Find out if the show you really want to see is sold out (or selling fast) without going through the lengthy booking procedure on the EIFF/Filmhouse Boxoffice sites. (Technical note: it’s all done in as friendly a way possible, to limit the load on the stressed EIFF site, and not to obtain or hold any ticket reservations itself.)

Check it out by visiting www.ixalon.net/eiff

So, what’s the current state of play in general for catching up on missed TV using a PS3 in the UK?

The BBC is clearly well ahead of the others here, but Five’s offering is surprisingly good. STV could fix their site with some small tweaks to allow the Flash player to load correctly, but the others have far more work to do if they wish to take advantage of all those PS3 users hungry for easy-to-access TV content.

Anyway, the situation in general highlights problems both broadcasters and hardware platform owners currently have; in a world of standards, there’s very little standard across both the catchup content from the broadcasters and the environments provided by each device. In a case of “somebody else’s problem” broadcasters need to produce and distribute a large number of different encodes to cover different devices as well as produce interfaces bespoke to (or specifically optimised for) each device they wish to support. Hardware platform owners also face similar problems; specific support for each broadcaster has to be added and where 3rd-party licensed technology is used, the appropriate and often costly licenses obtained.

We can only hope that cross-broadcaster projects and standards (such as the ill-fated Project Kangaroo and the pending Project Canvas) get the green-light and are eventually widely adopted.

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.

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.

The background – during high school, when the net was a new-fangled thing and your 2400 baud modem was breaking land-speed records, I stumbled across the world of MUDs. In ‘96ish I got hooked on a MUD called The Rifts (hard to remember but think it was this one) and eventually became an God/Administrator on it for a short length of time so I could build my own area of the game. When the world of alcohol, uni and surreptitious games of Starcraft arrived in ‘98 I managed to kick the habit, but I’d only been cold turkey for a year, when I was introduced to The Chatting Zone (TCZ).

Looking back on it, TCZ was way ahead of it’s time – it was Facebook on a smaller scale and fully embraced the idea of user-generated content in a game; it let users build a social network, socialise and build areas, applications and games for other users (we had a user-coded TCZ Scrabble way before Scrabulous!) The main difference being that it was primarily telnet-based and that there just wasn’t the audience, outside of the geeky world of MUDS, for these things back then.

I was an admin on (and far too addicted to) TCZ for years until it was shut down due to the host (a University) permanently pulling the plug on the server. We had our backup, UglyMUG (which was the pre-cursor to TCZ), but it really rather lived up to the name, and just didn’t have the user-friendly and colourful atmosphere of TCZ (we were the bain of some UglyMuggers’ lives with our bold,  bright and colourful emotes and tells). So I came up with a cunning plan to build a proper replacement. At that point the TCZ source code wasn’t available, and the MUD/MUSH engines available (e.g. TinyMUSH) left a lot to be desired, so my decision was to build an engine from scratch in my preferred language of the time, Java.

I got quite a long way into development with my Java version before TCZ found itself a new home and I got hooked again. However its resurrection was short-lived; it soon vanished off the scene again and I revisited my replacement code, this time with a TCZ friend concentrating on world-building. I did have JavaTCZ up and running privately for a little while, but the memory overhead was just too high and speed of execution of the game’s built-in scripting language was appalling; for a world/database the size of TCZ’s I was going to need to implement swapping of in-game objects off to disk, and Java’s IO performance at the time was pretty poor. I decided to recode it all using C++.

It took about a year to rebuild but we ended up with something pretty impressive. It had all the functionality of TCZ, was syntax compatible with TCZ’s scripting language, had a number of language extensions (such as a foreach syntax, multi-dimensional arrays and matrix operations) along with other hardcoded implementations of useful softcoded TCZ features (such as global teleports, built-in dictionary, standard format emote commands) and brand new features like our categorised chat rooms, auto-completion, syntax highlighting and code formatting. What’s more, it was MUCH faster than my original Java version and had a much smaller memory footprint. We got on-board quite a few former expert TCZ users and got a lot of the popular softcoded functionality recreated.

The important improvements were with the interface with the outside world. TCZ did have a limited web-interface but we took it much further; commands could be targetted to the web, and actions on the website could trigger user-scripted event handlers attached to users, rooms, objects, etc. We also had streamlined chat and IM interfaces, mudmail and bulletin board web interfaces, and POP and SMTP integration with the mudmail system. I’m not quite sure what happened with it, why we stopped – it was probably due to other things keeping me busy then eventually TCZ reappearing on the scene. I’ve still got the code (of both the Java and C++ versions) lying around on some dusty HDD somewhere, but there seems little point in revisiting it now everything has moved on to the web.

This was back in 2000/1, a full 2 years before Facebook was a glint in Zuckerberg’s eye, and the notion of user-generated content in games is only now just being realised.

So, not one to repeat previous mistakes, this post is an attempt at getting myself psyched up to crack on with another neat, but highly ambitious, idea I’ve been mulling over. More on that soon hopefully!

Hearted Users (Subsample from early December). Generated by fdp (graphviz). 2877 nodes, 3803 edges. Click to enlarge.

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.

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:

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!

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.

What went wrong? Well when working out LBP’s texture format (so I could convert the pictures to a format you can see in your web-browser) I only looked at photos taken in-game (which are 320×180px), turns out the pictures you take using a PlayStation Eye are slightly larger, at 320×240px. This pushes the filesize over a limit at which the structure of the file changes slightly. I hadn’t accounted for this and so the conversion process quit unexpectedly.

The framerate isn’t as smooth as I’d like, so I might try and implement the BBC’s high/normal quality switch so users can decide between image quality or framerate.

Update: It didn’t take long for me to have enough of the choppy playback. I’ve gone ahead and implemented the BBC’s high/normal quality switch. As with the BBC’s iPlayer on the PC, the default quality is ‘normal’ and if you click ‘Play high quality’, it will play the H.264 stream. You can tell which version it’s going to play as it appears in parentheses after the ‘Press X to play’ message.