The newsroom and possibly, significant portions of the archives of CTV Ottawa turned into smoke last night. Newsrooms can be rebuilt, equipment can be repurchased, no lives were lost, but the archives may be irreplaceable.
What’s up with all these big fires here in Ottawa this winter?
I have done many things in my misguided past as a programmer, but strangely, I never did much work with XML. Which is why a recent annoyance turned into an interesting learning opportunity.
I usually watch TV on my computer. (This is why I see more TV than many people I know… not because I am a TV junkie who really “watches” it, I am actually working, but I have, e.g., CNN running in the background, in a small window, and I do occasionally pay attention when I see something unusual. Or change to a channel with The Simpsons.) For years, I’ve been using various ATI All-In-Wonder cards. (No, I don’t recommend them anymore; whereas in the past, they used to attach a tuner to some of their really high-end cards, this is no longer the case, the base graphics hardware of their current crop of AIW cards is quite lame. Their current software sucks, too.) The old ATI multimedia program I am using, while far from perfect, is fairly robust and reliable, and among other things, it comes with a built-in program guide feature. A feature that downloads programming information from an online server.
Except that, as of last week, it was no longer able to do so; the server refused the request. Several customers complained, but to no avail; they were not even able to get through to the right people.
So what is a poor programmer to do? I have known about Schedules Direct, the fee-based but non-profit, low-cost replacement of what used to be a free service from Zap2It, providing the ability to download TV guide data for personal use. The information from Schedules Direct comes in the form of XML. The ATI multimedia program stores its data in a Paradox database. In theory, the rest is just a straightforward exercise of downloading the data and loading it into the Paradox tables, and presto: one should have updated programming information.
Indeed things would be this simple if there were no several hurdles along the way.
First, the Paradox database is password-protected. Now Paradox passwords are a joke, especially since well-known backdoor passwords exist. Yet it turns out that those backdoor passwords work only with the original Borland/Corel/whatever drivers… third party drivers, e.g., the Paradox drivers in Microsoft Access 2007, do not recognize the backdoor passwords. Fortunately, cracking the password is not hard; I used Thegrideon Software’s Paradox Password program for this purpose, and (after payment of the registration fee, of course) it did the trick.
Second, the Microsoft drivers are finicky, and may not allow write access to the Paradox tables. This was most annoying, since I didn’t know the cause. Eventually, I loaded the tables on another machine that never saw the original Borland Database Engine, but did have Access 2007 installed (hence my need for a “real” password, not a backdoor one), and with this machine, I was able to write into the files… not sure if it was due to the absence of the BDE, the fact that I was using Office 2007 as opposed to Office 2003, or some other reason.
So far so good… Access can now write into the Paradox tables, and Access can read XML, after all, Microsoft is all about XML these days, right? No so fast… That’s when I ran into my third problem, namely the fact that Access cannot read XML attributes, whereas a lot of the programming information (including such minor details like the channel number or start time) are provided in attribute form by Schedules Direct (or to be more precise, by the XMLTV utility that I use to access Schedules Direct.) The solution: use XSLT to transform the source XML into a form that Access can digest properly.
With this and a few lines of SQL, I reached the finish line, more-or-less: I was able to update the Paradox tables, and the result appears digestible to the ATI media center application… though not to the accompanying Gemstar program grid application, which still crashes, but that’s okay, I never really used it anyway.
And I managed to accomplish all this just in time to find out that suddenly, the ATI/Gemstar update server is working again… once again, I can get programming information from them. More-or-less… a number of channels have been missing from the lineup for a long time now, so I may prefer to use my solution from now on anyway. Perhaps when I have a little time, I’ll find out what causes the crash (I have some ideas) and the program grid application will work, too.
Needless to say, I know a lot more about XML and XSLT than I did 24 hours ago.
Vyacheslav Tikhonov is not exactly a household name in the English-speaking world, but to most Russians and many East Europeans, especially if they’re of my age or older, he is well-known as the Soviet-era actor who played Standartenführer Stirlitz, perhaps the greatest of all fictional spies, and protagonist of the 1973 black-and-white television series Seventeen Moments of Spring. A series that, incidentally, I recently purchased on DVD, and I was surprised to find that it remains highly enjoyable; not only is it light on communist ideology, it also manages to portray the German enemy as humans, which is somewhat unusual for films of this era.
Anyhow, the sad news is that Tikhonov has died.
I like good science-fiction.
Which is why a few years ago, I was about to give up on science-fiction in television. Star Trek: Enterprise was one of the last nails in the proverbial coffin, but my disenchantment probably began much earlier, with Star Trek: The Next Generation, describing a seriously damaged “Utopian” future in which the flagship of the United Federation of Planets is so screwed up, they need a psychiatrist on the bridge.
But then came shows the “re-imagined” Battlestar Galactica. Or Farscape. Or Lexx. Or Charlie Jade. Or even the awkwardly titled Total Recall 2070. Uniquely well done science fiction, which made television enjoyable again.
And then there was the Stargate franchise. I heard about the original movie, but never saw it. I only began watching Stargate SG-1 when it was into its sixth season. But, it didn’t take long to get hooked. Finally, science-fiction in which the protagonists are likable, intelligent professionals who act like rational human beings, not like messed up, spoiled brats. Stargate Atlantis, while less successful, continued in that tradition.
Now we have Stargate Universe. I’m still trying to like it, and it has its good moments. Few and far between, unfortunately. Meanwhile, we see messed up people engaged in gratuitous sex scenes, including sex while occupying someone else’s body. Yes. They’re billions of light years from the Earth, using unimaginably advanced alien technology to temporarily swap bodies with a terrestrial volunteer, to enjoy a few minutes with their friends and family back home… and then they promptly abuse the “loaner” body by getting drunk, engaging in sex (with partners who apparently don’t seem to mind that their loved ones look, smell, and sound like complete strangers) and even getting into fights, all with the tacit approval of the United States Air Force, which arranges these body-swapping visits.
Give me a break. I used to enjoy Stargate because, despite its flaws and sometimes (?) questionable science, it was fundamentally an intelligent show written for intelligent people. I’m still trying to find that spark of intelligence in Stargate Universe, but I may have to give up hope soon. At least I’ll be watching a little less television and have more time to do useful things.
Now I think I know why Rogers were so perplexed when Ottawa viewers like me complained about the planned change in its cable lineup, replacing WPBS from Watertown with a Detroit PBS channel.
You see, they must have known all along that we won’t be watching either.
Although they were citing signal quality as the reason for the planned change, reality is that the signal quality on cable channel 64 was just fine. I never had any problems watching WPBS there. However, now that they moved this and two other channels to the 95-97 range (cable channels that happen to coincide in frequency with FM radio) this is no longer true: the signal quality on these channels is just unacceptable.
I phoned them and they wanted to send a technician. I talked them out of that. Now my only hope is that some of my neighbors will phone also, and they escalate the problem.
Or maybe it’s time to dump cable TV after all and just get satellite? The main reason why I am keeping cable is the convenience if a set-top-box-less existence… if I need a set-top box, I might as well stick with digital cable. But set-top boxes are such a nuisance, especially when used together with a computer tuner card.
Perhaps it’s time to return to a good old-fashioned aerial. Never mind analog TV, I can get some HD digital channels even with a tiny indoor antenna… who knows what a decent aerial might do?
Rogers blinked. This is highly unusual, as they don’t listen to their customers very often, but I am grateful that they reconsidered their decision, and we get to keep WPBS on cable.
I received a notice from Rogers Cable in the mail this morning, about their decision to shuffle some channels about in the cable lineup. The notice is a little confusing: two stations are moved from channels 61 and 69 to 95 and 96, but does this mean that they are becoming digital-only stations? 95-96 do exist as analog cable channels, but Rogers never used these high channel numbers in the analog lineup, so I am not sure. I am concerned because I am not a fan of proliferating set-top boxes and remotes, so I remain a happy analog cable customer for now… but I fear that the beginning of the end is near, and set-top boxes will soon be inevitable.
But I am even more concerned about another change: the station on channel 64, WPBS from Watertown, is altogether being removed from the lineup, to be replaced by a PBS channel from Detroit. Rogers has done this in the past, replacing US network channels that were coming to us from Watertown with their Detroit equivalents, and I can’t say that we are better off with that change. However, WPBS is special: it has many supporters, even many volunteers in the Ottawa area, and the channel has been serving the Ottawa valley faithfully for many decades.
Rogers claims that they’re doing what they’re doing in response to customer demand. Forgive my French but… piss off, will ya? Months ago I phoned Rogers about a simple problem, namely that the audio on several analog channels (including music channels) is missing either the left or the right channel (yes, I checked, it’s not my equipment.) You’d think that a company concerned about their customers would fix such a simple and embarrassing technical issue. But they didn’t. So I can perhaps be forgiven if I call their sad little excuse a flat out, unadulterated, shameless lie.
Discovery Canada advertises its lineup of programs for next week. On several occasions now they announced the following:
“Destroyed in Seconds… right after How It’s Made.”
I could be wrong but I don’t think that the humor was intentional.
There is something positively charming about the random nature of the Internet.
I am watching a British comedy, One Foot in the Grave, on Vision TV (as to why a supposedly religious channel is broadcasting somewhat risqué British comedies in the first place, now that’s a question for another day, but I am certainly glad that they do.) At one point, the story features an old Citroen that appears in a trash dumpster in front of the protagonist’s house. The car has a license plate: MOJ459P.
On a whim, I entered this license plate number into Google. Surprisingly, there was a hit: http://www.convergence.cx/. For no discernible reason, the page features nothing else but the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, and an immortal quote from Charles Babbage, pondering the sanity of members of Parliament who were wondering if his machine could give correct answers if given wrong data.
And it is a weird Web site. The page contains an invisible link to a host-side script that barfs back a series of random generated e-mail addresses. Or, I should say, almost random generated; among a bunch of bogus addresses, the e-mail addresses associated with the registration information of the IP number from which I perform the query also appear. What this means, I have no idea. The site doesn’t seem malicious, but then what is it? The top-level domain .cx is the country code for Christmas Island, but the site itself is registered as a “Convergence Organisation Object”, in London, the United Kingdom, since 2001. I have no idea what it is. Curious.
I was channel-surfing for news this morning, and I caught a segment on CTV’s morning show about “dirty electricity”.
I shall refrain from calling the gentleman being interviewed using a variety of unflattering names, because it would not be polite, and in any case, it’s not the person but the message that I take issue with.
Basically, he put a bunch of electronic devices like cordless phones, baby monitors, Wi-Fi routers or even fluorescent light bulbs on a test bench, plugged them in, and then held a contraption with an antenna and a speaker close to them. The contraption was making loud noises, from which this gentleman concluded that these devices “emit radiation”, and “send dirty electricity back through the wires”.
So then… what? The whole Universe is emitting similar radiation at radio frequencies. Any warm object, including the walls of your house, emits radiation at such frequencies and higher. And why should I care?
Of course, it helps dropping a few scary phrases like, “skyrocketing rates of autism”. Oh, he wasn’t saying that they are related. Why should he? Merely mentioning autism while he’s talking about “dirty electricity” is enough to suggest a connection.
Just to be clear about it, almost all electronic devices emit radio frequency radiation that can then be picked up by a suitable receiver and converted into loud and scary noise. When I was 10 or so and got my first pocket calculator, I had endless fun holding it close to an AM receiver and listening to its “song”. Later, when I had my first programmable calculator, I could tell by listening to the sounds on a nearby radio if it was still executing a program, or even if it displayed the expected result or just showed an error condition. Modern calculators use so little power that their transmissions cannot be picked up so easily, but does this mean that the old calculators were a health threat? Of course not.
At such low frequencies, electromagnetic radiation does not interact with our bodies in harmful ways. To cause genetic damage, for instance, much shorter wavelengths would be needed, you need to go at least to the ultraviolet range to produce ionization and, possibly, damage to DNA. At lower frequencies, most emissions are not even absorbed by the body very effectively. The little energy that is being absorbed may turn into tiny currents, but those are far too tiny to have any appreciable biological impact. Note that we are not talking about holding a cell phone with a, say, 0.3W transmitter just an inch from your brain (though even that, I think, is probably quite harmless, never mind sensationalist claims to the contrary); we are talking about a few milliwatts of stray radio frequency emissions not mere inches, but feet or more from a person.
As to “dirty electricity”, any device that produces a capacitive or inductive load on the house wiring will invariably feed some high frequency noise back through the wiring. Motors are the worst offenders, like vacuum cleaners or washing machines. Is this a problem? I doubt it. House wiring already acts as a powerful transmission antenna, continuously emitting electromagnetic waves at 60 Hz (in North America); so what if this emission is modulated further by some higher frequency noise?
But even if I am wrong about all of this, and low-frequency, low-energy electromagnetic radiation has a biological effect after all… study it by all means, yes, but it is no excuse for CTV to bring a scaremongerer with his noisy gadget (designed clearly with the intent to impress, not measure) on live television.
North Korea today tested two additional missiles. Reason to worry, to be sure.
But there’s absolutely no reason for CTV Ottawa to announce this as “two more nuclear tests”. Not all rockets are nuclear. In fact, as far as I know we have no reason to believe that North Korea is anywhere near mastering the technology to place a nuclear weapon on top of a missile. So please… stop the hype and try to report the actual news, if you would?
Speaking of Rogers, one thing they do is that they substitute local commercials during commercial breaks of American cable channels, including CNN. The local commercials are almost always the same, and almost all of them are advertising services of the Rogers media empire… including radio station Y101.
Y101 is a country station, and its commercial, which I must have heard a thousand times, includes snippets from supposedly popular country songs. Including a song by Brad Paisley.
For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out the lyrics of this one, though. What my ears heard just didn’t sound right: “I would like to check you for ticks.” Surely, he must be singing something else, but what could it be?
Finally I decided to look it up. Now I know. The song says, “I would like to check you for ticks.” And just to be clear that there is no misunderstanding, the song’s title is quite unambiguous: “Ticks”.
Rogers is an interesting company. Sometimes, they are super competent. I remember when cable modems were new… I got one fairly early (and still use a cable connection as my backup Internet connection) and whenever I had a technical problem (which was rare) I was immediately able to get competent help on the telephone. Or when a contractor managed to cut our underground cable… Rogers was here almost faster than it would take for the police to arrive. Within half an hour they had a temporary solution rigged, and by the next day, everything was back to normal. They even apologized that they had to unplug us for another few seconds once the underground cable was repaired and reconnected.
Yet at other times, they are just blatantly incompetent. Such as when it took them months to sort out billing issues that only amounted to a few cents in the end.
Or take this past week. I phoned Rogers because I noticed that on CNN, instead of getting stereo audio all I get is the right channel. Perhaps not so much a problem for a news channel, but I am seeing similar problems with other channels, including MuchMusic, where it can be a bit more problematic, for all the obvious reasons. I reported this over a week ago, but no solution yet, not a peep from Rogers.
And then there is this other thing… being a weekend, Rogers is showing a preview of a premium channel, which this weeks happens to be the CBC’s Documentary Channel. So far so good, and I in fact caught a rather interesting program on it, about the history of the East German Trabant automobile and its current fans. Much of the dialog was in German, and it was subtitled. Except that every so often, the subtitles were covered for an extended period of time by a Rogers banner about the preview. Now yes, of course they want us to know that it is a preview and that this channel can be ordered along with many others… but must they demonstrate at the same time just how little they actually care about their viewers?
Not that Rogers is alone in this regard… many channels have picked up the nasty habit of overlaying a rather large, often quite disconcerting banner advertising the next show, for instance. And not infrequently, they do so while subtitles or other important pieces of information would appear there.
I am watching a documentary on BBC World.
BBC World is available here on basic analog cable, which is the only kind of cable I am interested in having in the house. (Mainly, I am put off digital cable because of the need for separate set-top boxes, but DRM also doesn’t help, not to mention the nasty habit of the box to wake up in the middle of the night to perform an OS upgrade, clearly demonstrating that I am not in control of equipment that is in my house.)
However, BBC World is, it appears, a high definition (HD) broadcast, so on analog cable it appears with a black stripe on the top and the bottom of the picture.
This particular documentary, however, was apparently shot in standard definition. So BBC World chose one of three options, each less than perfect: instead of cropping the picture at the top and the bottom, or introducing black stripes on the left and right, they decided to stretch the picture horizontally. Why so many people prefer a distorted picture over black stripes, I have no idea.
But this means that on my standard analog cable, I get a standard definition show that appears at less than standard resolution, vertically compressed, distorted, with unnecessary black stripes at the top and the bottom. Isn’t HD just glorious?
HD madness
Fortunately, as I tend to watch TV on my computer, I always have the option of stretching the video window vertically and get a picture with the correct aspect ratio. This option is not necessarily available on ordinary televisions.
Behind this ridiculousness is the insane decision to change not just the resolution but the aspect ratio of HD broadcasts. Why, you might ask? Very simple. If the aspect ratios were the same, most people could not tell the difference between standard definition and HD even when the broadcast was true HD, which often is not the case (older shows, and even some newer shows, are shot in standard definition.) So how do you convince people to buy HD anyway? By making it apparent that they have a “better” television set because it is wider.
And this has been done before. Back in the 1950s, when movie studios were seriously worried about the competition of television, they changed the aspect ratio of Hollywood movies, intentionally making them incompatible with the standard 4:3 aspect ratio of NTSC/PAL television. What is amazing is how well they managed to convince the public that a wider picture is better, providing yet another example of just how easy it is to manipulate people.
I’m done watching the very final episode of Battlestar Galactica.
Wow. Now this is what science fiction television is supposed to be like. When I saw the pilot movie back in 2003, I simply wondered, how on Earth they could possibly make something this gripping out of the “re-imagining” of a cheesy early-80s space opera? But they did… and the show never wavered in quality. I am sad that it’s over, but I respect their decision to finish the show the right way.
This is not what I usually expect to see when I glance at CNN:
CNN and integrals
It almost makes me believe that we live in a mathematically literate society. If only!
The topic, by the way, was a British Medical Journal paper on brain damage caused by a dancing style called headbanging. I must say, even though I grew up during the disco era, I never much liked dancing. But, for what it’s worth, I not only know how to do integrals, I actually enjoy doing them…
The other day, David Letterman had a segment called The Ten Most Hated Christmas Songs. They were well known Christmas tunes with twisted lyrics. All of them were funny, but two I found especially memorable. The first said,
“Joy to the world, George Bush is done.”
The second one was really creepy:
“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,
“Nineteen-twenty-nine…”
Indeed.
Sad news today: at the age of 76, Majel Roddenberry, aka. Nurse Christine Chapel from Star Trek and Lwaxana Troi from Star Trek: TNG, has passed away today. My she rest in peace.
Her husband, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, passed away over 17 years ago, on October 24, 1991. That date is memorable to me for another reason: it was on the morning of that day that I became a wizard of Richard Bartle’s classic multiplayer computer game, MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), aka British Legends, a game that I have ported to modern 32-bit platforms nearly a decade later and that I have been hosting ever since.