“they’re applauding because i’m a pissant”

Freeview

Freeview has been around for a month on my non-Freeview tuner. I don’t get to use the MHEG-5 based EPG but contrary to some press reports I still have an EPG. Given that’s how I select what to record on the Topfield PVR I would not be terribly happy if it disappeared.
I am happy to have TV3 and C4 available to record. The Daily Show now gets selected in my weekly time-shifting trawl through the EPG, where I select the programmes that week that will get recorded and which we will watch…whenever and without commercials. After a hard days work a bit of Jon Stewart with dinner is nice way to start the evening. The quote above is from last night’s show, or rather the episode that I watched last night, but was probably recorded the night before.

Final Cut Pro & MXF

Talking of work I never really concluded the discussion of my investigation into mixing FCP and MXF within a workflow. FCP 6.0 does not provide any MXF capabilities period. Compressor 3, bundled as part of FCP Studio, can use an optional Episode Pro plugin from Telestream that provides the ability to rewrap QuickTime <=> MXF. I believe that Omneon’s ProExchange also provides this functionality.
In the scenario that I was looking into we’ll probably stick with QuickTime from ingest through production and play-out but will rewrap into MXF for archiving.

Python and the Nokia E65

Don’t have much time for happy hacking the Nokia E65. I am a bit disappointed that the 3rd edition S60 security model is so restrictive that I couldn’t get some of the API to produce any results in my initial peeking. location.gsm_location() produces nada without ReadDeviceData, ReadUserData, and Location privileges. It seems that in order to get these privileges on the phone you own you need to acquire a developer certificate. Hmmmmmm.
I’m not a big user/fan of Twitter but I was planning to do a proof of concept script that would update Twitter as one moved between cell locations.

Lastly

Jim Barksdale argues for the need to more effectively archive our bits.
And given Microsoft’s recent patent threats this video of Columbia Law Professor, Eben Moglen, is worth five minutes of your time.