Local slaughterhouses can't implement the approval requirements for a competitive price. Foreign meat, killed in a slaughterhouse which doesn't have to meet these requirements and doesn't have to pay its employees a minimum wage, easily undercuts (excuse the pun) EU-slaughtered meat by several hundred country miles.

This would, of course, mean that either the price of luxuries (such as meat[1]) would have to rise, or we'd have to reduce our standards to a more realistic level. I don't see a problem with either of those. If we really cared about animals, we wouldn't eat them, duh. And if our minimum wage means that we can't produce goods for a reasonable cost, then... just reduce the minimum wage. The minimum wage is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a circular argument. "You need to earn so much because things cost so much... things cost so much because people need to be paid so much..." We only avoid this circular catastrophe by off-shoring our employment to what amounts to little more than bonded slavery.

[1] Meat clearly is a luxury. Vegetarians do not die from, and do not suffer from significant health problems from, being vegetarian. British citizens, including me, eat far too much meat. If you have a sedentary life such as desk job, you don't need to eat meat at all.

Did the LibDems really do WORSE than Labour?

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:29:49 GMT

For the past month, the political media have been chanting the same refrain; that Labour would be beaten into fourth place by UKIP in the European elections.

Fourth place.

What actually happened is that Labour were beaten into third place by UKIP. The elephant in the room, which no journalist apparently wants to talk about [1], is that the Liberal Democrats actually fared worse. The LibDems came fourth. The LibDems did worse than Labour.

So what's happened here? Something which even I, as a (literally) card-carrying Conservative party member, can scarcely believe. It would seem that disaffected Labour voters in the North of England and in Wales have switched directly to the Conservatives or UKIP, instead of going to the LibDems. I find this really, really odd. Most pundits would have you believe that the political rainbow of the UK goes, from left to right, Green/PlaidC/ScotN, Labour, LibDem, Conservative, UKIP. To jump straight from Labour to Conservative goes directly against this shared conciousness.

Labour to Green, fine. Labour to LibDem, fine.

Labour to Conservative? Very odd.

Labour to UKIP? Unbelievable.

What can have gone on? I find this result fantastic - as in, it appears to be the work of fantasy. But let's just have a look at the actual numbers, rather than the percentages with which journalists these days seem so preoccupied. Were the raw numbers of voters simply massively down? In 2009, 15.1 million people voted. In 2004, 16.8 million people voted. So that's about one and a half million people who simply didn't turn up to vote.

Can this alone have swung it? Perhaps. Certainly it seems that most ex-Labour voters simply didn't turn up. And they didn't turn up in such large numbers that, those who did, who did switch from Labour to other parties, had a massively magnified effect. As I've noted previously, the BNP managed to get two Euro MPs elected despite getting fewer votes than 2004.

But I still just can't believe that accounts for all of it. Labour, directly to Conservative? Or even less believable, directly to UKIP? Perhaps my perceptions - and those of London-based journalists - are simply wrong. It would still seem that a significant number of ex-Labour voters did exactly that.

My desperate clutching-at-straws, final analysis of this, boils down to two quite startling conclusions.

This switch was all about timing. We now have a full blown recession on, which wasn't even a twinkle in Gordon's loan book in 2004; that's accepted, but doesn't account for a direct switch to opposite ends of the political spectrum.

There is another timing element at play here; the Blair Effect. In 2004, Tony Blair led the Labour Party. He played the persona of charismatic, confident moderate - despite, as it later turned out, being a religious fundamentalist.

In 2009, David Cameron leads the Conservative party. I'm not frightened to admit, even as a Tory member, that Cameron is an identikit Blair replacement, who plays the persona of a charismatic, confident moderate - despite, if you look at his pledge to leave the EPP, being a strident Euroskeptic.

It would seem that the British electorate have found themselves a "type". We like charismatic, confident moderates.

But do we also now like euroskeptics? Cameron certainly is one, but does anyone outside the Conservative party's perpetual internal wranglings actually know this? Well, the evidence from the Euro elections is that, yes they do, and they're quite happy with it.

Which brings me to the second conclusion. UKIP got into second place by the simple, straightforward method of having popular policies. The British public have become massively more euroskeptic in the past five years. How or why, I can't fathom, especially since the IMF has confirmed that all other Western European economies - ie. all the Euro currency economies - were better placed for the recession than us. But that doesn't change the fact that British voters have suddenly become hugely euroskeptic in numbers we previously couldn't predict.

A mass switch to euroskepticism is extremely bad news for the most pro-European mainstream party in the UK. It spells disaster for... the Liberal Democrats.

And suddenly it all adds up.

Meanwhile, in the local elections on the same day, the Conservatives took Devon and Somerset from the LibDem stronghold of the South West. Again, I can't fathom that one. Even in my proudest blue-rosette wearing moments, I can only guess that it must have been local issues. Did the LibDems overspend, perhaps?

[1] Indeed, the BBC seem to have employed Winston Smith to "update" many of their web pages, replacing their inaccurate predictions of Labour's fourth place with the actual results. Try googling for labour fourth place site:news.bbc.co.uk and notice, in a few significant pages, the difference between Google's cached pages and the BBC's replacement pages. Get in quick before the cached copies expire.

(B)allot (N)ot (P)rotest

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:33:01 GMT

Nick Robinson's blog points out what I've been saying until I was blue in the face in the lead-up to the Euro election:

The BNP won two Euro MP seats despite getting fewer votes than the last Euro election because

people defected from Labour to either not voting at all, or voting for minor parties

In particular, it appears that in Yorkshire, around ten thousand people switched from Labour to the Greens (2009, 2004).

If the protest voters had stuck with Labour, or switched to another major party such as the Conservatives, UKIP or the Lib Dems, the BNP wouldn't have got in.

Club DJ wanted

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:32:19 GMT

Genuine request: "Club DJ required for Red Sea Resort. 6 Month contract - Monthly Salary + full accom package. Sun Sun Sun Sun Sun Sun Sun."

An old school friend of mine manages a resort near Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, on the Red Sea. He is after a "club DJ". Audience is a mix of wealthy Russians, wealthy Arabs and wealthy Israelis. Email him direct: harryholliday@ukonline.co.uk (note the double L in Holliday)

It's effectively a gated community, if you want to live an entirely Western life you can provided you stay on campus.

Toddler Disco

Tue, 12 May 2009 22:10:29 GMT

Tonight I shall be mostly compiling the music for Annabel's third birthday party disco. A mostly soul-destroying task (to think I actually paid Amazon 70p for Steps "5,6,7,8"; on the plus side, I didn't already own a copy), interspersed with a few highlights such as Altered Images "Happy Birthday" and Animal Magnate "Welcome To The Monkey House".

"Teddy Bear's Picnic". Shall we go for:

1. Original Henry Hall Orchestra version (very 1920s with Noel Coward sound-alike Val Rossing)
2. The Goon Show's Ray Ellington Quartet version (very zoot suit, very fast syncopated beat)
3. Bad Manners / Buster Bloodvessel version (dancy, but a bit odd)

Mike Savage misses the point. Dog bites man.

Wed, 06 May 2009 08:40:09 GMT

US shock jock Michael Savage says he'll sue Her Majesty's Government for defamation after being publicly listed as an undesirable, banned for entering the UK.

Savage is an outspoken right-wing political commentator of the type we simply don't have in the UK. Our broadcasting laws demand balanced viewpoints from each individual radio station; in the US, they solve this problem by simply letting as many people on as many radio stations say pretty much whatever they like, and hope it balances out across the board. Regardless of whether you agree with him, or agree with the system that allows him to broadcast his monologues and smack-down phone conversations with detractors, I readily admit that he makes for fascinating listening. I happened upon his show whilst driving around California, was hooked immediately and the dial was locked for the whole week. He is a giant of broadcasting. The nearest thing we have in the UK are James Whale and Charlie Wolf, but they don't really come close.

Savage is also well-known for getting very vocal without exposing the full depth of the facts. This is where his legal threats are doomed to failure.

Firstly, the Home Office can say "national security" and pretty much be done with it. They don't need to justify their actions, since Savage is a foreign national not on British soil, ergo he has no rights in the UK. There's a handy catch-22 for governments who wish to avoid problems, be they American shock-jocks or potential immigrants, and that's to just keep suspected troublemakers off their territory. The moment they set foot on land, they get rights. Until then... Somebody Else's Problem. This is the same in the US, Australia, the UK and pretty much everywhere.

Secondly, and most importantly, Savage crucially misunderstands why he has been banned. Savage makes a great fuss about the fact he never advocates violence, but the British government isn't worried about Savage or his fans starting violence. What the British government is worried about is existing British citizens becoming violent should Savage make one of his trademark forthright speeches in the UK. The British government is worried about how a group of British Citizens who happen to be Muslim might react to him, or how a group of British Citizens who happen to be homosexual might react to him. There's a clear public order threat here - not from Savage himself, but from the whirlwind of reaction that Savage deliberately aims to leave in his wake.

The British government is simply opting to avoid a public order situation. Whether Savage is the cause or the victim isn't the British government's problem. By banning him from entering the country, the government avoids the public order problem either way. It'd probably be more polite if they'd have said "We're banning you from entering because we can't guarantee your safety nor the safety of people around you", but the effect would still be the same.

Cameron and dumber

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 00:03:12 GMT

It's almost like the Conservatives are just laughing in Labour's face. "Look, we're so hugely far ahead in the polls, that we can announce monumentally dumb policies like this and still have a twenty-point lead over you."

One, schools do not need to be wrestled away from local authorities and the national curriculum. Notably, the national curriculum is what stops the tiny, tiny number of loony local authorities from the excesses of the 80's. You, dear Conservative Party, will remember this because you fucking introduced the national curriculum in 1988 in order for it to perform exactly this role, which it has been doing successfully ever since. Don't piss in your own pool, you morons.

Two, schools need local authority control because they are part of the local infrastructure which needs to be planned and co-ordinated so that it fits in with the rest of the local infrastructure. There's a billion reasons why this should be fucking obvious. Transport, for starters. Children, especially primary-age children, cannot be expected to walk to anything other than their local school (firstly because they have short legs - small stature is one of the defining elements of children - and secondly because they'd get into fights with the children of the nearer school that they have to pass on the way). Busses, as I've said until I'm blue in the face, work on the principle of collecting a bunch of people along a line A-B who all want to go other points further down the same line. If you encourage neighbours to send their children to entirely different schools, they'll all have to be driven there separately in cars. Never mind the environment, think of the congestion.

Three, the public-private finance initiative is one of the main reasons why Labour has put this country into so much fucking debt. When are politicians going to figure out that companies can write contracts much better than you, and will always write them such that you lose. It's called profit. Spending millions of taxpayer money on infrastructure which the taxpayer doesn't own and the contract ultimately awards to a private company within as little as twenty years is just such an obviously fucking stupid idea that it amazes me any politician could fall for it.

Gah. I hate it when my own party makes me angry. I'll calm down in a day or two and write something slightly less sweary to my MP.

This week(end) I have been mostly...

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 23:17:14 GMT

Today (well, Sunday) I have:

Tidied the garden

Mowed the lawn, all of it, and removed the grass cuttings

Removed the second fence between the veg patch/chicken run and the orchard

Strimmed the orchard

Completed two missions in GTA:IV

Bought weedkiller, carrot seeds, strawberry, potato and lettuce seedlings from the garden centre (no Sarah Mum Mum today) and took Mel & Annabel round the steam railway station next door (Annabel has developed a thing for Strawberry Cornettos)

Mowed the orchard (I was surprised the mower coped; big up Briggs & Stratton)

Dug the veg patch

Planted the seeds and seedlings

Weedkilled the back yard

Strimmed the driveway

Raked over the driveway gravel to reduce the huge oil stain from Mel's old car

Weedkilled the driveway

Fixed the kitchen utensil drawer

Watched the first half of a Jackie Chan film I'd seen half a dozen times already, but I love Jackie Chan films, even the poo ones

Watched Lost (WTF? So it's Heroes now? If he could do this all along, why didn't he show any signs of it when confronted by the gazillions of bodycount over the last few series?)

Had a bath and shave

Updated LJ

Red Dwarf review

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 10:47:43 GMT

It seems there is some kind of media blackout on the new Red Dwarf episodes that aired over the weekend on the free-to-view Dave channel. No review on DenOfGeek nor SFX websites yet - despite the fact that SFX magazine had clearly paid for product placement in the middle episode. Very odd, especially since it was far, far better than the by-the-numbers Doctor Who special "Planet of the Dead" which shuffled on to the Beeb to phone in a stumbling, mediocre performance on Saturday.

"Back to Earth" is a three-parter billed as the last ever episodes. Although filmed and lit in a much darker, more broody, high-contrast style, "Back to Earth" retains the spirit of the original shows, with some good vocal and visual gags, and the occasional, deliberately goofy special effect. The ship had never looked better, and the monster had never looked more comedic.

The script is jammed full of witty observations about science fiction and sci-fi fandom in general, especially the latter episodes which pay heavy homage to Bladerunner, which was allegedly the writers' original inspiration for Red Dwarf. If you're a fan of Bladerunner, you should watch this for the closely-observed Bladerunner spoof alone.

"Back to Earth" picks up nearly a decade after the previous aired series, and we learn that there have been several (fictional) unaired adventures. The ship's computer is offline after Lister left a bath running for ten years and the ceiling above Holly's computer room gave way. This also means there's only one tank of water left, which is inhabited by a giant dimension-hopping squid. To retain water - and therefore Lister and Cat's lives - they have to battle the squid. After some squid-powered dimension travel, the crew learn that they're fictional characters and, via the set of the current British soap Corronation Street (in which Lister actor Craig Charles currently performs), try to reach their maker to convince him to write more episodes.

Now, if you know your cult TV, you're probably thinking that this sounds a lot like the plot of "The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse", and indeed so did I. However the two are handled very differently, with the Dwarf's angle being particularly competent. The plot device has been used in comedy dating back to 1950s Goon Show "Six Charlies In Search Of An Author", and the Dwarf puts in a satisfyingly fresh reworking, helped along by some genuinely funny and original observational comedy about sci-fi fandom and an exceptionally well-observed Bladerunner spoof (and I really do mean exceptional, this cannot be understated).

The trilogy could have easily been spun out to catch up with the other actors (I'd have loved to see them invade the set of CBeebies toddler show "The Story Makers" with Cat actor Danny John Jules, or "Scrapheap Challege" with Kryten, or "Brittas Empire" with Rimmer) but the comparative shortness of three episodes is kept tightly focussed and probably all the better for it.

The only downside is a Russian holograph character who seems to have been unnecessarily inserted into the script to replace Holly as some kind of narrator. She has little to do, and little to say that the crew didn't already have motivation to do themselves; they're running out of water, they don't need a bossy holograph to emphasise the urgency of the situation. The Russian's poor accent doesn't help, nor does her set decoration status as mere for-the-dads eye-candy. The character-in-control-of-the-typewriter scene was the only other clichéd low point in an otherwise good handling of the classic characters-realise-they're-fictional plotline.

Other than that, it's brilliant. The final plot resolution draws heavily on Red Dwarf history and will be particularly satisfying for fans, even if it does leave room for more episodes despite being billed as the finale.

It's as cartoony and zany as the original, the original cast seem to be genuinely enjoying their roles, the quips are sharp as ever, the homage bits are particularly excellent, the FX are good where they need to be and authentically wobbly where they should be, and... it shat over the Doctor Who Easter Special from a great height.

Not breakin' the law, breakin' the law

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 10:31:33 GMT

A colleague at work is quite a committed Christian, and gave up booze for Lent. I wondered what I'd be able to give up for forty days and nights. I don't drink or smoke. I did try to give up take-aways, but the missus wanted one, so that fell down within the first couple of days.

Whilst remonstrating with yet another cyclist who was attempting to run me and my daughter over whilst walking through the pedestrian tunnel to Pitville playground, the criminal in question said "Everybody breaks the law". Which led me to an interesting thought... what if people didn't? What if I gave up breaking the law for 40 days?

Could I actually manage to not break a single law for 40 days?

Well, two-and-a-bit weeks in (I started a week late), I'm doing reasonably well. It's remarkably easy to go about your life not breaking the law at all. I've actually been amazed at how easy it is.

One thing that has made not breaking the law much easier, is free software. In particular, the OpenOffice suite of Microsoft Office compatible wordprocessor, spreadsheet, presentation tool and such meant I could abandon my pirate copy of Microsoft Office 2000. I certainly couldn't justify spending two hundred odd quid buying an MS Office licence. As it turned out, I did actually own an original licence for it... but not the one I had actually installed.

The other main change has been audio. I have a lot of dubiously-sourced MP3 files, including a large library of Doctor Who audio plays. I like to listen to these in bed. Instead, I have switched to only those plays which I have recorded myself off the radio for my own personal use (legal). That's a much smaller library, and I have pretty much worked my way through it, and may instead revert to my library of Goon Show recordings, which being more than 50 years old are now public domain. If Big Finish drop their prices a bit more, or do weekly episodic subscriptions instead of monthly, I might pay for the new non-radio ones.

Other than those two things, obeying the letter of the law has been surprisingly simple. Driving at or below the speed limit didn't seem to make much difference to my arrival times, nor did it seem to make the journey much longer nor more irritating. It became apparent that the main timesink for car journies was traffic jams, not the free-flowing high-speed bits in between.

Watching only TV that I'd recorded using Sky Plus or that I owned on DVD, instead of torrents of episodes ripped from US broadcasts, has been fine. I don't hack subscription telly smartcards anymore like I used to, I pay a subscription and have a TV licence, so that's fine.

One point where I've been unclear on the law is format-shifting. For example, I own a lot of pretty specialised industrial music CDs that I've bought over the last twenty years. It used to be illegal to convert CDs to MP3s in the UK even if you owned the CDs yourself and never gave the MP3s to anyone else. This has always been legal in the USA. In early 2008, a lot of stories indicated that format-shifting was to be imminently legalised in the UK but I haven't heard much about it since. If it's still illegal, then I've failed there. I don't like using original CDs in the car, as they get scratched and become unplayable, and I'd rather go without music at all than have to cart around an enormous personal CD player. I probably could get by with an old-style cassette walkman (I still own a decent autoreverse one) and my meagre but sufficient collection of original tapes.

Other instances of law-breaking have been so few that I can actually remember each instance:

Getting a tax disc for the new car which I bought for the wife. We'd arranged insurance the day before we bought it, so that was fine, but I collected the car (and the V20 form) at 5:30pm which meant that the post office was closed. So I drove it home with no tax disc. I then printed out the insurance document and took it, together with the V20 form, to the post office the moment it opened the next day (another journey without a tax disc). There, I was politely but firmly told that print-outs were not accepted, it had to be the original insurance certificate (quite how they'd notice, if I'd have had a colour laser printer, I have no idea, but that's by the by). Since the original document was "in the post", I was worried it'd be the middle of the next week before I could tax the car. As it turned out, by the time I'd driven home (untaxed) the postman had pushed the certificate through the front door, so I drove back to the post office (untaxed again) to obtain a tax disc. Quite a big fail there.

I accidentally reached well over 90mph on the motorway in the wife's new car. I put that down to simply not being familiar with a new car, and backed down to 70.

And that's it. It's been so little trouble that I'm going to try to continue the exercise indefinitely, and would recommend it to everyone.

Don't talk amongst yourselves for a moment

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 08:51:40 GMT

Whilst everyone else witters away amongst their friends about THAT video of a G20 bystander, can I recommend that you stop talking amongst yourselves for a moment and instead do something actually useful, like writing to your MP to tell them that their insistence, or lack of, on a criminal trial for the constable involved will be a key factor in your decision as to whether to vote for them at the next election?

writetothem.com