Monthly Archives: April 2006

Doctor Who

Only Two Weeks To Go

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Auntie Beeb is starting to get going on the pre-publicity for the new series of Doctor Who, with a Radio Times article this week, plus the big press launch last week, and trailers already getting going on the TV.

What is interesting is that both the main Doctor Who site and the official BBC line is that the date of the premier of the new series is still ‘TBA’, or in the week beginning 15th April. This is despite the first of the ‘TARDISODES‘ – special episode prequels for each story – which was released yesterday, stating Saturday 15th April. This is the date that everybody has been suggesting since Christmas.

The clips I’ve seen so far, together with various of the hints that have been dropped are pretty tantalising. This first episode looks like it revolves around a hospital that can cure anything, but that has a dark secret at the centre (don’t they always…). It also includes the return of a couple of ‘faces’ from last year. It’s also become pretty apparent that the show has lost it’s fear of referring back to the ‘classic’ series, especially as my impression is that many of the new fans are lapping up the classic shows that go out weekly on UK Gold. Indeed even the first of the phoney web sites set up this year – the Leamington Spa Lifeboat Museum site (take a look at Defending the Earth for some clues) – refers to the Tom Baker story The City of Death. Of course the biggest evidence of this will be later in the new series when Sarah-Jane Smith and K-9 make guest appearances.

The build-up is only going to increase over the next couple of weeks. Next week, as part of a 1973 season BBC4 is showing the 1973 story The Green Death, and they follow that up with a Doctor Who Weekend which includes a repeat showing of The Christmas Invasion, plus a repeat run of last years series over the weekend and rest of the week. Certainly I hope that the new series can live up to the build up!

Computers/Technology, Pictures

What is Flickr? (In Four Words)

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One of the blogs I read quite regularly is The Flickr Blog, which is a companion weblog to the main Flickr site. One of the interesting recent posts came partly out of their move to being part of Yahoo!, and how they now had to in some eyes waste time trying to articulate the vision behind Flickr for the wider organisation. Whilst you could describe what it does, i.e. allows people to store their pictures online, that doesn’t say it all, it’s also not right to look at it as some sort of vast stock photo library. You can throw terms around like Web 2.0 or Social Computing, but none of these give the kind of big corporate vision type description that was needed.

What they came up with was ‘The Eyes of the World‘ – which I think does do a good job of summing it up.

For the purposes of the article, they looked at some of the big events recently that have been captured on Flickr. In the same way as with the London Bombings, and Buncefield one of the best places to find images of the events has been on Flickr. Take for example this incredible picture from the recent riots in France posted by Hugo*, which really has to be viewed large. The article also highlights the recent demonstrations in Blelarus which were largely ignored by the local state controlled media.

However it’s not all big events. Many people also share events that on an international scale are small, but in many ways just as important. The The Flickr Blog highlighted this with their post yesterday called ‘A daughter is born and a father is dying‘ which highlights two of the deeply personal pictures that people choose to share with the rest of the community on Flickr. It very much goes to back up their description as the ‘Eyes of the World’.

Apple/Mac, Computers/Technology

A Mac User Switching Colour Profile Bug Workaround

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As with any platform, there are always the odd one or two bugs or quirks that annoy you. With the Mac, ever since we got a MacOS 10.4 machine, there is one that annoys me with the Fast-User switching. If you’ve not come across the feature, it allows the Mac to be logged on as me, and for Beth to come and check her e-mail without my having to log off – Windows XP will do something similar (although without the flashy MacOS X rotating cube effect).

However, I have a calibrated monitor profile set up on my account, that has a slightly darker, higher contrast set up to the default set up that Beth uses on her account. When the machine swaps over to her account, and then back to mine, I’m left stuck in Beth’s high contrast profile. More than that, the colour profile control panel doesn’t allow me to change back to my profile since the profile it is using is Beth’s, not mine.

However a few days ago, the MacOSXHints Weblog came up with a solution that is as simple as running the DMProxy application that is buried deep in the core graphics libraries. Beth has just checked her e-mail, the colour profile messed up, but I’ve tried it and it works. The page explains the problem (with an example screenshot of the effect) and goes through the solution, and how to set up a quick shortcut too.

Church, Politics

Is Climate Change a Reality?

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If you read Dave Walker’s Cartoon Blog you may have seen that he picked up on my report of this weeks lent lecture with an appropriate cartoon. What is also interesting is that if you look at the comments on his posting, he’s also attracted attention from a North American group who maintain that there isn’t any climate change, going for a bit of free publicity.

I had a read through their site, which was really quite interesting, particularly in the context of some of the things that Professor James said on Wednesday night.

As I’m not a climate specialist, I’m not going to try and either back Professor James, or try and debunk the science put forward by this group. If you are at all concerned I’d suggest that you run the names of the people in the group listed on this page through Google, and see what you find.

What I will say is that the one thought that strikes me over the whole thing, is a comparison of what would happen if we believed one group over the other and subsequently discovered that they were wrong.

Say we believed Professor James and the ‘Climate Change is happening’ group, and they turn out to be wrong, true you wouldn’t be able to get strawberries at Christmas, but ultimately we’d all be living in a less polluted environment. The effects would primarily seem to be economic.

However, look at it the other way. What if we believe the ‘There is no Climate Change’ lobby, and they are wrong. Say they are wrong and the levels of pollution that are being produced are sending us towards a climate change catastrophe. Take a look at the heat wave that occurred in France a couple of years ago was cited as the cause for thousands of deaths. Consider that on a global scale. If we mess up this planet, there is nowhere else that we can go – certainly no other planets in the solar system that could sustain life. This is it, if we mess this planet up, we’re all dead. I guess it depends how much of a gambler you are, but to be honest I’m not a gambler, and I don’t see that there is much of a choice.