Ying Tong Iddle I Po

Do you ever wish you too could watch people pratting about entertaining students and making poor jokes about King’s College? Well now you can. Similarly, do you yearn to find out the approach the Inland Revenue takes when dealing with evil cheese-obsessed genii[1]? Again your desire can be satisfied.

Honest comments about whether this is a good idea or it is the worst idea since crustless bread and should be pulled before I embarrass myself further are welcome.

[1] Yes, I know.

Today oi ‘av been mostly attending Jennie’s graduation ceremony. A lovely lunch in Trinity followed by a less lovely time getting a numb bottie on a Senate House bench. In other news I’ve also been getting the Lights! Camera! Improv! poster sorted in preparation for printing. This involved adding some of the reviews from Whose ICE… and, along with Jennie, making a thespy ICE logo. The fruits of our work are available behind the cut.

Completely drained today, so much so that I might leave work a bit early today and go and have a nap. I’ve also been doing the first level of organisation for ICE’s new show Lights! Camera! Improv!. Touch-wood it seems to be less stressful than Whose ICE…

On a related note I’ve been working on and off since the show on a redesign for the ICE site. There is nothing wrong with the old one per se but it is a little clunky to maintain — a sort of wiki/static HTML hybrid. The new one is just a plain wiki but with a CMS-style feel to it.

The only thing I need to add to the new site is a link to people but I can’t really face thinking of amusing secret identities for them now.

I thought Windows was supposed to be easy to use! I’m trying to encode the video from Whose ICE… and I thought to myself ‘Hmm, I don’t want to spend any time on it, Windows is a media OS now, yeah?’. Initial signs were good, plug in camera and immediately Windows Movie Maker pops up and offers to transcode my DV to WMV (naturally). OK, thinks I, I’ll go ahead and rip it at sufficiently high bitrate that I can use it as a master to transcode later. After a bit of ripping the WMV comes back and is awful. Stuttering playback and choppy sound, even under WMP. Perhaps it’s been encoded at too high a bit rate. Looking at the file I see it is about 3Mb/min, high but not silly. Similarly playback is only taking 10% CPU so it must be the file.

Disheartened I decide to ask Windows Move Maker to just rip straight to DV-AVI. What can go wrong there? Well aside from the video being 178Mb/min, not much. After checking the space I set it going and am rewarded with an even worse file. The sound is choppy and the video randomly skips. this might be due to Windows fankly inexcusable disk access behaviour (a subject for a different day) but I don’t think so.

Bugger this, thinks I, and off I toddle to my Linux laptop. Plug in camera and type

dvgrab - | mencoder - -of avi -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -o whoseice.avi

which, for the less CLI oriented, means ‘grab DV from the camera and pass it to mencoder which will transcode it to a DivX file’. Bang, my camera automagically starts playback, mencoder springs into life and I have a completely acceptable file in an easily dealt with format.

What do people who haven’t got Linux to fall back on do when Windows just Wont Work (TM)?

Oh, and my last resort would’ve been my mac. Not because I think it any less capable but because I’d've had to buy a 4- to 6-pin firewire convertor :).

Our comedy show Whose ICE was it Anyhow? went down really well on Tuesday night. I was really very proud of the n00bs who have become highly accomplished comedians. In an unheard of development both Varsity and TCS reviewed us. From the Varsity review:

After a short warm-up act to get the audience in the mood for improvised humour, during which shouting out was encouraged and demanded, the audience was as involved in the comedy as the actors. It was this that made the show enjoyable, as every one-liner came across as a shared in-joke despite having been made up on the spot. This was improv at its best: endearing, entertaining and gut-wrenchingly funny.

And from the TCS review:

Improvised Comedy Ents truly are a force to be reckoned with. That rare amalgam of comic wit and speedy intelligence, the trademark of ADC comedy shows, has been showcased once more; “Whose ICE was it Anyhow?”, not unlike the hit television series “Whose Line is it Anyway?”, probes new depths of hilarious obscurity, and the results could not be better. The trepidation with which many people greet improvisation was assuaged from the start, as a production emerged of which Greg Proops and Ryan Stiles would be proud.

Unfortunately I now have to make sure our next show lives up to expectations…

I just noticed (whilst browsing LJ) that one can list one’s school. Interested I looked up my old school only to discover that not only had most people listed started school after I had already gone to Uni, some weren’t even born when I started secondary school!

One of the dangers with moving into a freshly renovated house is that there will be teething problems. We’ve had a couple with the plumbing and electrics having been done in a somewhat ‘hasty’ manner. Luckily our letting agents (Spires) are pretty on the ball and we’ve got the problems sorted relatively quickly.

This weekend’s joy was the downstairs lighting circuit blowing (the fuse properly blew, resetting it didn’t help). We now have lighting again but our fuse box needs to be re-wired ‘properly’.

Joys.

Tuesday 24th January
ADC Theatre, Park St.

11pm.

Be there, or miss out on some seriously funny comedy:

For the first time in as many weeks ICE will be presenting “Whose ICE was it Anyhow” at the ADC. An hour of improvised games and sketches, the content of which is driven by you the audience. Come and see the freshest new improv talent in Cambridge performing alongside the jaded ancient veterans in a fight to see who can make you laugh the most. Expect to enter strange new worlds and encounter mad civilisations, to baldly go into the barbers and to truly control a comedy show. 11pm Tues 24th January, 2006, the ADC theatre. See the ADC website for free online booking.

Well that is a personal best. Time from setting up GMail account to first bit of spam: 2 hours.

So the first GPLv3 draft has been released. Already we’re seeing the usual BSD (freedom as in freedom for developer) vs GPL (freedom as in freedom for user) holy wars start. Personally my stance has always been to not have a stance, i.e. choose the license which is most appropriate. For example the X11 windowing system’s reference implementation was intended to be extended in specific directions by many varied vendors in many varied markets and its license reflects freedom for the developer to do so. Something like the Linux kernel was intended, initially, for a small subset of hardware and, partially, for the education of at least its primary author and the GPLv2 suits that, slightly more central, development model nicely.

So will the GPLv3 occupy the same niche as the GPLv2? It would appear that the GPLv3 has been subject to a great deal of Stallman-isation which was, I suppose, to be expected. New things include explicit discussion of patent issues and Digital Restriction Management[1]. Despite its attempt to be a dry legal document there exist certain emotive words when dealing with these touchy subjects. If we strip these away to bullet points it aims to say, in addition to the usual GPLv2 stuff,

• DRM is bad m’kay?
• GPLv3-covered software may not be protected, in object or source form, with DRM.
• Any keys, etc, required to make a GPLv3-covered piece of software work on a particular system must be considered part of the source code.
• Patents are bad m’kay?
• If you knowingly rely on a patent license to distribute a bit of GPLv3 software one must either license the patent to all users or protect said users from any patent suits.
• The format used to distribute the source code must be unencumbered by patents. Interestingly, until recently, this would’ve meant you couldn’t distribute source in a ZIP-file. Similarly tricks like reading the source aloud in an MP3 file (a la DeCSS) is not allowed, although reading it in an Ogg Vorbis file would be.
• The licensee may impose additional patent retaliation restrictions on the license when they modify and distribute GPLv3 software. For example IBM might add a clause to any GPLv3 software distributed by them for AIX saying that if you try to sue them for patent infringement then you can no-longer make copies this software.
• Copyright law is mostly OK.
• Distributing a but of software is now anything that would require permission under local copyright law except making private copies and executing it on a computer. This puts a great deal more in the lawmakers hands than there was previously.

Basically if you agree with the above and are already using the GPLv2 then you’ll probably be happy using the GPLv3. The devil will be in the detail. For example, Philips have patents on some aspects of CD-ROM production. Strictly interpreting the GPLv3 seems to indicate that one cannot distribute software licensed under it via CD-ROM or indeed any patent-protected media. These restrictions on both the user and developer arise due to the proliferation of patents and their popularity beyond the software realm. Can I transport GPLv3 software in a vehicle with a patented ABS system?

The DRM clauses are less troublesome mostly due to the smaller footprint DRM has at the moment. It is still perfectly possible, and normal, to completely avoid DRM in most of one’s life. One might see the GPLv3 as an attempt to close some stable doors before the horse bolts.

Overall it isn’t as bad as it could be; indeed the DRM restrictions are far better than I expected. I fully expect the patent-restrictions to reveal a large number of annoying special cases in traditional software firms however and I especially see the clause about protecting your users from any patent infringement to be controversial.

[1] Choose your own spin-modified acronym here.