Ying Tong Iddle I Po

Because of the bloody stupid Andy Murray, BBC2 has now become BBC1 and what was BBC1 has now become BBC ‘lets-eek-the-time-before-the-inevitable-failure-out’. Consequently, the one decent programme on tonight, ‘The Supersizers…’ has been cancelled.

I just sent the following to the BBC:

OK. I’m going to hold up my hand Auntie. I really don’t care if Andy ‘Tim’ Murray wins his match. I am in the minority I realise. The rest of my household loves the silly fool and cares deeply about his progress.

One thing we all agree on, however, is how much we love the Supersizers… And how we’re all capable of watching the Murray match on any one of the thousand or so *other* ways Wimbledon can be enjoyed on the BBC.

Imagine our suprise when, upon tuning in to get our weekly fix of the garrulous gastronomes, we were presented with the tail end of Panorama. Subsequent investigation revealed that, no, our digibox was not suffering from some confusion, BBC2 had indeed become BBC1.

If the BBC is going to launch BBC Murray, please have the good grace to do it sooner rather than later so that I can sit safe in the knowledge that the, already inordinately huge Wimbledon coverage, won’t be extended to quite frankly cringeworthy proportions.

Now, I know that the response to this will inevitably be ‘we decided that the Murray match was important and you are just some crotchety old fool who is probably sat at home counting his collection of interesting 1950s biscuit tins’. If not in so many words, then indeed in spirit. Well, I’ll have you know that said collection of tins is terribly interesting. If this were the One Show, we’d have a Z-list commedian or someone who was the offspring of someone else famous come and look at them. We’d have a nice little interview where I’d give a couple of soundbites that Adrian Chiles can mock in a nice gentle manner while the interchangable ‘regional presenter’ rolls her eyes.

So, BBC. Stop pandering to the stupid ‘Murray Mania’ and realise that you are providing a programme of television, i.e. a set of *different things*.

Right. Demons have be exorcised and this crotchety old man (28 years old BTW) can go back to his train set.

There is a new Firtree demo up on YouTube. This shows Firtree’s integration with GStreamer so that it can process video.

The video is also embedded below so that I can make all your RSS aggregators eat CPU :).

So my friend, Rebecca, was on Knightmare. I am genuinely incredibly impressed.

Here is a (pretty) little video showing the power of the new GObject-ified Firtree. Having signals as a first-class citizen in the Firtree world allows for dynamic pipeline editing as never before. In this example, the entire GUI is written in Python and uses Firtree underneath for the hard work. The rendering is done by Firtree on the CPU making use of multi-core where appropriate transparently.

If you want to see full HD version, or to download it, take a look at the ogg version or on YouTube.

An article in The Times got me thinking today. It was a moderately well researched article into the impact of DAB on resource usage and the ‘green impact’ of the decision that analogue AM/FM will be no-more for national stations by 2015.

As a summary of the article, it makes the following points:

1. “digital radios use more than four times the energy (8.5 watts) of analog [sic] (average 2 watts).”
2. When switched off “they are computers on permanent standby - like leaving a light on full-time.”

Now, we shall leave for a moment Ms Purves’ confusion between energy and power, and her inexcusable Americanism and come to the meat of these sentences. Does switching ‘off’ a DAB radio really raise it’s power usage to 60W? I think not.

It is fun to be a pedant and micro-analyse her article, which one could easily do. In the same way that getting a tasty trout for dinner using a gun and a large water butt is easy.

Let us address her main point: DAB is less green than analogue. Now there is no one measure of ‘resource’ usage. Power usage is of course one but one which can at least be amortised into ‘greener power’. A far scarcer resource (and one mandated by the laws of Physics) is bandwidth in the EM spectrum. Oil and gas may well run out in 20 years, but the EM spectrum has already been plundered as much as it is able. In terms of spectrum usage, the DAB wikipedia article performs a back-of-envelope calculation to show how DAB uses over 17 times less effective spectrum bandwidth than FM (despite the bandwidth for both being around 0.2MHz/channel).

As a wider concern, people should not focus on one resource number to measure environmental impact. There is no such number. Who is to say how many ‘resource units’, 1W of standby power is compared to 1MHz of bandwidth? It is impossible. Instead one should prioritise the scarcest resource while attempting to keep the impact on other resources as low as possible. DAB correctly optimises for the scarcest resource while allowing other resource usage to be optimised over time without impact on the system as a whole (e.g. individual unit power requirements).

Widening the scope even further, it does annoy me when the green lobby come in and attempt to micro-optimise one small area without looking at the bigger picture.