Television – Page 2 – Paul Hutchinson's Blog

September 28, 2008

Must see TV interview

I just watched this weeks Bill Moyers Journal on PBS it’s an excellent interview with Andrew J. Bacevich author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. You can Watch & Listen to it online and there is also a full transcript of the interview on the site. Below are are couple of excerpts to wet your appetite.

BILL MOYERS: You intrigued me when you wrote that “The fundamental problem facing the country will remain stubbornly in place no matter who is elected in November.” What’s the fundamental problem you say is not going away no matter whether it’s McCain or Obama?

ANDREW BACEVICH: What neither of these candidates will be able to, I think, accomplish is to persuade us to look ourselves in the mirror, to see the direction in which we are headed. And from my point of view, it’s a direction towards ever greater debt and dependency.

This reminds me that I haven’t sent you two readers to Tyler’s blog in a while, he very often points out what should be obvious realities to rational minded folks but that most US citizens just don’t want to face. Check out this post from a few weeks ago for a good taste of this, Elementary, My Dear Pwoggie. Now back to Bill & Andrew.

BILL MOYERS: And this is connected, as you say in the book, in your first chapters, of what you call “the crisis of profligacy.”

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, we don’t live within our means. I mean, the nation doesn’t, and increasingly, individual Americans don’t. Our saving – the individual savings rate in this country is below zero. The personal debt, national debt, however you want to measure it, as individuals and as a government, and as a nation we assume an endless line of credit.

As individuals, the line of credit is not endless, that’s one of the reasons why we’re having this current problem with the housing crisis, and so on. And my view would be that the nation’s assumption, that its line of credit is endless, is also going to be shown to be false. And when that day occurs it’s going to be a black day, indeed.

I couldn’t agree more!

May 10, 2008

BBC threatens Dr. Who fans

From the EFF comes this story of extreme copyright holder stupidity, Knitwit BBC Goes After Dr Who Fans.

Like Dr Who’s Ood, fans are happy to serve their favorite franchises when treated well. But if the BBC starts treating them like this, they can all too easily rise up and attack the very brand value the BBC is overzealously seeking to protect.

The BBC is following in the footsteps of the RIAA by threatening Dr. Who fans with legal action over knitting patterns. The BBC legal department must not be fans of the show, why else would they work to eliminate the free publicity from the Dr. Who fans.

May 12th update

Digging a little deeper into this story I found that there is a bit more that either makes the BBC look worse or better depending on which version is true. Over at the mazzmatazz site the knitting section has an entry for April 10th titled “I am furious”.

I have added creative commons licenses to all patterns now, as they are NOT to be used commercially, and the patterns are NOT to be resold.

If I continue to discover that they are being sold, they WILL be removed.

Then on May 5th is an entry about the BBC take down. Over at the TechnoLlama blog the post about this topic has two comments that add substantially to the story. Both comments point out that someone besides the creator of the knitting patterns had started selling knitted characters on eBay. What happened next is different between the two comments. The first comment says that the BBC got eBay to take the stuff down and then told the fan to take the free patterns down. If that’s true then I’d give the Beeb a little slack, they saw a serious infringement and then kept going a bit too far in stopping it.

The second comment states that it was the fan who had eBay take down the characters. Then the BBC went after the fan a few days later. If this is what happened then IMO, the Beeb should have thanked the fan for the help and just let the knitting patterns slide for personal use.

If you want to see pictures of all the characters this very talented fan made check them out at the site.

April 20, 2008

Good stuff from the blogs I read and an admin note

First the administration note, do to blog spam driving me nuts I’ve decided to close the comments on old posts that attract blog spam. If you encounter an older post with closed comments that you would like to contribute to, send me an email using the address that is at the end of every page at my main site. Assuming your contribution is relevant I’ll manually add it to the comments of the post for you. If it’s irrelevant I’ll reply explaining why I am not posting the comment.

Now for the good reads from the blogs I read:

Blake has posted an excellent round-up of the real discrimination going on in the ridiculous ID/Creationism vs. Science non-debate. Science After Sunclipse » Creation, Power and Violence

I mentioned it in previous post but now the NCSE has fully launched their Expelled Exposed web site. Check it out for the excellent information on the topic.

Bob’s post this week is a must read for anyone involved in hiring IT consultants, The Truth About IT Consultants.

Via Mark from the Denialism blog I wound up at this three part series, Contrary imaginations. – By Daniel Engber – Slate Magazine.

And last but not least, Tim’s post Scientists 2, Teens 0, Journalists -2, points out the two silly reports this week trying to make it seem like kids are smarter than adult scientists. Please people, join the reality based community and keep your rational thought processes in place. Contrary to what TV wants you to believe, it is extremely rare for a child to make a useful contribution to the advancement of knowledge. In fact other than Emily Rosa I can’t think of a single case and her contribution was not a giant breakthrough on a complex topic just a bright child pointing out that some of adults are too easily falling for magic tricks and thinking they are real.

April 13, 2008June 3, 2017

FCC issues $6 mil in fines against TV manufacturers and retailers

This week the FCC has taken action against television manufacturers and retailers for violating the rules regarding DTV and V-chip regulations.

From the FCC news summary:

The Commission’s DTV- related enforcement efforts have focused on protecting consumers from unknowingly buying televisions that will not allow consumers to enjoy the full benefits of the digital transition. The orders demonstrate the Commission’s commitment to strong enforcement in promoting the successful transition to digital television.

Here are links to the individual FCC actions:

Panasonic Corporation of North America

Philips Consumer Electronics North America

Westinghouse Digital Electronics

March 24, 2008

Solar Energy Information

I’ve run across some good solar energy information in the past few weeks in while doing research for a couple of conversations on an engineering list.

EETimes has an article about the seventeenth annual Photovoltaic Science and Engineering Conference The next gold rush – solar power.

This week PBS is repeating the October 2007 NOVA episode Saved By the Sun, an excellent overview on the current state of solar. It includes an section on the economic model of the new company SunEdison. You can watch it online here.

Finally the US Department of Energy Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Solar Energy Technologies Program Home Page is a good starting point for getting information on all aspects of solar energy. Check out the Myths of Solar Electricity page for some good de-bunking of seven commonly encountered photovoltaic myths. Don’t get confused by the “100-mile-square area” statement in myth #1, that’s a square 100 miles on a side, 10,000 square miles not 100 square miles.

January 25, 2008

Miro on OpenSuse a DLL Hell fix

A couple weeks ago I posted about switching to Miro the Internet TV program running on Linux from another app on WinXP. Well a day or two after I wrote that post, OpenSuse 10.3 had some mandatory updates. Miro was running at the time so I exited Miro and waited for the updates to finish. No reboot was requested so I clicked the Miro icon, a little processor usage then nothing. I rebooted, tried again and the problem remained, time to open a console to see what’s going on.

paulh@linux1:~> miro /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.8.1.4 Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/bin/miro.real", line 123, in <module> startapp() File "/usr/bin/miro.real", line 58, in startapp import singleclick File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/miro/singleclick.py", line 36, in <module> import app File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/miro/app.py", line 610, in <module> import frontend File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/miro/frontend.py", line 50, in <module> import MozillaBrowser ImportError: libgtkembedmoz.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I see the last line and knowing there was just an OS update I immediately think DLL Hell. I know, most people only use that term for Windows *.DLL files but, I use it whenever I hit a problem with shared code in any OS. Actually I can’t remember the last time I had to deal with DLL Hell in Windows or Linux. Both Microsoft and the Linux community have done a great job of eliminating dependency issues. Since I’m lazy when it comes to fixing PC problems these days I simply searched Google for ImportError: libgtkembedmoz.so. Many plausible looking solutions are in the results and I spend a bit of time trying out some of them but no luck.

When I get back to working on the problem a few days later I try out some more suggestions found on the net. Still no luck, no time left to play around that night and I want to see the new Cranky Geeks episode. Here’s where the cross platform feature of Miro pays off, I put it on the Media Center PC and tell Miro to use the Samba share for storage. I get my Cranky Geeks fix and plan to revisit the problem later.

Tonight I decide to try again but this time I actually read the whole console output instead of just the error line. There’s the answer in the first line, the OpenSuse package for Miro is looking for xulrunner-1.8.1.4 and I have xulrunner-1.8.1.10 and a symbolic link for xulrunner-1.8.1. I take the easy way out and just create a symlink for xulrunner-1.8.1.4 (ln -s /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.8.1.10 /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.8.1.4). That does the trick and Miro launches again on OpenSuse. 🙂 I’m assuming the recent OS update upgraded xulrunner-1.8.1.4 to xulrunner-1.8.1.10.

I had seen a thread about this issue on the Miro forums before so I head over to post my fix. What do I find, pturner7 posted the following fix two days ago.

Looking in this folder /usr/lib/ reveals that I have xulrunner-1.8.1.10
To fix this, edit as root the file > /usr/bin/miro
Change both instances of /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.8.1.4 to /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.8.1.10 (or whatever version is residing there).
That should get it past the .so error.

The problem was that the OpenSuse package builder used a hard coded library reference in the startup script creating this DLL Hell.

Comments closed 7/18/08 to slow the spam

January 13, 2008

Absolute Zero

I just finished watching part one of the NOVA episode “Absolute Zero” on PBS last week. Check your local listings to see if you can catch it on a re-broadcast or you can watch the program online. Part two will broadcast on most stations on Tuesday the 15th and will be online on the 16th.

Generally I found the program exceptionally good, it covers the history of scientific thinking about hot and cold very well as well as showing the commercial uses. I have only two criticisms and they are so small they are really nitpicking. The first is that the narrator as well as Professor Hasok Chang, author of “Inventing Temperature, Measurement and Scientific Progress”, both use the obsolete units name centigrade. It probably just bugs me because I can still remember losing grade points in Mrs. Wolfs’ chemistry class for using centigrade instead of Celsius. The other criticism is the lack of clarity when in the part on Clarence Birdseye the narrator says, “temperature forty degrees below freezing”. I had to pause the playback and think for a minute wether they meant Celsius or Fahrenheit. My first thought was that they meant -40°C which equals -40°F but then I remembered that household freezers are around 0°F so, I think they meant -8°F (-22°C).

I encourage everyone to watch this fine program and please support your local PBS station so, they can keep bringing us the best science show evah, NOVA.

January 11, 2008

Instant Media is dead, long live Miro

My regular reader 😉 may remember that I’ve recommended Instant Media (I’M) as an alternative to Joost in previous posts. Over the last 6 months or so I basically only used it for automatic downloading of DL.TV and Cranky Geeks (linked under Netcasts on the right). While I had noticed that the I’M guide wasn’t working back in September I hadn’t bothered to find out why. This week I looked around and found some information in these blog posts.

Instant Media Gone Bust? Feeling the Web Video Bubble Burst

Instant Media, Miro Competitor, Leaves The Net Without A Trace

Instant Media Grinds to a Halt

Those posts speculate on what happened and the last one linked above does have a fairly definitive answer from one the the former developers.

Scott Blum, the eccentric billionaire that was funding our company, decided to scuttle it mid-July

This was a little puzzling, why did the I’M web site stay online until September when the plug had been pulled in July. This blog post gives me an idea of why, the company tried to sue Microsoft and get a preliminary injunction over Microsoft’s use of their trademark, I’M. That seems like the reason to me, I’M had to stay up on the web until the court decided, once the courts ruled against I’M in the middle of August I’M had no further incentive to stay around.

Since I’M was gone I decided to look around for an alternative and I found a great one, Miro. This is an excellent program especially since it’s open source and cross platform. I installed it on my OpenSuse 10.3 PC and setup a Samba share so that my Media Center PC can play the videos. One feature I hope to make good use of once NerdTV starts season two is Miro’s support for Bittorrent. I like the idea of be able to easily to give some of my bandwidth to NerdTV to help defray the distribution costs (PBS doesn’t have very deep pockets).

November 11, 2007

Judgment Day

Just in case you haven’t heard about it yet, this coming Tuesday, 11/13 many PBS stations will be airing a new episode of NOVA, Judgment Day Intelligent Design on Trial. I would normally have said most stations rather than many stations but sadly I’ve encountered evidence that leads me to believe that some stations are not going to air the show.

Over at Sandwalk Larry mentioned that WNED Buffalo NY was not airing the show. I looked into this and found that WNED is not going to air it on its channel that reaches the largest audience (it is airing on their HD channel). 😦 If a north east PBS channel is doing this I think it’s a pretty safe bet that stations in more science hostile areas are likely not airing the program, check your local listings. If you are a contributor to your local PBS station and they aren’t airing it please let them know how you feel about it because keeping contributors happy is the #1 goal of most PBS stations.

October 22, 2007

Silence of the Bees on PBS

This sounds like a great season opener for Nature this Sunday night, Silence of the Bees.

The Season 26 opener probes colony collapse disorder the dramatic loss of honeybees in North America and Europe. The honeybee is responsible (via pollination) for one of every three bites of food people eat. Included: long-term ramifications.

The PBS Pressroom has more information and some photos from the show. If you click a picture you will get a new window with a bigger image and a button to download a high resolution version. However, the download requires registration showing you are part of the media. Well, I found that if you just click the picture in the pop-up window, instead of the download button, you get the high resolution image without registration.

Over at ENN they have a good article about the show. I wonder if Bug Girl has heard about this show.