First reply I've got in ages!

Dear Mr Crawley

Thank you for your e-mail regarding 'Who's Watching You' as broadcast on 25 May.

I understand you were unhappy with camera techniques used in this programme and note you felt it detracted from its premise.

I can assure you that I've registered your comments on our audience log. This is the internal report of audience feedback which we compile daily for all programme makers and commissioning executives within the BBC, and also their senior management. It ensures that your points, and all other comments we receive, are circulated and considered across the BBC.

Thank you again for taking the time to contact us.

Regards


BBC Complaints

www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

---------Original Message-------------


Although the programme was interesting the shooting style was very distracting. Whip pans, pulling focus once a shot is established and reframing the shot whilst a person is doing a piece to camera really detracts from the documentary content. It's fine for pop promos but not for a prime-time documentary. You can stick a Z1 on a tripod you know!
It also looked like it was graded by a colour-blind person.

Stephen Fry - I like him!

Leaf Networks - better than Hamachi

I've written about Hamachi as a lightweight VPN solution in the past and for a year or more I used it every day to access files at home and provide an in to friends and relatives machines who I do tech support for. Not having to worry about opening ports on routers etc. is fantastic but recently Hamachi got unreliable and now I can't make it work for more than a few weeks without upgrading (due to their new license) which is a pain as suddenly you can't VNC to the machine you need to upgrade!
Anyhow - I've been playing with Leaf for a few days and it seems a much more solid solution. It also has the advantage of having routing built in so you can use it to expose other machine on the target network over the VPN tunnel. As well as allowing LAN play across the internet for XBox games that don't support Windows Live I imagine any embedded devices you don't want to expose to the world over an open port would be usable from wherever you've got your laptop (insecure wireless in a coffee shop, for example).

Quote from Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails fame)

"One of the biggest wake-up calls of my career was when I saw a record contract. I said, 'Wait - you sell it for $18.98 and I make 80 cents? And I have to pay you back the money you lent me to make it, and then you own it?"

Also see Counting Crows do a RadioHead.

Citrix and virtualisation

I've been interested in virtualisation for some time - I think it's the way things have to go not only at the lap/desk-top but also in the data centre. For personal computing it represents a way to truly secure Windows and at the server it allows a much more efficient/scalable computing.
Citrix are an interesting company - their WinFrame system for Windows is the optimal solution and so when they start talking about virtualisation you have to take notice. The link in the title has a very interesting video that you should watch.

....most interesting was Citrix's demo of their new virtualization solution XenClient for the Mac. Virtualization is the process by which you can run multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single computer. It has been frequently used on the Mac to run Microsoft's Windows in conjunction with Mac OS X. Citrix first started publicizing their plans for a new kind of Virtualization called "Type 1 hypervisor" back in January.

The technology promises to offer a faster and more secure virtualization environment than existing solutions. Parallel's and VMWare's solutions are considered "Type 2 hypervisors" which must run under a host operating system such as Mac OS X. While this simplifies the implementation, it also results in potential security vulnerabilities as well as a performance penalty due to the added level of abstraction. In contrast, "Type 1 hypervisors" run directly on the "bare metal" hardware.

Previously; VMWare Server, VMWare and Ubuntu, XP SP3 & Parallel.

I didn't know Banksy did drawings