Goodbye Television Centre

March 22nd, 2013 by Alistair MacDonald No comments »

tvc_from_above

This is a sad time for those who have fond memories for the good old BBC Television Centre. BBC News moved out last week, the last broadcast from the building happening as I write this, and the building closing at the end of the month. I am one of those people with fond memories.

When I was young my father, formally an electrician in the the theatre, became a broadcast engineer for the BBC and this is why we moved to the south of the country when I was at school. The coincidence of this is I gained access to one of the most interesting places in the world, that being TVC.

At first I thought I must have only been to the building half a dozen times, but writing this I realised just how many more times I have been there and how many memories I have. I have seriously lost count and have seen so much to look back on.

I have been on the Top of the Pop set (in TC2 I think), in the 1980′s Tardis, and watched the (slow) filming of many random programmes from the viewing galleries. I remember walking through the sets of Johnny Briggs, Rolland Rat, and the back of the Noels House Party (that at the time was more of a doughnut than the binding it was contained in).

I have sat in the old news studio when the automated cameras were new and subtitling was done from the corridor. I have seen the turntable the christmas penguins rotated on, I have played with the old COW (Computer Originated World). I was even the first to see the Kenny Everett title sequence when VT was in the basement.

I have walked the corridors and past so may doors. I have eaten in the canteen, drunk the tea, chatted in the BBC club. I have explored the old OB units. I have relaxed in the Blue Peter garden. I have played with the galleries and must be one of the few people who can use a vision mixer that were self tort. I have visited three generations of network control and discovered how stupid all the security keys expiring on new year is.

I have even helped with the TV7 refit in the 90s. I have also briefly been on kids TV but not filmed at TVC. There are so many other memories but if I keep going I will not stop for months.

The most amazing thing is I never got lost in the building. Well, yes, okay, that last fact is a complete lie.

One odd thing is most of my experiences of the place were as a child. Even in the 2000s it was starting to feel a bit foreign and like the next generation had taken over. The atmosphere was still there but I was no longer part of it.

I have not been back since the great Manchester exodus started to drain the life out of the building. I don’t really want to because now there is just a building. The life has gone. I guess the memories will still be there but the atmosphere and the community is what the BBC has really lost, and I think it has gone because I can not find is elsewhere.

So that is it. Goodbye Television Centre. I have some fond memories. They are old and at times they feel like I was a different person, and in many ways I was, but I treasure them never the less.

Just in case you were wondering anything I did within TV was pure nepotism, but my radio career was all my own work.

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Goodbye Posterous, Goodbye Dopplr

February 20th, 2013 by Alistair MacDonald 1 comment »

This month I am saying goodbye to a couple of services that I have been using for a while.

First Posterous. At the end of last week it was announced that the micro blogging platform Posterous will be closing down at the end of April 2013. This has been anticipated for a while since Twitter bought it in March last year and assured users that they will not close down without notice and will create an official data backup path.

I started using Posterous when I moved my “Vox Blog” to it (actually migrating to TypePad and then Posterous as it was easer) after Vox was closed at the end of September 2010.

As this is a second blog of “silly stuff” that I do not upload much to it nowadays I have decided to just kill it off. I did consider moving it to another service such at Tumblr but it is not simple to get the archive in there and I have other things to do that are more important. I will however place a full copy of my Posterious blog on my web site and redirect from the original URL so the content will not vanish from the Internet.

There is a small bug in the export where the original Import from Vox is listed backwards, and the Image URLs are mashed, but I fixed the URLs with a little .htaccess hacking. If you need help to do the same please do ask.

Next is Dopplr. Dopplr is a service where you log where you will be travelling to and it allows you to see if your friends are going to the same location. When you attend a lot of events like I do it can actually be useful. The service has been running unchanged since it was bought by Nokia in September 2009. I give it a lot of credit for running apparently untouched for almost 3½ years. Sadly it has just started to play up by not allowing trips to be created, edited, or deleted. It is clearly not being maintained and about to die.

Rather than move to another system (I only know of Tripit and it is not quite the same) I have imported my last Dopplr backup in to my Google Calender. Clearly this is not going to duplicate Dopplr’s social element, but will help with my planning and this is what I have mostly used it for in recent times.

So that is two services gone and I suspect there will be more going before the end of the month. The Internet is always exciting because of the constant flow of new and exciting things on it, but most will eventually vanish or be swallowed up by other services regardless if they are successful or not. It is sad but the way it is.

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Posted in Tech

UKHost4U caught posting fake positive comments

December 18th, 2012 by Alistair MacDonald 2 comments »

In 2007 my company had a bad experience with the company ukhost4u and I blogged about it. In summery I needed a service, called them to check if they included that service in there package, they said it did, after signing up it turned out they did not actually supply that service, and then they refused to refund the subscription. I blogged about it to warn other and them wrote the money off as one of those things.

After the original post I was getting a lot of comments on it. At first negative and then a few positive. Now as I have pointed out in the past a blog post about a negative experience tends to attract a lot of negative comments from users in the same situation. Satisfied customers will rarely be searching for the words that list such a blog post and hence will not get the chance to comment. I for one remember this when reading negative posts and comments. On my post however there were a few positive posts that struck me as odd.

Anyway, time passes and last Thursday a gentleman called David Eadie posted a comment on my blog post. It was a bit strong and I don’t wish for any company to be made bankrupt but I can understand how Mr Eadie feels.

Then, less than 25 minutes later I receive the following comment in my moderation queue….

I have been nothing but happy with the service provided by UKHost4u. They have always been very friendly and have actually taken the time to fix issues with my web site code which would have normally have cost money and a developers time.

Unlike other providers I have used the telephone calls are answered and most emails that I have sent in have had a reply within 1hr which is much better than the 48hrs that my last provider took to even advise me that it had been assigned to support.

I understand some people here don’t seem to have been happy with them, but I think they will find a lot of much worse providers and when you go with someone with NO telephone support, 48hrs email reply times and 80% MAX up time you will be more than happy to use UKHost4u.

Now, it is odd to get this kind of post because of the afore mentioned reasons, it does sound a bit like marketing spiel, and the web site they entered is for sale. I really do like comments of multiple views on my blog but I also don’t want to be a patsy delivering a fake review for a service I feel is bad. As a result I contact the poster via the gmail address they gave and asked if they can provide a link to there Facebook, LinkedIn, or other profile to help convince me they were a real person. I did not get a reply.

Then I decided that I might as well call the owner of the domain and they were kind enough to take my call and confirmed that they are the owner of the domain and they had not posted the comment. So now I have confirmation the details entered were fake, and logic dictates that is was posted by UKHost4u or an agent acting on there behalf, but there is no proof yet.

So, next on to the access logs for the site. It turns out that the post came from 149.6.122.114, and guess what, it is a UKHost4u IP address. In fact it appears to be the address used by the UKHost4u server.

I have contacted UKHost4u to give them a chance to comment and perhaps even apologise. They replied and implied it would have been one of there customers using an IP address registered to them. I sent the information they requested and stated I did not believe a customer of theirs would create a fake persona. I have not has a new response.

So, if you are looking for a new ISP and read a positive review of UKHost4u online from someone you don’t know and respect then I would take it with a pinch of salt.

If you are from UKHost4u, and I suspect you will be reading this, then there are a couple of lessons here. First being that putting so much effort in to scraping a few quid from your customers is not only bad customer service but will give a justified bad image online. Second that you are not as anonymous as you think so being dishonest will eventually come back and bite you. If you want to work with me to fix your ways and change your company attitude and image than I am available to help, but I suspect you are more interested in diminishing what I have said than actually fixing your problems.

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Posted in Rant, Tech

Geek Steam BBQ 2012

August 19th, 2012 by Alistair MacDonald No comments »

For the last three years I have been organising a BBQ at the North London Society of Model Engineers track at Colney Heath (not far from the M25 / A1(M) junction). Basically we have a BBQ and ride on real model steam trains, and you are invited as well. Just bring some meat to cook and enjoy the day.

Last year we shared the day with a visiting club from Chelmsford running the trains and I believe they will be back again. We will also have an electric train you can drive and a few chances to learn how to drive a real steam train on the ground level track.

There are more information on my web site if you want to know more. Please come along and enjoy yourself.

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Posted in Events

Sport Starting

July 31st, 2012 by Alistair MacDonald No comments »

This weekend gone I was in Leeds for LeedsHack3, a 2 day hack day that took place in Leeds City Museum where I created SportStarting.

It was a great weekend although I spent half of it searching through plant rooms and climbing in roof voids replacing parts of the network that were just not capable of supporting the event. Thanks you [not] BT.

Anyway, the deadline for submitting hacks was 10am Sunday, so at about 9:45am I though I better submit something and then start working on it if I was to have something ready for the midday deadline, and that hack was SportStarting.

The idea was born from the large number of channels that the BBC have of Olympics on satellite and not knowing what was on what channel when. My idea was to do the same things as I did for OnFilm4 (and borrow half the code) and tweet when a sport was about to start.

Getting the listings was not as easy as I had hoped as the BBC Backstage feeds have quietly been turned off and services like Digiguide want silly money for the listings (£2,880 to be exact). I had a plan, but because I was starting the hack a day late I needed to revert to the backup plan, and that was to use the Guardian open data schedule. The down side of this is I did not have the channel numbers, but the up side is I could get it finished before the deadline.

Reusing so much code and having the data in a spreadsheet turned the day log hack in to a data manipulation and a simple code tweaking job that, despite a few interruptions, I had complete within the 2 hours available.

Finally I should add that the hack is legal and not infringed any copyright or other laws, but I might have called the team name “The London 2012 Olympic Games Summer Gold Silver Bronze Winning Team (sponsored by Burger King and Mastercard)” as a bit of a satirical joke. Sorry about that.

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Fancy a laugh…

June 25th, 2012 by Alistair MacDonald No comments »

…at my expense? Well this is your opportunity on Wednesday evening.

I am going to have a go at “geek” stand up comedy at Bright Club Newcastle. Basically I going to talk about one of my projects highlighting the amusing parts and hope people giggle a little. By popular request I will be talking about my Metro system simulator.

If I am rubbish it is still worth coming as it is compared by the lovely Helen Keen and there will be lost of other acts. Having seen some of the rehearsals I can say they will be as good and funny the past events if not more so. So come along. It is £3 on the door but you should get your name on the list now to guarantee your place as it does tend to sell out.

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Posted in Events

iPhone Virgin / Orange APN Fix

June 1st, 2012 by Alistair MacDonald No comments »

In 2010 I won an iPhone 4 at Over the Air for my Hole Mapper mobile app. I was having some problems getting the phone going because I had not purchased the phone at an Orange shop, and in the end I was forced to pay £25 for a PAYG SIM to do anything (and I am still grumpy about that). I could then enable the phone for T-Mobile’s network as part of there network sharing, and this meant I could use my Virgin SIM again (after a little trimming).

Anyway, back to today… My phone on Virgin has worked well for well over a year but recently Virgin have also started sharing the Orange network in the same way that T-Mobile customers have been, and my data does not work on Orange by default. This is because the settings are being picked up from the network and for reasons I won’t go in to they are wrong for me and I can’t change them on my iPhone because the settings are locked down.

The solution was to go to http://www.unlockit.co.nz/ that created a profile containing the APN setting. Just go to the side ON YOU PHONE and follow the instructions to set the APN. The UK and Virgin are preconfigured so when you click to create the profile, and allow it to be instilled your phone will magically start working when you fall on to the Orange network.

The official solution is for you to call Virgin Mobile and they will disable the roaming. This obviously means you can’t use Orange’s coverage, but as Orange coverage is poor where I live I often end up with a blue circle on Orange where there is a good 3G signal form T-Mobile/Virgin so I might have that done anyway, but lets see how thing go.

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Posted in Tech

Hibernating Unbuntu on the A0751h

May 30th, 2012 by Alistair MacDonald No comments »

This is a blog post I started almost 2 years ago but got side tracked and never finished it. Having just needed some information from it I dicided I would finish it off and post it just in case it is helpful. Please remember that there may mow be a more appropriate solution available though.

A couple of years ago I bought a reconditioned Acer Aspire One A0751h. It is a lovely little machine. It is rather slow and the graphics chipset has huge compatibility problems, but it is still a nice machine. It came with Vista installed but now has Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installed.

One problem I had with the graphics chipset driver is that the machine would not hibernate properly. The quick fix to this was to replace the latest hibernation applications with the old ones that still work with these drivers.

First of all you will need to install the Debian Userspace Software Suspend package with the command…

sudo apt-get install uswsusp

…and then we need to remap the commands to the new (or should that be old) binaries…

sudo rm /usr/sbin/pm-hibernate
sudo echo -e "#bash\ns2disk" > pm-hibernate
sudo mv pm-hibernate /usr/sbin
sudo chmod a+x /usr/sbin/pm-hibernate

sudo rm /usr/sbin/pm-suspend
sudo echo -e "#bash\ns2ram --force" > pm-suspend
sudo mv pm-suspend /usr/sbin
sudo chmod a+x /usr/sbin/pm-suspend

sudo rm /usr/sbin/pm-suspend-hybrid
sudo echo -e "#bash\ns2both --force" > pm-suspend-hybrid
sudo mv pm-suspend-hybrid /usr/sbin
sudo chmod a+x /usr/sbin/pm-suspend-hybrid

Canonical make the point that the fact that Ubuntu’s suspend not working is a fault with the power management routines and should be these should be fixed instead of just replaced. Using the Debian USS works but is not supported under Unbuntu and may have other issues.

Remember that this is not an officially recommended solution and to return thing to normal you can run the following…

sudo rm /usr/sbin/pm-hibernate
sudo ln -s ../lib/pm-utils/bin/pm-action /usr/sbin/pm-hibernate
sudo rm /usr/sbin/pm-suspend
sudo ln -s ../lib/pm-utils/bin/pm-action /usr/sbin/pm-suspend
sudo rm /usr/sbin/pm-suspend-hybrid
sudo ln -s ../lib/pm-utils/bin/pm-action /usr/sbin/pm-suspend-hybrid

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Posted in Tech

What I am doing about the EU cookie legislation

May 26th, 2012 by Alistair MacDonald 2 comments »

You may or may not have heard about the new(ish) cookie law that has come in requiring web sites to get the users permission before sending out a cookie that can be used to track a user across web sites. Although aimed at increasing online privacy it is causing a problem for most people who have a web site including me.

I have done an audit of my sites that use cookies and I actually use them very irregularly. In fact I am only serving them from my server for two forums running PHPBB and several WordPress installations. As both of these are an opt in with a privacy policy mentioning cookies I am quite happy that I am already complying with the legislation. I used the Buisness Link templates for these policies (that have vanished from their site but I can send a copy) if you want to do the same.

The problem I have is with third party services serving cookies, most specifically AdSense and Google Analytics. The new legislation gives both Google (as the service who sends out the cookies) and me (as the user of there service) equal responsibility to get the users agreement before service the cookies. The problem is I have no control over what Google serve and they don’t appear to have a solution in the pipeline. As the Information Commissioner’s Office, the organisation charged with enforcing the legislation, have said they are taking a light touch approach to enforcement “where there is a low level of intrusiveness and risk of harm to individuals” I will, like many, continue to take the wait and see approach and hope that Google comes up with a more defined solution in the near future.

So, in summery I am already compliant with the exception of some Google services, and I am now hoping Google will supply a recommended solution for me and many millions more across Europe.

Update: Things are changing already with new advice from the ICO saying that we can presume implied consent. As a result I can now just bring up a one time message (perhaps just for European visitors but I will need to check in to that) letting the user know I am using Google Analytics cookies and taking there continued use of the site as implied consent. Clearly I am missing the deadline on implementing this but will have it coded and active soon.

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Posted in Tech

The Late Shows 2012

May 25th, 2012 by Alistair MacDonald 1 comment »

For the last few years The Late Shows have happened in Newcastle and Gateshead where cultural venues who would normally be closed on a Friday and Saturday night open their doors until 11pm (and sometimes later).

This year I was out with some friends on the Friday for a drink and a visit to the Ouseburn venues. The trouble with going for a drink with friends first is that you tend to get caught up in nattering and not getting to the venues you were planning to. Eventually we set off and here is a summary of what we managed to see at in the time we had…

Toffee Factory

We got to see a little singing (well okay, about 20 seconds) and then took a tore to look at the rooms available (clearly being run by estate agents and not cultural folk this one ;-) ) and finishing up at the roof garden. No residents seemed to be exhibiting anything but it is there first year open so hopefully we will see exciting things next time.

Wychcraft Furniture Co

Not an official stop but it is nice to see a local woodworker showing their wares. It was also great fun having a go at balancing fire on my chin. Apparently there was more of this fire juggling fun and the like on the Saturday but sadly I did not get across there this year.

Seven Stories

A venue that got its name from having 7 floors, and it is also important to remember that the exit is on floor 3, or somewhere like that. Anyway, this children’s story telling venue had lots of costumes of charters from books resulting in lots of [so called] adults putting on costumes and regressing to their childhood. There were plenty of dressing up opportunities this year but this was by far the best. If they ever need volunteers to dress up for the kids then a few hundred of them can be found at the Late Shows.

36 Lime Street

Only a brief visit here as we were running out of time and a friend of ours got involved in a political debate about politics that swallowed the rest of the time we had.

On the Saturday I decided to have another look at some venues, but this time by not going to the pub beforehand. I hoped to see more and on my bicycle that I did…

Mushroom Works

This was one of my favourite stops last year with a great elephant show and Sarah Blood’s neon baked in Cake . Although there was not all that much new to see this year there were a few good things to look at. I also caught up with fellow maker Bettina Nissen who has some marvellous 3D printed creations.

Onethirty3, Hoults Yard

Some basic and slightly fun prints being exhibited. The works were okay but the way they were being hung in the space really added to them.

Unit 44, Hoults Yard

Some of my favourite art works of the weekend. I especially enjoyed the “smiley” designs. Taking time to look at these made my trip the Hoults worthwhile.

Unit 44 – While Walls, Hoults Yard

Well, not quite my thing, but each to their own and all that.

Newcastle Cycle Hub

Ironically I had trouble finding somewhere to put by bicycle here where I could see it. It appears to be a cycle shop, cycle hire and café in one although I might have got that wrong. I will have to stop off another day and find out more.

Side Gallery

This is always worth a look. Some great thought provoking photography on show here. It is always a good selection and in many ways I with a lot of what is shown here was more accessible to the world. It is free to visit any time so if you are around then go.

Castle Keep

Somewhere I have been many times and I love to go to the roof for the view. The view changes every time I visit, but there do tend to be a few years in between each visit. My oldest memory of the castle as a child is of the view of all the train tracks and points going in to the station, but from what I can figure most of those are now the long stay car park. There was also a play that was nice and slightly odd diversion, and some interesting models of old buildings in Newcastle.

~Flow

I was not going to stop here as my intention to go one day in the week, but I was passing and although pre-booking was normally needed there was a spare space belonging someone who did not turn up. Something that defiantly gets my mad invention seal of approval. It is a shame it is not a more permanent installation.

Holy Jesus Hospital, National Trust

Somewhere I have passed many times and wondered what is inside. A great introduction and brief history of the building at the start. There were also a few fun things going on like dressing up (yet again) making stained glass windows like at school, a cycling simulator (no idea why but who cares). They were even giving away free soup that gets my thumbs up ever time.

So that is what I did, and there was so much I did not get to do. Some say that this should happen more times a year, and although I don’t disagree perhaps it would be more practical to have different sectors of the cities open on different weekends, or add a Thursday as well. Well dome all and fingers crossed for next year.

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Posted in Events, Well done