April 2005 Archives
April 30, 2005
Geocomtex on the web
The web experience backing up the Doctor Who series continues. Henry VanStatten's company Geocomtex from episode six - 'Dalek' - now has its own website at www.geocomtex.net - found via a banner ad on Mickey's Who Is Doctor Who? site....
Anyone for Monkey Tennis?
Looking at ITV's Saturday night early evening line-up this weekend - "Hit Me Baby One More Time", "Celebrity Wrestling" and "Celebrity Stitch Up" - it occurs to me we may not be far away from actually seeing Alan Partridge's "Monkey Tennis" hit our screens. You can already play the Monkey Tennis card game in preparation....
Dell and McAfee Require Internet Explorer 5.x or higher
So, it wasn't enough to bundle and automatically get going McAfee's Anti Virus software on my new PC, or email reminders about the expiry of my free subscription to me, Dell and McAfee also want to dictate to me that I must use the most insecure of the major browsers....
April 28, 2005
Haunted Holborn
I've mentioned before that at Christmas I bought my wife a book called "Walking Haunted London" by Richard Jones, hoping we could learn more about London, and maybe capture a spooky experience at the same time. It also turns out that most of the haunted locations in London seem to be in pubs, so it is quite a pleasant way to pass the time. Last week, before heading to Malta on holiday, my wife and I did the walk in...
April 27, 2005
A gallery, a monument, a museum and a spot of shopping - Day-tripping in London
With a month off on my hands I'm working through a lengthy list of things that I've always wanted to do around London, but have never found the time for. Today I ticked three things off the list. I started at the Estorick Collection at Canonbury Square in Islington, which until June 5th has a exhibition on Avant-Garde Graphics from 1918 to 1934. The gallery itself is quite small, consisting of six rooms, five of which are taken up with...
Election hustings meeting in Walthamstow
Yesterday I went to an election hustings meeting at St Johns Church in Walthamstow, which featured all five of the candidates standing in my constituency. The meeting had been organised by a confederation of local churches, and I only found out about it because my dad emailed me the details. There was no publicity outside the event, which I thought was a shame, because although the turn-out was around 70 people, even though I live 5 minutes away if it...
United Nations Intelligence Taskforce on the web
As the series goes on I am getting more and more impressed with the web support for Doctor Who. To accompany the events in the latest episode "World War Three", the BBC have launched the U.N.I.T website that was featured in the show. Using a login provided on Mickey's Who Is Doctor Who? site [bison] you can access the secure area, which features a bulletin style message board that U.N.I.T. operatives can contribute to. This includes information about the clean-up...
April 26, 2005
LCD Soundsystem at Hammersmith Palais
As expected LCD Soudsystem were awesome last night, and I also enjoyed the support, fellow DFA act The Juan Maclean - but two things in particular stood out for me. Firstly, even if I hadn't just come from Malta to distort my idea of the cost of living, expecting people to pay FOUR POUNDS for a pint of of weak, warm lager in a plastic cup is astonishing. I like the Hammersmith Palais as a venue, but not the prices....
April 17, 2005
Doctorin' the BBC Complaints site*
I've already written about the BBC having to make a response to people complaining about Doctor Who being too 'scary', which included a quote from the BBC's Complaints site: "Doctor Who has never been intended for the youngest of children and in line with the BBC's scheduling policy, the later a programme appears in the schedules, the less suitable it is for very young children to watch unsupervised. We would suggest it would be a programme which 8 year olds...
English Heritage forced redirect for Firefox users
Welcome to the English Heritage accessible site. You have been redirected to the accessible version of the site as you are using a browser that is not currently supported on the graphics site. Very kind of them. After all, I'm sure my copy of Firefox would have been rubbish at displaying the full version of the site. What I particularly enjoyed was that following a link from a search engine, for example, http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/filestore/visitsevents/asp/visits/Details.asp?Property_Id=100, once Firefox fails to be detected as...
Google and Yahoo! Playing With Video Search
One of the advantages of being a broadcaster is that if you want to experiment with audio and video search technology, you've got loads of material to carry the research out on. In fact the BBC has so much we are still in some cases actively destroying it. Often when I am at search conferences or events people ask how they can get hold of BBC audio/video material to play with. I've no doubt that some of the early adopters...
A guest editor for BBC News
"Good news. The first person invited to come along and be this website's editor for the day has agreed. David McDowell, from Lockerbie in Scotland, has written in a couple of times to suggest I'm a bit of a chump. Few would argue. He likened me to a particularly private part of the anatomy over my approach to 'by-lines' on the site, and observed last week that David Brent and I had a fair bit in common. But to his...
April 16, 2005
Orlowski on Flickr
"Is there a chiropractor in the house?" was the title of a post on the Flkr blog, which somehow survived the downtime. (While Flickr users couldn't get at their photographs, Flckr staff could keep blogging!) Yeah, right, because in an article slagging Flickr off for not having enough redundancy in the system, you think having a redundant separately hosted channel of communication to your users that can be updated easily via a simple content management system is a bad idea,...
April 12, 2005
Complaining about the new Doctor Who
"Forget typecasting! He should never be cast again, in anything. Utter selfishness and a lack of respect for the fans. I, for one, will not be watching any of the rest of the series. He has spoilt it and his timing is so reprehensibly self-serving, he will be thought of badly by a lot of people until the end of his days!" Mike, Blackpool, UK One of many well thought out and reasoned responses on the Have Your Say site...
Where is the BBC News?
Over the last couple of months the BBC has been running an internal competition for staff to make prototypes of new uses of BBC data. One of my entries was screen-scraping the BBC Complaints site into an RSS feed, which I've already written about. My second entry was called "Where Is The BBC News?" This admittedly crude prototype splices together the RSS feed of the BBC News World Edition Index page with World 66's "Visited Countries map" to produce...
April 11, 2005
Haunted Chiswick
I've mentioned before that at Christmas I bought my wife a book called "Walking Haunted London" by Richard Jones (who kindly posted a comment on my last ghost walk commentary), hoping we could learn more about London, and maybe capture a spooky experience at the same time. It also turns out that most of the haunted locations in London seem to be pubs, so it is quite a pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon in my book. This weekend...
April 8, 2005
"People Don't Like Basements But Tapes Do" - A Tour of the BBC Film Archive at Windmill Road
Download a PDF version of this article Last year I had the good fortune last year to get a guided tour around the BBC's Film Archives at Windmill Road. The numbers of items stored by the BBC's Information & Archives department is staggering - I noted down numbers like "26 million newspaper cuttings, 3 million still photographs, 4½ million pieces of sheet music", and that was just a fraction of the statistics quoted at me. The film archive has...
April 7, 2005
Watching the Election from home
I've been stuck at home for a couple of days, which has given me plenty of time to flick around News 24 and Sky News to follow the election campaign. It seems ironic that in not agreeing to a televised debate between the party leaders to avoid the adversarial style of politics in a USA presidential election, the parties seem to have replaced it with an adversarial campaign process that is 'the party machine' versus 'the press'. Yesterday Blair was...
April 6, 2005
Haunted Highgate
I've mentioned before that at Christmas I bought my wife a book called "Walking Haunted London" by Richard Jones, hoping we could learn more about London, and maybe capture a spooky experience at the same time. It also turns out most of the haunted locations in London are pubs that serve food, so it is quite a pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon in my book. Our first trip was to Hampstead, and this weekend, although we are not...
April 5, 2005
And they're off....!
So the worst kept secret in the land was finally revealed today as the 2005 Election campaign got underway when Tony Blair announced: "I have just been to Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament, which she has graciously consented to do." Nice of her to deign to allow us to have our democratic fun. I'm very interested in this election actually, as the New Media landscape in the UK is much more advanced than it was in...
Il Fumo Uccide - but they look good
My parents bought some cigarettes back from Rome for my wife the other week, and they are the first thing for many years to make me want to smoke again - simply because I thought the packaging was so nice. As a bitter vitriolic ex-smoker if it was up to me there wouldn't be any opportunity to put attractive design onto cigarette packs - it would be wall-to-wall health warnings, and the cigarettes themselves would have an assortment...
April 4, 2005
BBC Homepage coverage of the death of Pope John Paul II
The 'Big Red Button' that puts the BBC.co.uk homepage into 'Breaking News' mode was naturally used over the weekend to reflect the news of the Pope's death. One of the things that I particularly like about the system is that when a story is on the page for a long time (in this case nearly 24 hours over the weekend) the image and treatment is constantly updated, re-using the hard work of our colleagues over at BBC News, without having...
April 3, 2005
Budget 95 on BBC.co.uk
Download a print version of this article A few months ago BBC Broadcast introduced a 'site owners database', which looked at the directories on the live BBC site, and attempted to gather contact information for every area of BBC.co.uk. It is very useful in my day-to-day work, but even more useful because it provides a facility to look for orphan sites - top level directories on BBC.co.uk which nobody has claimed. Some of these turn out to be very...
April 2, 2005
Budget 96 on BBC.co.uk
Download a print version of this article A few months ago BBC Broadcast introduced a 'site owners database', which looked at the directories on the live BBC site, and attempted to gather contact information for every area of BBC.co.uk. It is very useful in my day-to-day work, but even more useful because it provides a facility to look for orphan sites - top level directories on BBC.co.uk which nobody has claimed. Some of these turn out to be very...
April 1, 2005
Doctor Who TV Movie on BBC.co.uk
Download a print version of this article A few months ago BBC Broadcast introduced a 'site owners database', which looked at the directories on the live BBC site, and attempted to gather contact information for every area of BBC.co.uk. It is very useful in my day-to-day work, but even more useful because it provides a facility to look for orphan sites - top level directories on BBC.co.uk which nobody has claimed. Some of these turn out to be very...