Today, iplayer tells me "You have download 2.22 of content" with a checkbox saying "Do not show this message". Robbed of a unit the former looks messy, robbed of "again" the latter looks a bit "Do not press this button again".

Download times have come down a bit. Still — 4 hours now for a 60 min programme. I even managed to get something to play today; the frame rate appeared to be about 5/second.

What a flurry of posts? I went mad today and joined twitter and friendfeed both at the same time. Gosh, what a time waster this stuff all is.

Right, just got to twitter about posting on my blog.

Managed to download a file; it doesn't block so badly at 5pm. Can't get the file to play in any way, shape or form. There is, however, a solution. What you do is click on the "download to windows media player" link. This gives you a straight forward URL from which you can http download. This is actually better, in many ways. You can use what ever download manager you like, including a vaguely capable one. You don't have to guess which file is which as you did before. And as soon as some one has worked out how to pull the URLs out of the BBC's UI, we should be able to circumvent the entire process of going to their website.

So, perhaps it's not all doom and gloom after all.

Just been forced to "upgrade" to this, despite having no desire to. It's very impressive. It will only do a single download at a time and is current reporting 10 hours left for a 1 hour programme; the old BBC IPlayer would download in about real-time, certainly after 10pm in the evening. I did manage to download one programme in 5 mins, but sadly the file was only 32k at the end and it wouldn't play; really, really broken. And, of course, it's ditched my existing programmes despite promising to keep them.

Apparently, they have ditched P2P for IPlayer Desktop; good idea, if you ask me. Lower CPU load, no upload traffic generally good. But you have to upgrade your servers, guys. And, of course, the entire internet, to avoid the slowest link effect. Very poor indeed. The message boards would be floods of moans; lucky that the BBC had the foresight to close them down.

Ironically, they've gone high definition; it was announced on the website. Great idea; a week to download 5 mins, but looks great when you do.

Very poor; has to go down in history as one of the worst damn squib launches I've known. I wish I knew how to upgrade back to the old iplayer.

Did the update. RC1 is out which is a reasonable time. If I updated on the release day it would have taken for ever; last time, it took something like 2 hours. This time the whole process was over and done with in an hour. It's all been relatively painless. So far only two problems. Obviously my marble mouse configuration stopped working again, and I had to change all my HAL scripts; luckily, this is now better documented than before. A great relief because following through the myriad pieces of advice on how to do this every update was getting taxing. And, secondly, they've introduced something called "screen-profiles" which is colour schemes for screen; very nice, I'm sure, but when it seems to be kicked off when I start screen with an aliases, asking me lots of questions. Uninstalled it; problem gone.

And Jaunty? Well, it looks nice enough. Boot time is definately faster, although my windows box still beats Ubuntu (there is less on it, to be fair). Login screen looks very cool. Other than that, well, all ahead as normal.

People seem to be talking about my post on upper ontologies. Half of them are moaning about my blog software.

Look, the point is that the user interface is nice and simple for me. I just type stuff into a text editor, I can do it offline and it all works. No one else needs to use it if they don't want to!

Of course, it would be good to use something better, but not if I have to fiddle with any of the 100s of rubbish online editors that I've seen. And it's too hard to change now.

Bah, humbug.

I've been getting recurrent problems with the ssh service on cygwin. It was crashing with a wierd fork, malloc style error that I just had no chance of debugging. It's been causing me real grief. sshfs has stopped working, unison has had problems. But it's only been intermittent, so I never got around to fixing it.

Today, I did the google thing. And the cause? Think hard, have a guess, I promise you will be surprised.

My web cam drivers. Of course, I hid the critical information from you — I have attached a device from Logitech to my machine; I've ranted about logitech before, but this one takes the biscuit. They really do make some of the worse software known to man. I mean, how are you supposed to figure this one out? Hmmm, a key component of my secure networking is causing problems; what can it be? Perhaps, it's my webcam software.

Uninstalled their QuickCam disaster. The webcam still works. So far, no ssh problems at all.