Good to Bill Mallonee playing again

The failure of big IT projects

A new NHS computerised medical records system on trial at a London hospital has been criticised by a hospital boss for causing "heartache and hard work".

I have a friend who was contracting for EDS (who are famous for burning tax-payers dollars and never delivering on time/budget) before they pulled out of the NHS unified records project. He told me that they were developing their own VPN solution to use between hospitals for it. Now VPN isn't a problem that needs to be solved - there are complete and secure implementations in both open and closed-source flavours. VPN is done - but in a sense it didn't surprise me. Big organisations are famous for having that not invented here mindset. At the BBC I saw wheels being re-invented often because "..nobody understands what we do as well as us". Truth to tell there aren't many problems that haven't been cracked a few times already and designing your own VPN protocols (or whatever) never brings you the benefits that using a ready made solution will give - many people will have hammered hard on it and it's likely to work (and even more so if it's open-source where thousands of eyes have looked at the code - very important for security applications).
If you want a robust, distributed database that can serve thousands of look-ups per second on commodity user hardware then I would suggest that you maybe talk to Google!

Can our natural rhythm heal us?

There are a few places where I feel naturally relaxed - riding a bike, waking up on a Saturday morning and sitting behind a drum kit....

Deluxe closes Midnight Transfer

Wow - the first DI build I did (back in 2005) is being closed. Lot of good equipment there for 2k/4k work. The Filmlight scanner is a machine to behold.
It's a shame - I assumed that when Deluxe bought them their future would be assured.

High Def 25Psf video

More than a decade ago when Mr Sony was developing what would become HDCam (with some small contribution from the previous 1" open-reel HDVRS analogue & digital formats) they realised that progressive video was the future but existing HD equipment (typically the BVM-D series monitors) couldn't lock to such a slow framerate (24/25/29.97 as opposed to 48/50/59.98 fields). The answer for progressively-sourced pictures was the Psf standard which makes progressive frames look like interlaced video. So as to make film people think that this was better than video they have a new name for a field - the segment. In fact Psf is interlaced video (but there is no movement between the fields) - it just shows that good old interlaced video is able to faithfully reproduce progressive pictures (but the reverse is not true as progressive video with the same frame-rate has only half the motion rendition as interlaced video).

So - let's dismiss a couple of misconceptions;

• There is no difference between a Psf signal and an interlaced signal from a technical standpoint
  
• Sending 1080 pictures via Psf doesn't degrade them in the slightest - in fact if you're laying off 1080 to HDCamSR then anything below a 5800 (in 50/60P mode @880mBits) is recording Psf!

Now then - below are screen-grabs from my trusty WFM7120. The first shows the output from a Symphony NitrisDX BOB. The footage had come from a Sony EX3 cameras recorded at 35mBits 1080/25P onto Memory Stick and imported straight into a progressive timeline. The Avid plays back Psf which the Tek shows as 1080i (for the reasons discussed above). Laying this off to HDCamSR (a 5500 deck) gives a 25Psf recording on tape. The second screen shot is the Quicktime sample movie imported into a new 25P timeline - it just serves to comfirm that the BOB output is always Psf.



This last picture is the down-convert output of a Leitch X75 which is a great little get you out of trouble box (basically does everything->everything with a few extra tricks thrown in - profanity delay etc.) but it's not a multi-frame broadcast standards converter (like a Snell & Wilcox Ukon).

Although you can't see it from this screen-grab the SD output has had it's field-dominance changed and the quality of the video ain't great. This wouldn't be an issue for VHS/DVD review copy or if it was the pre-processed feed for web-conversion but it's not suitable for SD delivery.
For that the best option (short of a £20k Ukon!) is to use the SD-downconvert from the HDCamSR machine.

Snouts in troughs?

It strikes me that you're either a died-in-the-wool capitalist or you're not. I think I've grown up enough to realise that not all folks who believe in free-markets are the very devil incarnate but these people who are willing to accept government handouts and then say their pay should be decided by the market are being a tad two-faced. If you believe in laissez-faire economics deep down in your heart and you're a banker then you should (if you're true to yourself) not accept state intervention. The market should decide if you sink or swim - then you can take whatever package you can get. If, however, you're happy to receive tax-dollars to keep you afloat then you have no right to claim the free-market high-ground - you've moved beyond believing exclusively in free-markets and you're now a different kind of banker.

Maybe they should have thought about this when they decided to butcher the economy for short-term personal gain.

My friend Cynthia's cake business

She makes some good cakes! She's just re-launched her website and is available for weddings, birthdays and barmitzvahs...

New face-recognition in iPhoto '09

I've been playing with the new Apple iLife and have been very impressed how well the face-tagging feature works. The picture above was after the software had learned maybe half a dozen examples of my family. The maths and programming degree I did in the eighties had quite a large slab of pattern-recognition (automated speech recognition was my thesis project) and I remember being taken to see a system the MOD were playing with in 1986 - they had either deployed it (or were going to) at Greenham Common (remember that!) - I think it was called Wizzard (or something like that). It was pretty impressive and it ran on a network of PDP-11s!

Anyhow - below is a paper I had to read for my degree about early efforts in face recognition;

M. Nixon, Eye Spacing Measurement for Facial Recognition, Proceedings of the Society of Photo-Optical Instrument Engineers, SPIE, Vol. 575, No. 37, August 1985, pp. 279-285

Quantel pulls out of NAB

Bit like me(!)

Snowy day - London grinds to a halt!

Only a couple of us made it into the office - I walked from home, hour and a half door to door (I took this picture as I passed Euston) and probably the nicest commute ever! People were very cheery and the silence that snow brings is lovely. All three of my kids were very excited as their schools are closed and they're off to the Heath to go sledging.

From the website of a potential customer...

Via our integrated market-driven USP-experience we'll leverage your expertise to discover the potential your business really has for dramatic growth...

I browsed around for half an hour and still had no idea of what they actually did!

Ceative XFi pocket media players

I bought Creative Zen XFi pocket media players for my youngest two this Christmas (8 gig ones for £80 from Amazon). I was thinking about the iPod Nano but for two boys who don't change what they listen to much, don't routinely download podcasts but do watch LOTS of video these have proved a better bet than iPods. Creative shtick is the quality of audio playback which seems superb (better than Joe, my eldest's Nano). They have their own software for managing the thing but you don't need to use it - you can just drag'n'drop onto the various directories and it all shows up where you'd expect. It has some neat PDA-type features (that passed the boys by!) but the real killer from my point of view is that it plays various video formats - typically MPEG-4 AVIs and Windows Media 9 format files. So - if you're used to handling DivX, Xvid etc then it's all good - you have to re-size in some cases but my workflow for off-air recordings is DV-MSR (off-air MPEG2 transport stream)->MPEG2 (MediaPortal does this at the end of a recording if you ask it to and it is instant)->AVI (via VirtualDub MPEG2 edition). Alternatively their tool (which makes WMVs) is pretty slick and can queue stuff up etc.

Excellent!

David Peto ex-Unit Post - Eastenders?!

I've enjoyed working for Unit on a few occasions and was interested to see David had moved onto new things. If I hadn't read it on his blog I'd not have believed it!

Virgin Media box - rubbish, and it killed my PVR's EPG!

For many months Virgin Media have been calling me to try and get me to take TV as part of my package - I had telephone and data. Eventually the pestering ground me down and I said they could send me the set-top box but I resolved not to install it - I was getting an upgrade to 20Mbits and fixed-cost calls (i.e. standing charge only) so that it seems I'll be saving.
Well - once the box had been delivered I had to unbox it just to have a look and I realised they sent one of the H.264-capable Samsung boxes (HDMI o/p at 1080!). Sarah then said "...it has a better quality version of iPlayer than gets delivered over the web - could we use it for that?" so I ran a co-ax under the floor and installed it.
Of course it didn't work and after much tinkering in engineering menus I discovered that the smart-card wasn't paired with the box! So back into the carboard and stored in the cellar!
Whilst I was tinkering I set MediaPortal to see the box on it's S-Video i/p and was going to run an extra IR blaster so I could PVR cable-channels (in much the same way that TiVO works with Sky boxes). Last night I noticed that MediaPortal had stopped making off-air recordings and when I looked it was clear that it wasn't getting any EPG data. After much head-scratching I realised that if you define an external cable or Sky box it assumes that the EPG ain't coming from DVB-T any more - d'oh!

So - that Virgin box is staying in the cellar and ain't coming anywhere near my good working setup!

Ofcom and PSE - there is no secret sauce Mr Harding!

The issue of Photosensitive Epilepsy comes up often in television - back in the late nineties there was an episode of Pokemon that featured flashing images that provoked kids in Japan to have seizures. Since then Ofcom have been very keen to avoid this on British television and since 2003 have produced the following guidelines;

OFCOM Guidance(extract).pdf

This is an extract from the document but it does include the important details which hinge around the following;

3. A potentially harmful flash occurs when there is a pair of opposing changes in luminance (i.e., an increase in luminance followed by a decrease, or a decrease followed by an increase) of 20 candelas per square metre (cd.m-2) or more (see
notes 1 and 2). This applies only when the screen luminance of the darker image is below 160 cd.m-2. Irrespective of luminance, a transition to or from a saturated red is also potentially harmful.

3.1.1. Isolated single, double, or triple flashes are acceptable, but a sequence of flashes is not permitted when both the following occur:
i. the combined area of flashes occurring concurrently occupies more than one quarter of the displayed (see note 3) screen area; and
ii. there are more than three flashes within any one-second period. For clarification, successive flashes for which the leading edges are separated by 9 frames or more are acceptable, irrespective of their brightness or screen area.

These parameters are well defined and so anyone who can understand them can build a PSE detector that will with certainty detect when a violation occurs. This is how the situation should be as it avoids any one manufacturer of test equipment having a monopoly. Unfortunately this is just the situation that has nearly developed with the Harding FPA detector. Their machine is a PC with SDi capture card that you digitise the video sequence to be checked into and it runs an analysis. The other popular unit is the GordonHD which is more like a traditional piece of equipment in that it sits in the signal chain and gives an alert when it sees a violating sequence go past.

We have a couple of customers who like the idea of realtime performance that the Gordon gives and don't like having to capture (the Harding doesn't support standard codecs so no Quicktime reference export from Avid!), analyse (in slower-than-realtime) and then get a report - only to repeat it all after you've corrected the offending clips (because the broadcaster likes to see a full 10:00:00:00 - 10:54:00:00 report!). The Gordon on the other hand is cheap (£3k against £13k) and just sits there taking a feed of HD/SDi video and Timecode and firing a GPI when a violation is detected (and even entering the TC into a file) which means you can have it hanging off the Avid (or whatever) and the editor can rock'n'roll over a piece of footage adjusting his edit point over the flash frames (it's mostly paparazzi footage with all those camera flashes that cause it) until he gets a sequence that doesn't cause a problem.

Anyhow - you can tell which machine I think is best. Harding is a great self-publiciser who gives you the idea that he alone knows the secret-sauce of PSE. The guys at Tektronix tell me it's on the way as an upgrade for their WVR-series 'scopes but they are worried that Harding has all the patents stitched up.

Anyway - a quick once around pals revealed the following;
Ascent Media check all of five's output (including the two daughter channels) on a GordonHD, ITV's QC department at Upper Ground use a Gordon as their first-pass analyser and Channel Four specify it as well. However, talking to everyone in facilities reveals that they (almost) universally believe the Harding to be the only machine capable of doing the job.
I had several earlier-model Gordon's at Resolution and they were superbly fitted to the job (and cheap enough to have one in every suite). We never had a tape sent back that had gone through it and that included many more hours of terrestrial television than most facilities ever turn out (including quick turn-around stuff with lots of potential trouble - think the Friday night eviction show for Big Brother).

John Emmett of BPR is a gentleman of the old school (they make the Gordon) and you can find an interesting paper on the subject of PSE he co-authored here.

A bit different to Skype!

A prediction from a French magazine of 1900 - they foretold video conferencing!

Windows 7 - getting my geek on

Last week Graham asked me if I was going to try and get a Beta copy of Windows 7 - I told him I didn't have the time or inclination to have to suffer Vista v.2! However - I did feel a bit ashamed that I was being a bit close-minded and I could tell by the look on his face that my geek-cred was slipping so when MS opened the Beta up past the first 2.5m downloads I snagged a copy and installed it on an old Vaio PCG-X1SP (1.5Ghz P4, 1gig RAM, 40gig HD, Radeon 7500 GFX) and was amazed how snappy it was compared to Vista on my MacBook (2Ghz Core2Duo, 2 gig RAM etc etc).

A few drivers weren't there in the Windows ISO but one check of the Windows Update installed everything. The only sub-optimal device is the Radeon Mobility display driver which Windows identified as a generic SVGA device (but got the 1400x1280 resolution correct). It'll do but I wanted to get it right so I have two option;

http://www.driverheaven.net/modtool.php

http://mobilityradeon7500vistadriver.webs.com/index.htm

My first week at the Beeb

Check out my turn-ups and white socks (it was the eighties, after all!) - I'm the forth one from the left sitting down and looking nervous!

Super Capacitors

Need to write this one!

MD5 cracked - is SSL broken?

Must write