revford blog
Yellow Valkyrie is about to die!
Burning Chrome, part 2
Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:30:14 GMT
Part two of Gibson's Burning Chrome.
Should be good revision for Jak if he's still planning to run a cyberpunk game.
Burning Chrome, part 1
Tue, 14 Oct 2008 10:18:04 GMT
Something cyberpunk from the BBC, a radio two part production of William Gibson's story Burning Chrome.
Part two tomorrow.
iPlayer Search Tools updated
Thu, 25 Sep 2008 19:01:51 GMT
Updated the iPlayer Search tools, simple console based search tools for the BBC iPlayer.
No new functionality, just cleaning up the output and slimming down the code.
Just a simple update this time, cleaning up the show title information. When the BBC last updated the iPlayer is started getting more detailed headings, I'll simply use these now rather than messing about trying to pull different bits of information together.
Libraries
lib-rf-iplayer.pl
Download
iplayer-search
iplayer-notify
My Zinc Bed
Sun, 31 Aug 2008 22:37:39 GMT
A TV adaptation of a stage play about addicts, I caught My Zinc Bed the other day.
Interesting drama and great performance from a strong cast. Well worth a look.
It's showing on BBC One again soon so should be back on the iPlayer tomorrow.
[spooks] Code 9
Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:07:04 GMT
Parts one and two of the new Spooks spin off, Spooks - Code 9, are on iPlayer now.
Quick review, if you're a fan of Spooks, don't bother with this. It was weak in it's own right and unworthy of the Spooks name.
Slightly longer review.
The premise is interesting, the Spooks team foil terrorist attacks and international disasters on a weekly basis, what would happen if one time, they don't.
Okay so far.
The disaster in this case is a Nuclear bomb in London, during the 2012 Olympics. Millions dead including most of The Government and MI5.
Fast forward a year and we have a new generation of MI5, no one has more than 11 months of field experience. The seat of Government has moved to Manchester where our heroes are based. MI5 are now working in small cells in each major city so they can't all be hit at once again.
The result is a 1984-ish country of checkpoints, armed police and ID cards. With the new breed of MI5 agent acting more like "Secret Police" thugs, torture and imprisonment without trial now being standard procedure.
Sadly the whole thing came over as being a bit weak, almost all the scifi near-future tech was wrong or nonsense. It just seemed silly, when it should have been shocking.
I can let all the techie stuff slide as it's a drama series and not a hacking documentary. But here are a couple of examples of things that bugged me.
Cracking a password on an encrypted file, the Agent attempts this by typing in his guesses by hand, why not use an automated brute force attack? Or try and identify the encoding and look for known weaknesses?
In another nonsense, the villains are invading wireless networks, they've managed to get hold of a valid device to clone so they could have a valid MAC address and key. Makes sense so far.
But our heroes can't stop this, as it would take too long to change the key. Why? It's a routine task that should take no more than 5 minutes, they should be updating keys on a regular basis anyway.
Spooks is usually quite good at getting the tech at least vaguely credible, bonus nerd points to them, but this was poor.
Nothing was downright dreadful about the show, but nothing was really good about it either.
Inferior to [spooks] in every way.
Burn Up, the conclusion
Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:00:04 GMT
The conclusion of Burn Up is still on the iPlayer, well worth a look.
Much of the science in the show is covered in Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", also well worth a look.
Burn Up: Episode 1
Burn Up: Episode 2
Burn Up on iPlayer
Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:35:35 GMT
Burn Up is a new BBC/Kudos drama set around the new head of Arrow Oil, Tom McConnell (Rupert Penry-Jones, aka Adam from Spooks).
Great cast including Neve Campbell, Bradley Whitford and Marc Warren. Part 1 was great, part 2 is tonight at 9pm BBC Two.
iPlayer search tools updated
Sat, 12 Jul 2008 23:54:32 GMT
When the iPlayer was updated recently it broke my old search tool. I fixed it up and here is the new lib.
The tools are still fine, just replace the old lib file with this one:
iPlayer 2 coming soon
Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:10:07 GMT
The BBC have posted a preview of the upcoming iPlayer revision.
Plenty of interesting new features, RSS feeds of searches is a great feature.
No mention of providing a download service for Mac and Linux users. Ah well.
Doctor Who: Silence in the Library
Sun, 01 Jun 2008 16:23:43 GMT
Part one of the wonderfully spooky Doctor Who adventure, Silence in the Library.
The writer that came up The Empty Child, Captain Jack and the Weeping Angels of Blink returns to scare kids out of libraries and send us screaming from shadows and dust.
Looking forward to part two and learning more about River Song.
Waking the Dead: Pieta
Fri, 23 May 2008 09:02:19 GMT
The team investigate links between bodies found in the mass graves of the former Yugoslavia, and a stolen handbag.
All is linked together by team pathologist Eve, who worked in Bosnia just after the war.
Doctor Who: The Unicorn and the Wasp
Sun, 18 May 2008 20:19:55 GMT
Cluedo week for Doctor Who, it was with the Lead Pipe in the Library, but Whodunit?
Waking the Dead: Wounds
Thu, 15 May 2008 10:32:26 GMT
This week's Waking the Dead is up on the iPlayer now, strange rituals in the woods and some shocking news for Boyd.
Waking the Dead: Wounds
The Doctor's Daughter
Sat, 10 May 2008 19:43:37 GMT
Doctor Who: The Doctor's Daughter
Not at all what I expected, but some nice ideas, a fun show and a plot hook for the future.
I did expect them to make some more use of the Doctor Who history. I'd mark out hard for a reference to Susan. But the production team seems to be sticking to their guns and keeping this as a Doctor Who for a new generation. No knowledge of the older stories required.
Still, they would have scored bonus geek points if when The Doctor said "I've been a Father before", he'd added "and a Grandfather".
I'm holding out for more Timelord returns. We've had The Master (he'll be back), we still need Romana, Susan and The Rani. :)
Doctor Who: The Poison Sky
Sat, 03 May 2008 19:15:45 GMT
Continuing from last weeks Sontaran Stratagem, this week we complete the UNIT vs The Sontarans story.
iPlayer tools
Sat, 03 May 2008 13:47:47 GMT
I've been fiddling with a bit more Perl code and built two versions of a quite useful tool for searching the BBC iPlayer.
There is no system for subscribing to shows so I can see when new episodes appear.
So I made one.
It's very simple, runs as a cron job and sends me an e-mail when episodes of of shows I'm interested in appear.
All these tools require LWP::Simple, which Ubuntu/Debian users can install from the console with:
sudo aptitude install libwww-perl
Everyone else can use CPAN.
perl -MCPAN -e 'install LWP::Simple'
As I have a few tools that search the iPlayer and tell me about it in different ways, I moved the actual searching subroutine into a shared file.
So first up, here is the simple iPlayer search tool modified to use this.
This presents the results in a nicely colour coded way, like this:
BBC iPlayer search results search term: QI QI: Series 5 - Europe http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b0082hyx.shtml
While this looks nice, I needed a version that is silent when there is no hits, iplayer-search always returns the header and the search term, also the ANSIColor details make no difference when viewed with a mail client, so I can leave them out too.
The quiet and plain version is called iplayer-notify:
This I add as cron jobs, using:
crontab -e
Like this:
# BBC iPlayer notifications, searches run every day
# m h dom mon dow command
00 05 * * * /home/gav/bin/iplayer-notify Doctor Who
03 05 * * * /home/gav/bin/iplayer-notify Spooks
06 05 * * * /home/gav/bin/iplayer-notify Waking the Dead
09 05 * * * /home/gav/bin/iplayer-notify QI
12 05 * * * /home/gav/bin/iplayer-notify Timewatch
15 05 * * * /home/gav/bin/iplayer-notify Torchwood
18 05 * * * /home/gav/bin/iplayer-notify Have I Got News for You
So each morning I get e-mails about any available episodes of shows I may like to see.
Make sure you set your actual email address in the crontab file, like this:
MAILTO="revford@blueyonder.co.uk"
Obviously use your own address not mine. You need it to tell you when your shows are on, not me. :)
Hopefully that will be a bit helpful to someone.
Waking the Dead: Duty and Honour (part 2)
Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:37:56 GMT
Part two of Duty and Honour available now:
Waking the Dead: Duty and Honour
Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:29:56 GMT
Part one of this week's Waking the Dead.
Investigations lead from a human hand found by a dog, to an army base.
Doctor Who: The Sontaran Stratagem
Sun, 27 Apr 2008 23:47:54 GMT
Martha, UNIT, The Sontarans, evil Nerds, evil Clones, evil Satnav and smog weapons. Awesome.
You'd think the sonic screwdriver could shatter glass though, a steel one could. :)
QI on iPlayer
Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:27:13 GMT
Starting to recover from last nights drinking at Zak's, I turn to the BBC to entertain me, quietly, where I discover this week's QI.
I made the serious error of not drinking a pint of water before turning in, so this morning was sick as a dog.
While it could be argued that the actual error was drinking all that Grolsch, then moving on to many White Russians, I still blame the lack of water.
Anyway, back to the show.
Stephen Fry's, well, I was going to call it a quiz but that isn't that exactly, it's more a rambling witty conversation that takes place on the set of quiz show, is perfect bring me back into the land of the living.
It's hard to describe but quite interesting.
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