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In the land of the sheep…

I wrote this post while in New Zealand but never posted it, now I’m at Linux.conf.au I have time to finish it up.

Well its been a long time since I have posted on my blog. As I lasted mentioned I now work at Google, which has been going well but keeping me fairly busy. For the last month (October, 2009) I have been back in Mountain View, California. While I was there for mainly work purposes, I did get the chance to go to both the Summer of Code Mentor Summit and the GitTogether. Both where a lot of fun but tiering.

It was good to see the BZFlag guys again – they even had cool t-shirts this year. Not as cool as our Thousand Parsec shirts, however. 🙂 I was finally able to meet kblin who I had know through the WorldForge project for many years. As always he looked nothing like I expected.

At the GitTogther I was mainly interested in trying to make git usable with large media repositories. This is one area which Subversion still has an advantage. After much discussion we came up with a solution to the problem which I gave a short presentation.

It also gave me a chance to catch up with the Open Source Progams Office. It was great to catch up with Leslie Hawthorn and her fabulous crew.

No sooner had I gotten back from the states, I headed of to New Zealand. Lee Begg who I also first met through the WorldForge project and was the co-founder of the Thousand Parsec project, is getting married and I will be a grooms man.

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2008 11 15 mithro Google
Summer of Code
Thousand Parsec
Uni Comments (0)

TV Idiots

People are continually talking about the end of Television. The TV executives blame people downloading off the Internet via “peer to peer” for there gradual decline. TV series are a huge part of most television programming, viewers get hooked and then continually tune in.

However, the idiots who schedule TV series are ruining them for everyone. TV series need consistent time slots to keep building suspense and grow viewers. Having inconsistent breaks and time slots ruins that processes and drives ratings down. How are people going to know to tune in to the program if they can never be sure it’ll be on?

Inconsistent breaks and timing killed Lost and Prison Break for me, the breaks ruined the suspense both programs rely on and I’m no longer watching either. The recent break in Heroes really dampened the enthusiasm I had for the program.

Another huge problem which happens very often in Australian TV is that they mix old episodes with new episodes to make seasons longer. This confuses continuing stories and characters which have died randomly reappear. As well, they continually advertise things as new episodes when they are actually airing repeats. They are particularly bad with programs like NCIS or Law and Order.

Why are commercial TV stations trying to destroying themselves?

Compare this to our national broadcaster ABC, which now has full VOD casts of all their productions. I don’t have to worry about missing things like the Chaser as I can just go and download them later.

2007 04 25 mithro Comments (0)