BNP on Question Time? Oh noes!
Oct1
The BBC is once again the target of a bit of a fuss over the revelation that the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, will appear on Question Time. To which my response has to be a very bored sounding “yes, so?”.
Question Time is principally a platform for political parties to engage in televised debate and (as the name implies) answering of questions from the general public. The BNP, like it or not, is a political party in this country.
Now, don’t confuse this support for their appearance on the show with support for what the BNP stand for. As far as I am concerned (and which the evidence tends to support) they are lying, racist white supremacists. However, I will defend their right to argue their point in an open venue, because I suspect they’ll come out of the other side feeling a bit more bruised than they expect.
Knowing what David Dimbleby has been like in the past with ‘fringe’ political parties Mr. Griffin will get very, very little leeway in pushing an agenda outside of the questions he is asked to field. I suspect that the BNP’s policies will be called into question by other panel members and then ripped apart by the reactions of the studio audience. All on live TV, with the whole of Britain watching.
Sure they’ll get a bit of airtime as a ‘genuine’ political party, but unlike most ‘genuine’ political parties the BNP probably won’t have much in the way of policy with which to respond.
Incidentally if you’re into this sort of thing you can follow Question Time on Twitter (@bbcquestiontime).
Almighty Stats
Apr0
In the wake of being linked to by the BBC Internet Blog, probably the most cataclysmic linking event I’ve ever been subjected to, I decided to take a look at my stats and see how it affected the traffic to my little corner of the web.
What you need to understand before you read this is that I actually don’t care how many people visit my blog – until today I made no use of any monitoring suite outside of what the server logged whilst it went about its daily business (I have since installed Google Analytics in light of the numbers I’m seeing, just because I’m curious about their validity). It therefore came as quite a shock to discover that over the past 12 months I’ve averaged around 188 visits a day. Not page views, not server hits, but distinct visits from distinct users. I serve 12.3MB of content per day, not that much when compared to even a small but relatively popular site, but a hell of a lot more than I was expecting.
This month's stats
Anyway, the influx of visitors from the BBC brought my daily total for yesterday to 354 distinct visits, the most popular page indeed being my rambling about the new iPlayer. I also served up 51.6MB of content to the world in general.
All these numbers are of course from my own stats provided so adequately by Apache and reported on by Webalizer. I’ve done a little digging about and discovered that my biggest site users in terms of pure hits are search engine spiders, but remember that they only count as one visitor. It does appear that each visitor is indeed a single unique person having a look at my blog.
Other useless factoids come from the search stats – “flux capacitor time machine icon leopard” is one of the most popular search queries for ending up here, as are a few variations on “bugsy malone staging”. Someone arrived at my blog after searching for “jackson sofa”, which I have no explanation for.
I’ll post a followup in a couple of days to see if Google Analytics corroborates these stats, and if not I’ll take a closer look at why these numbers are wrong.
iPlayer Updates Bring Better Quality
Apr6
It would seem that the BBC iPlayer has just undergone a huge update, with many of the Labs features now making it into release.
The big headline feature is of course HD – some iPlayer programmes are now available in true 1280×720 HD quality (providing you have a beefy enough network, 3.2mbps to be exact). Apparently the BBC HD people were very exacting about what would and would not meet their standards, and iPlayer have finally managed to find the right combination as well as satisfied their own requirement of getting a cross-platform application working.
Secondly, but quite cool, is the variable bitrate feature. This means that the streaming player will start out with the highest bandwidth version of the video (replacing the old high/standard quality button) and will turn itself down should it encounter streaming problems until it can stream reliably. Also gone are the big/medium/small size buttons, replaced by a single ’switch size’ button which alternates between small and big video, and tweaks the bandwidth version accordingly.
The iPlayer Diagnostic has a look at PAVCON.
You can now also get iPlayer to run a connection diagnostic to see what you can and can’t get on your current connection, something you’re prompted to do if the streaming detects that you don’t have sufficient bandwidth. Running this from behind PAVCON provides the expected response – I can barely scrape streaming the lowest possible TV quality, providing I’m not doing anything else with the network. However, next year with a nice chunky connection I should be able to stream some HD goodness.
Finally, but by no means least importantly, the iPlayer Desktop is now out of beta and is the official application for getting iPlayer content on Windows, OS X or Linux. This conveniently cross-platform application is powered by Adobe Air and finally gets rid of P2P communications (which uses Evil Nasty Horrible Illegal Content-Stealing BitTorrent, and is subsequently blocked all over the place) as well as supporting the new HD content and fixing lots of bugs.
All in all, I like it and look forwards to the advances in iPlayer v3 this summer.
The BBC Suck at Technical Acronyms
Mar2
I keep track of the BBC dot.life blog, which purports to be about the technical side of life. So, first paragraph of the post today about Skype finally making it to the iPhone what do I find but a glaring error which actually made me go “aaargh”:
Is this the moment that Voip – to use the ugly jargon – finally makes the leap from the laptop to the mobile?
What on earth is “Voip”? Oh, he means VoIP. Yes, IP as in TCP/IP. “Voip” is not a business name or the name of a proprietary technology, it’s an acronym for “Voice over Internet Protocol”. I would have thought that the BBC technology guys could do better.
Anyway, Skype on the iPhone. Clever idea if I want to make outgoing Skype calls to people, as long as I’m in a WiFi hotspot. This would be convenient for travelling abroad and calling home but whilst I’m in the UK (or vice-versa calling people abroad without paying extortionate rates) it’s not really on par with the services from 3 and Nokia’s Skype integration, especially since other Skype users can’t call me unless I’m in the Skype app.
Still, I know for certain I’ll end up downloading it in case I mystically have my contract suspended and find myself abandoned in the middle of a hotspot needing to call home and not being able to find a payphone.
BBC Online Editors
Feb0
Or more specifically, the lack of them. I was perusing the news today when I saw this on the BBC website.
The action followed a meeting of about mechanical contractors in one of the plant’s car parks early on Monday.
A meeting of about… mechanical contractors? One slip-up is acceptable, but over the last month or so I’ve noticed more and more grammatical and punctuation errors including my personal favourite of the misplaced comma.
Does the BBC not employ proof-readers any more, or are they just relying on their readers to report problems?
Rate This
Dec1
According to the BBC, Culture Secretary Andy Burnham has said that websites having age ratings should be considered. You can see what everybody else’s comments on this are (BBC), but I’d like to take a moment to explore a few alternative solutions which don’t rely on the government setting up a system which is bound to fail.
OpenDNS is a fantastic system which everybody should use anyway. It can manage DNS controls for your whole network, and includes über-efficient filtering and parental controls, complete with community-driven categories. It’s really easy to use, and only suffers a downfall if your child is intelligent enough to change the DNS servers, in which case most filtering tools are useless anyway. It’s quick, easy and efficient.
Both Windows Vista and OS X Leopard have comprehensive parental controls, allowing you to limit time, block websites, use filters, ban activities, limit time doing certain activities and so on. These are included with any version you’re likely to have on a home PC, and are easy to set up.
NetNanny is the most common installable utility for parents to restrict web browsing, for Windows or OS X. It costs, but a lot of people associate cost with quality so it should keep those who don’t know better happy.