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

Anyway, I found myself looking at quite a few spots on Google Streetview but getting the location of a spot over from one to the other is a bit tricky. To help make things a little easier, I’ve created the following bookmarklet which embeds Google Streetview directly into the spot pages on www.gowalla.com.

Please note: This has only been tested in Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 and IE8.

javascript:d=document,e=d.createElement('script');e.src='http://ixalon.net/gwsv.js?'+(new Date()*1);void(d.body.appendChild(e));

This will fire up the main bookmarklet script at http://ixalon.net/gwsv.js (take a look to see how it works.)

Drag the following link to your bookmarks menu to add it: Show Google Streetview

Visit a spot page on Gowalla (e.g. the Arc de Triomphe at http://gowalla.com/spots/23328) and then enter the above bookmarklet into your browser’s address bar. Even better, add it as a bookmark and pick it from your bookmarks menu when viewing the page. You’ll get something like this:

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’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.

One unfortunate problem of not expecting such a plethora of great movies, is that I didn’t book many tickets in advance and a lot of screenings have sold out. I’m thinking that next year, if the line up is of this year’s quality, I’ll take a week off work, get a delgate pass and really get to see everything I want (and more!)

What I’ve seen, going to see, or would love to see this year, includes: Away We Go, Sin Nombre, Black Dynamite, Adventureland, Salvage, The Hurt Locker, Romeo & Juliet vs The Living Dead, Moon, Exam, Wide Open Spaces, Big River Man, Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (Guilty Pleasure!), Sam Mendes: In Person, Joe Dante: In Person, Darren Aronofsky: In Person, Wittertainment (Ok, not a film, but still jolly good fun!)

Hopefully some of those that I’ve not been able to get tickets for (especially Moon) will be chosen for the Best of the Fest screenings on the final Sunday of the festival (they are doing that this year?) Speaking of Moon, follow @ManMadeMoon on Twitter; the director of Moon and an amusing chap (in the nicest possible meaning of the word!) Also worth following are the Twitterverse’s movie reviewers at EIFF: @crappertay, @Filmstalker, @FilmFan1971, @itsonitsgone and @2weddings (If I’ve missed anyone, drop me a message and I’ll add you). Also, keep an eye on the tags #EIFF and #edfilmfest.

Now, the question is do my contributions to buyacredit.com and coproducer.org let me buy a “industry” delegate pass next year, or if not, do any budding film makers out there want a promotional website built?

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.

The Calman Commission does have some suggestions that I think will be almost universally supported, for example devolving air-gun legislation to the Scottish Parliament. Air gun crime is a big problem in Scotland and there is widespread approval for stronger legislation, something that Westminster has been hesitant to address.

However the commission had a great opportunity to come up with some revolutionary and innovative means of addressing the more deep-rooted constitutional and financial concerns, but instead has either ignored the most sensitive problems (for example the West Lothian Question) or has suggested yet more half-way-house measures, for example, proposed income-tax recommendations. The report suggests that the amount of tax levied by the UK Government on Scottish persons (it’s unclear if this is working for a Scottish company or domiciled in Scotland) should be lowered by 10p per pound, the block grant that the Scottish Parliament is currently funded by would drop the corresponding amount and that the Scottish Government may choose how much of that 10p (or indeed over 10p) be charged. Revenue raised by this “Scottish Income Tax” would be sent to a new Scottish exchequer for public spending by the Scottish Government, the idea being that the amount the Scottish Government could spend would be partly a consequence of their decisions.

There’s a problem with this method. The Scottish Goverment can already raise or lower income tax by 3p in the pound, but all parties have yet to do so as firstly it will likely cause a beaurocratic nightmare and secondly, as the majority of other taxes (such as cooperation tax, VAT, etc) are still set by the UK Government, there’s very little in way to balance these changes other than direct cuts or extra investment in public spending. As far as I can see Calman’s suggestions still result in these two problems, with the only difference being that the Scottish Government would have slightly less of an reason to blame lack of funding for public spending on decisions made in Westminster. However, since it’s less than 50% of one form of taxation (I believe around £5-6bn of a £33bn budget) the majority of public spending will still be dependant on monies and decisions from Westminster. What’s more, Calman has suggested the Scottish Income Tax should be the same across tax bands, so that the Scottish Parliament does not have the device of altering the ratio of how much is raised between base and high-earners.

So I can’t help feel that we’re pretty much back to where we started. Whilst change for change’s sake is best avoided, there appears a real need for it throughout the political world of the UK. Yet it feels as if there’s still a great inertia in UK politics; that change is frowned upon and only begrudgingly granted in the most minimal of forms.

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:

• Searching is a pain; it’s slow, especially when searching by track, and when searching by artist, you end up with results that when you follow them, there are no tracks available. It also doesn’t allow you to use a keyboard/chatpad unlike most apps/games on the PS3. Also bands with names beginning “The” are sorted under “T”, and searching for the prefix of the following word doesn’t seem to work.
• Adverts; not a pain in themselves, they are fairly unobtrusive, however when you click on them you are whisked out of VidZone to view the content the advert links to, close that and you are bought back into VidZone. The problem is your Now Playing content is lost so you have to queue up your tracks again.
• Video size; 4:3 videos are scaled to use the entire vertical resolution, widescreen format videos are not and appear in a small area in the centre of the screen. Apparently they’re working on this.
• Volume normalisation/Replay gain; seemingly non-existant, some videos are very quiet, some are very loud. This makes it quite hard to just leave VidZone on in the background for some ambient music. Edit: Excellent, they’re working on this one too.
• Startup; a minor niggle, but on starting VidZone you’re greeted with a startup progress twizzler thing (i.e. an infinite progress bar) for a considerable amount of time before it starts downloading track list data. I can’t work out what VidZone is doing on start up – it’s not accessing the network and it’s only a 30MB application to load. Then when you finally get into VidZone, your Now Playing queue has been cleared, so music won’t start playing until you queue up some videos. Possibly an option to reload your list, or start a-fresh would be nice.
• Inconsistent controls; when browsing songs, you have to use the square button to play now. Normal PS3 practice would be to use the ‘X’ button (which does seem to work in a few places.) Edit: Figured that one out – ‘X’ will play a song if your Now Playing list is empty (for example, the first time you find a song and press X, somewhat setting your expectation that it’ll always work like that.

There’s also a lot of unexplored opportunities that I’d love to see Rants Ltd and SCEE explore in VidZone:

• Take a leaf from last.fm and spotify; build in social tools, for example: playlist sharing, ability to show friends what you’re listening to, user-based video rating and associated “people who enjoyed this video also enjoyed” listings.
• Web integration; at least the ability to browse the track list online and ideally the ability to edit our playlists.
• Surely more can be made of the adverts? The best thing to sell to me when watching a video is something related to that track. What about Cross-selling track-related PSN content? For example, let me add a Rock Band or SingStore DLC versions of the track I’m currently watching to a basket. Don’t interrupt my viewing/listening experience though; it needs to be a quick 1 or 2 button press affair with an unobtusive interface overlayed on the bottom of the video (where ads and song information is currently shown). Give me the option to checkout there and then, but don’t force it.
• Track/band/video trivia would be a nice optional addition, similar to the overlays on some music channels. Has to really be optional though as many prefer to see the videos unobstructed by any overlays.
• A quick crossfade or some other smooth transition between tracks. Start streaming the next track earlier so there’s less of an abrupt break between each video.

Let me say again, that despite these quibbles, I really do love the service; it’s a great idea with a pretty good implementation. Seeing how receptive those behind the service are to feedback over Twitter, I’m sure that the creases will be ironed out over coming months. Every PS3 owner should at least give this a try – it is free after all.

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.