**** BEGIN LOGGING AT Sun May 04 02:59:57 2008 May 04 04:07:39 anyone around? May 04 04:41:22 anyone around yet? May 04 05:09:19 anyone around yet? May 04 08:28:25 How about now? May 04 08:28:37 hi peter May 04 08:28:55 Hi Tony. Did you have a good holiday? May 04 08:29:05 yeah, quite good May 04 08:29:25 apart from the 5 to 12deg temp... luckily i took a few good jackets :-) May 04 08:29:32 Seen anything exciting? May 04 08:29:50 but then again, Sydney seemed to have the same temperature apparently while i was gone May 04 08:30:23 yeah - it's been between about 12 and 19 most of the time. May 04 08:30:32 i saw lots, black forest walks, steam train rides to icy mountain tops, spring (LOL) setups for a weekend festival in Berlin etcv May 04 08:31:16 Excellent! I take it you were in the south of Germany then? Did you get as far as Austria? May 04 08:31:35 No, spent 2.5 weeks exploring mainly east and south May 04 08:32:24 I've had about 2 weeks of Germans too - visitors staying with us. :-) May 04 08:32:42 but did enter France, Check and Switzerland just to say "we have done it". May 04 08:33:11 (which means we did explore west a tiny bit) May 04 08:33:23 Cool. Where did you go in the Czech Republic? May 04 08:33:46 Any good breweries? May 04 08:37:32 No breweries, didn't have time May 04 08:38:07 Can't remember the czech town name, really just drove thru the check point to say we have been there May 04 08:38:11 from Sebnitz May 04 08:38:27 As you probably expected, you did not miss anything exciting happening in the Beyonwiz land. Everything is still happening at a snails pace with stop gap patches that hardly address the issues at hand. May 04 08:38:37 chatting to my gf right now May 04 08:39:04 yeah, but finally it seems the wiz guys are recovering from steves illness and getting us things we are asking for May 04 08:39:06 Beyonwiz are beginning to look a lot like Topfield now. Good enough to plonk in the shop. May 04 08:39:12 e.g. EIT info stored with recordings! May 04 08:39:42 They should just record the EIT stream and parse it out as required. May 04 08:39:50 a dodgy ICEremote implementation also :-) May 04 08:40:27 In the late morning kind of a good view from the lookout Schauinsland. On our way to Lake Constance we went to Wutachschlucht (Wutach River gorge) but didn’t go in the right direction so ended up on a field and not in the gorge, oops…). After that we stopped in Schaffhausen (Schwitzerland), by the way, the country code “CH” for Switzerland May 04 08:40:28 What a WOFTAM. Ice stuffed it all up after PV and I left. May 04 08:40:45 (sorry, from the gf) May 04 08:40:55 hmm, twhat the hell, that wasn't what i copied May 04 08:41:06 In the late morning kind of a good view from the lookout Schauinsland. On our way to Lake Constance we went to Wutachschlucht (Wutach River gorge) but didn’t go in the right direction so ended up on a field and not in the gorge, oops…). After that we stopped in Schaffhausen (Schwitzerland), by the way, the country code “CH” for Switzerland May 04 08:41:13 shit, bloody msn May 04 08:41:20 Got some steam ship informations in Bad Schandau, then drove our car along the historic railway through the Kirnitzschtal (Kirnitzsch Valley) and crossed the border to Czech Republic in Sebnitz - Dolni Poustevna. May 04 08:41:49 ok, so crtl-c doesn't work in MSN or my keyboard is jammed :-) May 04 08:42:08 i am so used to simply dragging a selection in trillian and it auto-copying May 04 08:42:15 I'd blame MS. May 04 08:42:40 yeah, the ICE stuff seems a bit problematic, shame about the serious lack of funds May 04 08:43:01 I haven't seen the south of Germany, but I have seen most of Austria and that was pretty awesome. May 04 08:43:26 Yeah, i went to Salzburg and Vienna in 1998 and adored Salzburg very much May 04 08:44:34 but had fun driving on quite a number of Autobahns, in Anni's 1L toyota echo (called a yaris there) May 04 08:45:26 6000rpm in 5th gear nudged us to 170km/hr according to her speedo, but only 159km/hr according to the GPS software running on my N95 which we used to get us all around the place. May 04 08:45:55 1L engine - fine as long as you don't need to go uphill :-) May 04 08:46:07 or enter an autobahn May 04 08:46:25 IceTV really only have one competent programmer on their payroll (Dan) and he's flat out cleaning up everyone else's mess or working on pretty pointless things. The guy doing the website and widgets is a Mac weenie completely obsessed with visual design without any consideration to compatibility or efficiency. May 04 08:46:37 foot flat after the serious bends getting onto those things, and would be lucky to get to the speed of the trucks May 04 08:47:26 Must be weird driving one of those after a WRX. May 04 08:47:33 I would have loved to have had my WRX there... apart from the pric eof fuel May 04 08:47:36 and on the wrong side of the road. May 04 08:47:38 hehe May 04 08:47:49 yep, hit a couple of gutters at 60k May 04 08:48:00 on the right hand side, on very narrow roads May 04 08:48:19 while trying to read the one and only sign to hint the next turn May 04 08:48:48 and my Garmin GPS giving instructions in German because that was the way Annett wanted it May 04 08:50:09 The left and rights should be easy enough, but after that it gets complicated. May 04 08:50:12 her car was not much more fuel efficient than my thing at the autobahn speeds by the way May 04 08:50:58 i kept looking for another gear, even at 100km/hr in 5th, because the little 1L revved so high May 04 08:53:24 Given the number of issues with IceTV, I asked them to help the beta testers by lowering the stupid timeout throttle. May 04 08:54:08 i am still relying on the topfield (and perlTGD) to do my recording, so haven't focussed a lot on if the wiz is recording my favourites May 04 08:54:23 but ICEremote seems to have put a couple of timers in ok May 04 08:54:38 They chose not to do so or even respond. So, as far as I am concerned, if IceTV could not be arsed helping their service being beta tested, I could not be arsed looking for or reporting bugs in it. May 04 08:54:55 is a shame really May 04 08:55:46 i keep asking for a "lifetime" membership, given i provided the original code to Dan for the Toppy, but they can only extend it to the next year each time, and I wonder how long I can keep begging for this access for May 04 08:56:02 It's pretty representative of the way the company has been heading. Even though PV was a bit all over the place, at least he had the vision and passion to deliver a good user experience. May 04 08:56:55 sounds like my old boss at optus too, he was a visionary with many great schemes, and ended up moving jobs and companies about 6 times since then May 04 08:57:18 To me it looks like IceTV has been in zombie land for the last 1.5 - 2 years. Not completely dead, but certainly not alive and kicking. May 04 08:57:21 i don't mind how Iceremote is May 04 08:57:48 the only thing that annoys me at the moment is I can't find anywhere on the remote website to enter keywords to enable recordings May 04 08:58:15 there physically has to be a show coming up in the next week to enable series recording which is silly May 04 08:58:21 The mechanisms behind IceRemote are quiet sound and flexible, but it was never fully developed. May 04 08:58:47 (e.g. battlestar and 4400 both weren't on this week due to the biggest loser final, so I wasn't able to add them to my series recording) May 04 08:59:08 I wrote a proof of concept solution for them, which they are now using in production. It's crazy. May 04 09:00:28 yeah, i guess opensource etc is a great concept, until you need to make a living May 04 09:00:32 The whole thing was designed to poll once every 5 minutes, with an option to go as low as every minute and we expected that a proper implementation would scale easily to handle 100,000 subscribes with a 3 minute poll interval May 04 09:01:20 and then i can't imagine a company coming up with the $$ that is really required to get something out May 04 09:01:33 Actually, if it was open source, it would have been rewritten and dancing circles around the current implementation. May 04 09:01:45 yeah, but at a loss to ice May 04 09:02:43 well, not really actually thinking about it May 04 09:03:24 They are in the business of providing data and service. Even with open source, people still need that, so they would not make a loss. May 04 09:03:24 a few (many??) people still pay their ice subscription and use 3rd party uploaders, e.g. TED, PerlTGD etc May 04 09:03:33 They are an integral part of the solution May 04 09:03:59 i think they are on a winner finally with the "most chosen" etc for iceremote May 04 09:04:26 Either that or someone will sue their pants of because of privacy laws. May 04 09:04:35 maybe the networks would finally see the value in this and realise that there are shitloads of people who wanted "Terminator-SCC" and not the laddette to ladies tripe May 04 09:05:12 you can probably see my hatred of Neins programming :-) May 04 09:06:06 The reason IceTV can't scale the service up and the reason for poor performance is the amount of data they collect about their users and about every interaction you have with their servers. May 04 09:06:15 hehe May 04 09:06:42 Their database can't keep up because of all the write lock contention as they log everything. May 04 09:08:10 ahh, ok, was wondering what the limitations were May 04 09:08:29 I don't ever recall IceTV disclosing that they collect this info or what they do with it. They even released a PC or Mac piece of software that uploaded a list of all your files to their servers. May 04 09:08:47 argh May 04 09:08:52 Once someone questioned that, they said it was a "bug" and it would be fixed in the next release. May 04 09:08:52 erlich? May 04 09:08:58 oops, i mean "really" May 04 09:11:20 I'm not all that impressed with how they are going. I think they have a good concept and a good chance, but they really need someone (hey pick me ;-) to pull it all together for them. May 04 09:11:55 good on you for trying May 04 09:12:19 i pulled back a number of years ago because anything software related i only do as a hobby May 04 09:12:42 it would have cost Ice a mint to get the current generation of EPG-uploader out May 04 09:13:05 because I have spent years evolving that, and that is not what a company that wants a quick software solution needs May 04 09:15:41 They must be seriously pressed for money and as a result when they pay peanuts they get monkeys. The bad news is that over time the peanuts add up, but the monkeys don't produce anything worth keeping. May 04 09:16:44 Anyway, I'll stop that now. It's just a shame that they can't nail it down. They were so close, but it's all just slipping away. May 04 09:16:57 Almost time to eat dinner... May 04 09:17:39 dinner.. that is late :-) May 04 09:18:00 over in germany mine was typically at 8.30 or 9pm LOL May 04 09:21:57 Didn't start cooking until about 18:30 - was washing the car and trying to seal a leak into the boot before that. May 04 09:22:18 preparation for winter.. good :-) May 04 09:24:03 See you later... May 04 09:24:16 yep, will do **** ENDING LOGGING AT Mon May 05 02:59:57 2008