One of the annoying things about the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) website at www.edfilmfest.org.uk is that you can’t tell if there are any tickets left for a screening until you’re half way through the ticket booking process. Even then, there’s no way to tell how close a screening is to being sold out, or to check if a previously sold-out screening now has returned tickets available.
So, film-going ladies and gentlemen, I present the EIFF Ticket Availability Checker, a mashup of data publicly available (but hard to find) on www.edfilmfest.org.uk and boxoffice.filmhousecinema.com.
Check it out by visiting www.ixalon.net/eiff
If you find any problems or have any suggestions, please contact me or leave a comment here.
Time for another off-topic blog post! 
This time on the 63rd annual Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF).
I’m not sure if it’s my taste in films, the excellent work of the festival staff, or a general trend in filmmaking, but this year’s line up at the festival seems pretty spectacular. There’s been a few films every day so far that I’ve been keen to see, where during previous years, I’d be lucky to find a handful over the whole festival. I think the success may be down to all these, but also that the festival is now reaping the rewards of moving from August to June. 2008 was the first June festival, and it felt a little subdued; I think film makers, delegates and the public didn’t know what to expect.
Thankfully it didn’t take us long to get used to the change, and with June being a quiet time in the Film Festival calendar yet also near the start of the summer blockbuster season, there seems to be a lot of films vying for attention. There still isn’t quite the buzz that’s associated with the main Edinburgh Festival season in August, but the line up of films (and the simplified logistics of getting around the city) makes up for it. Continue reading ‘Edinburgh International Film Festival’
First up, it’s pretty unusual for me to post about politics; I normally keep such thoughts to myself or moan about the general ineptitude of politicians to friends and colleagues, however I’m a keen follower of what’s going on regarding UK politics, as it has the opportunity to be an exciting time of change.
Today a report was published by the Calman Commission; who were tasked by the opposition parties of the Scottish Parliament, with the support of the UK Government, to look at the relationship of Scotland within the United Kingdom. This relationship or “devolution settlement” is already a very misunderstood and highly politicised thing, which pretty much everyone will admit is so riddled with problems and patchy half-thought-out legislation that something needs done. I’m neutral when it comes to both party politics and on the independance debate; as with most things there are reasons for, reasons against and a lot of spinning in between - but one way or another, the problems with the status-quo need addressed. Continue reading ‘The Calman Commission Report’
Last night VidZone, an interesting new free service cropped up on the PS3, curtesy of the lovely people as SCEE and Rants Ltd. VidZone in a nutshell is a music video channel where you choose the music; you queue up tracks from VidZone’s playlists, search by artist, song or genre, and build up your own playlists.
Despite a few teething problems, common to any new free service these days, VidZone works remarkably well. On my connection videos start streaming within a couple of seconds, there’s a good selection for a fledgling service, the video quality is decent for the majority of videos and the audio quality is as good as any other streaming service or music channel. There are however a number of minor niggles: Continue reading ‘PS3 VidZone Critique’
Well I hit the big three-zero last weekend and instead of having an early mid-life crisis, I thought I’d try and hunt for some inspiration to actually push ahead with an exciting idea I had a few weeks ago.
I’ve been involved in and coded a lot of pet projects over the past 10 years, most never come to fruition (e.g. Google Maps Mobile back in 2005) and others face an untimely end (e.g. Sackbook). The biggest of these was back in 2000/1 and is one of those “Damnit Chris, why did you stop?!” nagging what-ifs.
Continue reading ‘Finishing Projects - The Tempest’
Sorry for the downtime (again!) - the changes the BBC have been making lately aren’t huge, but thanks to their obfuscation of the iPlayer’s Javascript files, the simple job of maintaining PS3 iPlayer becomes horrendously complicated.
Not only does the obfuscation make it difficult to write the required regular expressions (a way for programs to look through text and pick out and modify specific sections), it also makes finding and understanding any changes needlessly time-consuming.
Now, I’m all for companies protecting their IP by taking measures to protect any source code that has to run client-side (i.e. Javascript), but in the BBC’s case I don’t see why they do this with iPlayer. The iPlayer uses a few BBC specific libraries for handling the UI elements (e.g. the carousel), but nothing that couldn’t be replaced with a number freely available open-source libraries.
The BBC is also a public body that really should be keeping these things open for people to look at and learn from and it’s not as if javascript obfuscation is any real protection against any commercial organisation that’s intent on saving a time and money by stealing the BBC’s code. I can understand that when it comes to the content, they have to be careful to respect the rights-holders’ wishes, but as far as I can tell, the iPlayer’s javascript is entirely the BBC’s own IP.
Happy New Year! Here’s to a great 2009!
One of my resolutions the past few years has been to try to do something news-worthy (though nothing notorious) during the year. 2008 was a bit of a bumper year with PS3iPlayer, O:SC and Sackbook getting mentioned by purveyors of fine tech and gaming news, so this year I’m going to cheat a little and reserve Sackbook (Strikes Back) to 2009.
For those waiting for an update on what’s happening with Sackbook; I’m afraid I can’t give any firm timescales as to when the site will be up and running - things move slowly at this time of year (everyone is too full of good nosh). However I have been using my time between scoffing turkey sandwiches and mince pies productively to get some funky new features on the site. Here’s a sneak peak of a couple:
Operation: Sleeper Cell, our little fundraising game for Cancer Research UK, has been gradually winding up over the past few weeks. I’m hoping to keep the site up and running to let players continue to solve the puzzles and carry on donating if they’re feeling super-generous.
We got some wonderful news today - Aleks, of the Guardian’s Gamesblog, has named OSC as one of her top 5 games of the year amongst other greats such as Braid and LittleBigPlanet. Thank you Aleks!
I’ve had a few people tell me that some of their pictures aren’t showing up on Sackbook. After considerable hair-pulling I’ve worked out what’s going on and I think I’ve fixed it (slightly more technical detail after the jump!)
However there’s a slight problem; there’s now a few corrupt converted images out there which have either a black strip along the bottom, or a strip filled with funny colours. If you spot any of these on the site, please send me a message or leave a comment here with the address of the level or profile in question and I’ll get the site to reconvert them.
Continue reading ‘Sackbook and Corrupt Images’
