TV Search

With the increasing fusion of traditional broadcast and internet based TV services, search is playing an increasing role.

But I am beginning to think it is misplaced in a sit back experience. Our daily lives are already based around (mostly) futile Google searches that need to be refined and tailored to deliver results. How frustrating that is in a TV experience! It is almost like the providers are saying "we've got this stuff and we're not too sure how to present it to you, why don't you just search and find what you want - save us the trouble".

Other arguments against search are lack of content, does a legitimate provider really have a catalogue of more than a few hundred items at a time? Probably not for the next five years or so, beyond that then maybe - although the commercial drivers for this seem dubious.

What would I want, a presentation by good old fashioned genres easy to navigate and channel neutral with filters to get rid of content I don't want (i.e. in my case pay for) - that would work!

Film: Jonathan Livingston Seagull directed by Hall Bartlett

A quirky film that uses a series of metaphors about the life of a seagull that can be reflected and applied to human life.

The story follows one seagull and his desire to break free of the accepted norms of his species, one particular issue seems to have been the limitations of how high or fast a seagull should be able to fly.

Jonathan is cast out from his flock for such free thinking and then goes on a voyage to find more free thinking he individuals. This he predictably finds and then becomes his salvation.

The accompanying sound track and songs are composed by Neil Diamond - and this fact made me curious to watch this, in an interview Diamond does list this era as a low point of his career though - there are certainly no Sweet Caroline tracks hidden in this film.

The film also has some impressive nature photography. I think back in the 1970s it would have been a ground breaking film maybe a vehicle for the photography, but time is rarely kind so it just feels a little bit ordinary now.

Watch if curious 6/10.

Ready NAS Duo drive mounting

For home use I use ReadyNAS Duos - the Netgear entry level RAID capable NAS.

Overall they are pretty good, a little underpowered on processor/memory but for the price they sell you cannot really complain. Also with them taking up to 2TB commodity drives it makes for very cheap storage.

One thing though, what if the NAS hardware failed but you wanted to recover the drive. No point moving to another Ready NAS if you had one as it would probably just re-initialise the drives.

The same thing is of course true of enterprise level RAIDs you would probably have to worry about controller firmwares or recover from backup.

Except I do not have a backup, as the NAS kind of already is used for that purpose.

I was dismayed to read that although using an ext3 filesystem they use SPARC chips and a block size of > 4096 KBytes. The x86 linux kernel can only mount 4K block size ext3 filesystems.

So it was looking like all was lost until I read about Fuse that provides file system support in userspace (so no kernel restriction nonsense). These packages come with Linux distros and I needed to compile a ext2 plugin fuse-ext2.

I hooked up a spare drive from a previous NAS upgrade to a USB caddy and:

Scan the logical volumes to get the logical volume names, ReadyNAS uses "c" as its name"
vgscan

Activate c ready for mounting
vgchange -ay c

Make a mount point
mkdir /tmp/lvm

Run the userspace mount:
ext2fuse /dev/c/c /tmp/lvm    (note fuse-ext2 on debian)

And you can then see the ReadyNAS files. Very handy for recovery this technique, apparently the non standard block size was for performance which is understandable but it is also very useful to know you can do this to get your data back!

Carrier good news

In a small way that is, the US have just trialled the new catapults that will be used on future carriers.

This is replacing the steam catapult it seems:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_Aircraft_Launch_System

So for once Lewis Page can report on a defence success:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/21/emals_launch_success/

So all we need to hear now is the Type 45 might have an operational missile system within 10 years and then the Navy will be ready!

Voyager 1 at Solar Wind Edge

Pretty incredible it has travelled this far and still returning information:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11988466

Student Protests

The controversial vote has now happened for a big increase in tuition fees, consigning the students of today to a much bigger debt burden than ever before.

The Lib Dems have come out badly from this, and I just wish we could switch to a parallel world where they were still in opposition - would they change their policy once it became clear the public finances could not maintain the levels of students? I'd like to think yes, but know that it would be highly unlikely.

It is difficult to objectively look at the policy aside of all the heated demonstration and police confrontation. It is a big step into the unknown raising the tuition fees so high. I've got a feeling that maybe cutting back on higher education that was not deemed to be as useful to the economy with more modest rises would have been preferable.

Of course this cutback may now happen naturally now that tuition fees are hiked so high making study less attractive. Also I've a feeling that students will now be looking more closely at what they are getting for their payments.

Film: 2001 - A Space Odyssey Directed by Stanley Kubrick

I watched this film to compare to 2010 close together. Nice to have the chance to skip forward in scenes that are a bit too arty and probably only worked on the big screen.

This film is a lot more polished, watching again having read the various interpretations over the years was interesting.

The initial part of the film contains no dialog and depicts earth and the apes living on the planet. I think the idea here is that they are dying out until the unseen push provided by the obelisk that suddenly appears, and seems to give them basic weapon and tool skills.

The film then goes straight into 2001, with man in orbit now around their planet. A magnetic anomaly is found on the moon, and excavation finds the obelisk buried. Something happens on further investigation that causes a deafening noise and radio signal to be sent directed at Jupiter.

The Discovery mission is then 18 months later travelling to Jupiter to investigate, all in secret preparation - scientists in hibernation aboard. Two crew members run the ship along with the HAL 9000 computer.

HAL has been given the real reason for the mission, to be revealed on arrival at Jupiter - but this somehow makes him paranoid and fearing the humans will make a mess of the mission. He proceeds by faking failures of the AE-35 part of the antenna in order to systematically kill the crew members.

The surviving astronaut deactivates HAL after forcing his way back into the ship from EVA. But now the Jupiter obelisk has been discovered - he goes to investigate.

Passing through what appears to be some sort of time distortion he arrives in a furnished room, and then we see scenes of himself ageing quickly before death.

The final scene is of a unborn baby overlooking the planet earth, a story of evolution assisted by an unseen influence.