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.

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.

After a request from Film 4 I have changed the OnFilm4 logo to make it less like the official Film 4 logo so people do not think it is an official service of Channel 4. As they asked so nicely and have a good reason I have no issue with doing this. Hopefully it retains the essence of Film 4 without being confused with the official logo.

If only other organisations (I have two in mind) would write polite emails instead of threatening ones with sudo legal bull they might have got what they want as well. There might have been a little rant sneak in there. Sorry about that.

Yes, that is correct, as of last night I am no longer using voicemail on my phone so to leave me a message you will need to use email.

As of two weeks ago I have become very busy for reasons that I will no doubt be blogging about soon. As a result I can not take many mobile calls and a lot of people are calling me leaving messages. I am constantly finding several messages on the phone at a time, some already dealt with, most duplicated in an email, a few from the same person calling back multiple times, and a huge number of “please call me” messages with no hint as to why or if it is in any way important. It should also be noted I don’t have time to respond to all of the messages.

As a result I have decided to stop using voicemail all together on my phone. I looked at several solutions over time that will take the voice mail and convert it to an email for convenience, but this only makes retrieving the message easer and does not simplify me making my response so it is email all the way I am afraid. I am not the first to do this as some friends have already given this a go. So from now on if you need to contact me then please send me a VERY SHORT email me and I will respond by email.

Please don’t feel this is unfair. It is a common question “how can I reach you quickly”. Although people don’t realised it they are in fact asking how do I jump the queue to get Alistair to do something. The truth is that I can not do everything, respond to everyone, and be at your beck and call. Sorry but I need to prioritise and no matter how important you think your issue or question is it might not be top priority when combined with my list of things to do. Moving entirely to email helps with this prioritisation.

Also please be brief in your email. If it is a line or two and I can deal with it when it arrives then I will, otherwise it will be dealt with in the evening, the following day, or in the following week depending on what else I have to do. Things do get missed so feel free to email again, but only after a few days, and include all I need in the latest email as I will probably delete the older ones.

Finally let me know how this works out from your perspective.

A while ago I was playing with some fonts used by large brands and using them for another company name for fun. There are some more I did just after that but never quite got round to uploading until now.







For anyone reading this blog outside of Tyne and Wear the British Rail text is in Calvert produced by typographer Margaret Calvert for the Tyne and Wear Metro.

Sorry for the short notice on this but Brian and I will be giving a presentation at this Monday’s Dorkbot NCL about Maker Space, Newcastle’s first hacker space. Hopefully we will also have a good discussion around how to take things forward.

If you did not know Dorkbot is a geeky show and tell and in addition to us Alex McLean will be taking about live coding as a performance.

More details on the Lanyrd listing and the Maker Space web site and not forgetting the Centre for Life’s web site. Please come if you can.

I used to have a second blog of daft photos and the like hosted on Vox.com that was closed down by Six Apart last year. My intention was to move it elsewhere but I never quite got round to it. Eventually I managed to get it moved across to the Posterous platform with a few issues that needed working round. Today I managed to get most (but not all) of the bugs sorted that included the need to edit every one of the 400+ posts. So…. please have a look at my Posterous (formally Vox) blog.

For a couple of months I am hanging out in an office on the Newcastle quayside with a view of the River Tyne. Being an office totally devoted to work we have been discussing the high and low tides quite a lot. Eventually we downloaded the 2011 Tide Tables PDF from the Port of Tyne web site for no reason what so ever. As I am learning Python properly now I set myself the academic challenge of extracting the high and low tide times from the PDF and placing it in a CSV so I can do something more interesting with the data if not more useful. If you wan to do the same then please have a go. TyneTideTimes2011.zip.

Update: The time in the file is Greenwich Mean Time. For British Summer Time add one hour from 2am March 27th 2011 to 2am October 30th 2011.

After a phone call with a senior manager at TrafficLink this week I have been informed the BBCs travel feeds that were offered as part of the BBC Backstage initiative will be switched off in a few days. As you may have heard there is another political issue associated with this change that I will not be touching on here while staff at BBC are investigating it further.

In the short term all mashups will continue to work as normal. When the feed currently taken the BBC data stops I will switch over to the Traffic England feed that is licensed under the Open Government Licence. The Traffic Scotland link is only experimental at the moment but I hope to have this added to the feed soon. Wales and Northern Ireland may take a little longer to add.

If you need any help, support or another data source for your project please get in touch and I will see if we can help.

Update: The Traffic England and Traffic Scotland feeds are now fully functional and the old BBC feed is feeding the Traffic England data.

About a month ago my good old Sony Vaio laptop started playing up and kept crashing and refusing to switch on. It has served me well over the last 5 years but it is now time for an upgrade.

The trouble is that I am a bit out of the loop when it comes to hardware and I could do with your advice and recommendations. I need a laptop that is good for a variety of development. Some of this is for the Windows environment but this can be dine in a virtual machine if needed. I think a decent keyboard without a strange layout is my main requirement.

I have had a good experience with my last two Vaios so would like to stick with them, but there are not any in the range that tempt me at the moment, and they are not cheep, so I am looking at other options.

Suggestions so far, with reasons why I have not just gone with it…

• Apple MacBook Pro – Expensive. Nice hardware but really expensive.
• Dell Vostro – Can be really nice machines, but really bad experiences with defective hardware and Dell support on many occasions. Would not want to buy direct because of it.
• HP – Nothing really wrong with HP and we had several at the office. Just a bit boring.
• Lenovo ThinkPad – Used IBM ThinkPads in the past and was not overly taken by them, but that was a long time ago.
• Toshiba Satellite Pro – Again nothing really wrong, just a but boring.

So, what would you recommend and why. Also what else should I be looking out for in terms of processor, chipset, or anything else.