bbc

First Men in the Moon

The Gatiss version. Our intrepid heros, Bedford and Prof. Cavor, are about to land on the moon. Suddenly, a klaxon sounds…

Making links

Some years ago, back when I was in sixth form and trying to decide what I wanted to study at University, the BBC broadcast a Horizon documentary on novel interfaces for computers, which was presented by Douglas Adams and Tom Baker. The documentary presented a future information system in which you could follow links between documents, images and videos, with software “agents” that helped you find things. More than anything else, it was a novel documentary by itself; how better to show what a new information system might be like, than to film the documentary as if it were being… Read More »Making links

A for Andromeda

Given that the 1961 original was lost in one of the great BBC tape purges of the 1970s (to make way for Match of the Day, no doubt), it’s unsurprising that I’ve never seen A for Andromeda. Rather more embarrassingly, I’ve not read any of Fred Hoyle’s novels. and I watched the live remake of The Quatermass Experiment that BBC Four showed last year; I enjoyed it, but I didn’t think that the plot had dated especially well, and the pacing required of a live production with outside broadcasts felt artificial. I’ve just seen BBC Four’s remake of A for… Read More »A for Andromeda

Buzzword 2.0

The BBC have been carrying a story today on the rise of Web 2.0 and Flock, to tie in with a report on this evening’s Newsnight (the report can be seen on the Newsnight website for the next twenty-four hours). I can’t say that I’m too impressed. I’ve tried Flock (see my earlier comments), and have found it to be a generally unimpressive experience, in that it doesn’t add any significantly new additional browser functionality that was not already available as extensions to Firefox. Given that Flock is probably about 98+% Firefox in terms of lines of code, this doesn’t… Read More »Buzzword 2.0