A week ago I posted on an Irish blogger who had his luggage lost, and with my upcoming trip to Amsterdam and Britain, the subject has occasionally popped into my head. This BBC article hasn’t done a lot to calm me down. With changing planes in both Kaliningrad and Amsterdam, to get to Birmingham International, with two or three airline companies involved, I do wonder if I will arrive at each destination at the same time as my suitcase… Apparently insurance claims for lost luggage have almost doubled in the last 6 months, though I do wonder if the article is little more than a press release for the insurance company quoted?
Aug 15 2007
CSI Plotline Prediction
I enjoy watching NCIS, CSI, and Waking The Dead (the first two via some Swiss satellite channels, with the 2nd audio channel selected to retain the original English sound track, and the 3rd program from BBC Prime). Anyway, according to a Daily Telegraph article, the science behind finger print analysis has just jumped forward. Basically, it is now possible to gauge someone’s sex, race, and even diet from fingerprints lifted from a crime scene.
The good aspect of this news? The TV programs I mentioned will soon be able to deviate a little from their standardised plot lines, and who knows, maybe in real life we will even see more criminals put behind bars? The bad news? Well given the lengths police officers have gone to in the past to frame people not guilty of a crime they are accused of, if juries are presented with this sort of evidence in the future, I can see it being a lot easier to jail people who have done nothing wrong, and I’m only really considering places like Britain. In countries with less reputable policing, hard labour or even executions could be punishments handed out in cases where this method of investigation is used. That is just considering the judicial side of things, when it comes to profiling done by non-police forces, with data collation in mind, I imagine the hard core conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day with this. Forget the tin foil hats, be prepared to see people with latex gloves on 24/7, when outside the house.
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Aug 14 2007
The Missing Link
A couple of months ago I posted about Charlie from Lost, or rather the actor that played that role. I included a couple of screen shots from an earlier role (Geoffrey Shawcross) he played in the ‘Hetty Wainthropp Investigates’ drama. Today I caught another episode in which Dominic Monaghan looks more like a young man than a teenager, slowly bridging the gap, looks wise, between Geoffrey and Charlie. Anyway, the shots are below.
original first image lost somewhere, somehow, sorry…
Hmm, seeing the pictures all together, maybe it was just the haircut, but watching the Hetty Wainthropp episode today, the cars looked a little more modern, and the character now has a love interest, so I am assuming there was at least a series or two between the episodes. The BBC Prime Satellite TV channel seems to do that quite a lot with their shows – jump around, and not follow chronological order. ‘My Family’ is the most obvious example of that – people keep getting younger and older, moving out of the house to live on their own, then the next day everyone is younger and living together again. Can’t really complain, it is still just brilliant to have any English language comedy and drama to watch, without having to download them 🙂
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Aug 14 2007
Tiscali Begs For Mercy
As you will know from my previous posts here, my opinion of Tiscali is pretty low. Having worked for ISPs in the past, and specifically for Tiscali’s technical support department at one point, I feel I have a little insight into their business methods. For your average, light-traffic user, they perhaps are slightly higher up than AOL, but not by a great deal.
Anyway, Tiscali has warned UK customers that they had better not start using video on demand (VoD) services a lot, or else the ISP will have to shape their traffic. Check the BBC article for a bit of background info. Well? I’m waiting…. have you read it yet? Right, I will assume you at least skimmed it… I loved the section where Tiscali refers to their current traffic shaping of other Peer To Peer based applications. Whilst they make it sound like no harm is done, many of their customers have reported dial-up like speeds. Combine that with Tiscali’s fair use policies, and you begin to see just how restrictive they are becoming.
You can of course see where the company is coming from – if everyone is using connection at 100% of its capacity 24/7, the whole network will suffer. However, as technologies and applications improve, the usage patterns on the internet will also follow suit. You can not realistically expect customers to not use VoD because their ISP has not got the infrastructure in place to cope with the demand. It simply reeks of Canute ordering the tide to turn back. (Though that is not the best analogy, as the King was merely proving one of his excessively complimenting courtiers that he was not all powerful).
Anyway, enough of my preaching on top of a soap box, I understand Tiscali is a business with a need to profit, they just always seem to rub me up the wrong way…
Aug 13 2007
Phishing For Whitehats Makes You Zombie-Like?
If this post’s title contained words that made no sense to you, then you may well be interested in a BBC list I came across. The idea is relatively simple, and executed pretty well; if you come across a term related to computer security you have not seen before, check out the article, and you may well find an explanation there.
If I have sent you to this post at some point in the future, it is probably because Mark Ward has done a better job of explaining a particular term than I could. Or I am just too lazy to do so myself. Apologies if so 😉
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Aug 02 2007
UK ISPs Misleading Customers
According to a recent BBC article, British internet service providers are not being completely forthright when it comes to advertising realistic figures for ADSL connection speeds. Although many quote figures of up to 8Mbps (1024Kbytes/second§), unless you happen to live next door to the local exchange. In actual fact, the average connection was only rated at 2.7Mbps!
I need to check how Mum and John’s connection is behaving when I get back to Britain, though they are with Pipex, so I am not to worried about it. I’ll also need to see if Dad wants to start his ADSL some time soon, so I can sort things out for him next month.
§ Obviously this figure does not take into account protocol overheads, and would require the server or collection of peers you are downloading from to be running at full steam.
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Aug 01 2007
RIP Frank/Mike
We manage to catch Eastenders on BBC Prime over here, and it only seems to be a week or two behind the UK broadcasts. As you may already know Mike Reid (who played Frank in Eastenders) passed away having suffered a heart attack. To people a little older than me, he was well known previous to his soap career, with a respectable career as a stand up comedian, and even a childrens TV show presenter. Previous to that, he worked as a stuntman in The Saint TV series, and the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!
Although his exit from Eastenders was probably a good move, his time on the show certainly bought a lighter note to many storylines.
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Jul 31 2007
Northern Ireland – Good News
No, I am not referring to the obvious here (the situation is now stable enough there for the army to change their role in the community, allowing the police to handle all but the most severe of situations by themselves), but instead the fact that Northern Ireland will soon have its very own localized version of Sesame Street!
In case you think I have had too much to drink this evening, check out the BBC article for a little verification…
One of the main aims for the programme is to help educate the urban children about life in the country, for which two new characters will be introduced. With the sad demise of Jim Henson a few years back, I’m not sure who ‘does’ the voices now, but if they mix American and Irish accents from the North, it should be an interesting mix.
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Jul 31 2007
One For Alex
Alex has been a little in the real world recently, so her blog (Dryad Musings) is a little lacking in recent posts, but perhaps this will spur her on? Anyway, next year, her and her brother are hoping to go on a survival experience, and so when I read about an American survival TV show hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons, I thought of Alex.
It turns out Bear Grylls had not in fact been roughing it every night for his ‘Man vs. Wild’ (‘Born Survivor: Bear Grylls’ in the UK) program, which many people had assumed after watching the show. He had in fact done his bits on camera, then some nights slept the night in a motel or hotel over night. I just hope they never do that sort of thing on Ray Mears’ Bushcraft shows – we catch them on BBC prime over here, quite a good show.
Jul 25 2007
Eagle Eyed Ira Spots Flooding (Pictures)
Many thanks to Irina for spotting the following pictures covering the ongoing problems in Gloucestershire with the recent flooding.
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