Andrew's diary

Wednesday, 31 May 2006

Yesterday, Broadcasting Data Services contacted me, saying I had to pay royalties to publish BBC and ITV listings under Schedule 17 of the Broadcasting Act 1990. After some discussion (including pointing out that backstage.bbc.co.uk makes TV-Anytime data available for non-commercial use, and that the recent competition positively encouraged people to republish them), we've agreed that using the BBC's TV-Anytime data would not mean royalties needing to be paid.

Unfortunately, as ITV don't provide such data, we've also agreed that I will remove ITV's listings. I'll try to get in touch with the appropriate people at ITV (suggestions welcome) and arrange a royalty-free feed which I can collate along with the other channels.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but at the moment there's not much I can do.

Update: there's discussion on the mailing list.

Saturday, 27 May 2006

Test drove the 2.0l TDI Touran: nice car, lots of space well put together.

Thursday, 25 May 2006

Private entry

Tuesday, 23 May 2006

Private entry

Saturday, 20 May 2006

Went and looked at a Touran - would be nice to have a new car for our holiday. Although boring, it's nicely put together and specced. It'd be a shame not to use the discount whilst we can, as well.

Thursday, 18 May 2006

Google's Web Toolkit (GWT) looks interesting: write Java code, half of it gets translated to JavaScript and HTML and deployed to the web and then interacts with the other half still on your server.

Tuesday, 16 May 2006

As expected, the much-hyped "Google and Nokia announce new Internet Tablet" story turns out to be "Nokia announce new OS (what they'd previously announced anyway) with Google Talk client (what they wrote themselves)". Slightly less likely to set the world alight...

In the webcast (transcoded to a 770-compatible DivX here: os2006-webcast.avi (20MB)) Google go to great lengths to emphasise it wasn't much to do with them. Both companies could learn a lot from Apple's product launches, TBH.

Wednesday, 03 May 2006

Got pointed to Google's TechTalks - which seem to be similar to Hursley's "Lunch & Learn"s. When combined with a Google Video downloader and my Nokia 770 video encoding script it gives a nice techy thing to watch on the train. Patched the script to handle the 1000fps frame rate MPlayer reports for Flash Video (FLV).