More iPlayer shenanigans

I seem to be obsessed with fiddling with the BBC's iPlayer in one form or another. I admit it, I have a problem. From knocking together scripts to control the rubbish Windows downloading version (preventing it from raping my bandwidth and quietly moving the files as soon as they were downloaded through FairUse4WM so that I could play the resulting files on non-Windows machines) to being the first documented person to limbo past the mechanisms designed to favour iPhone and iPod Touch users over mere mortals, I've been picking at the edges of the stickers to see what's underneath them.

As I previously mentioned, the BBC were pushing out a Nokia N96 application for iPlayer access, and I wondered why they were restricting it to just that handset when there are plenty of other QVGA, Symbian S60v3 handsets. Well, it's out now and I'm still wondering why they're restricting it to the N96 because the application works perfectly well on the N95 – not that the average user would be able to find that out, because the iPlayer team have put access to the app behind a user agent checking script. Visit www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/iplayer on an N95 and you get told your phone isn't compatible, but get Firefox to pretend to be an N96 and you gain access to the application, stored at www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/iplayer/iplayer.wgz

WGZ files are Nokia widgets, and are actually renamed ZIP files chock full of webby things (HTML, JavaScript, images and CSS) assembled with a bit of metadata so that the phone knows what to do with it all. Looking at the code in the iPlayer app is a little tricky in its raw form because it's partly obfuscated (no line returns and variable names are deliberately non-descriptive) but also interesting (because sections refer to other Nokia handsets).

The quality of the streams that iPlayer provides the Nokia phones is significantly inferior to the iPhone version – but then there's a smaller, lower resolution screen. When you're actually watching them they're quite adequate.

Far more details are over at the Beebhack Wiki where like-minded brethren pick over the carcass of iPlayer's chicken: beebhack.wikia.com/wiki/Nokia_H.264_version

More newsworthy to some of us is that the next version of iPlayer will be an Adobe AIR application that will happily run on anything that AIR runs on (basically the big three – Windows, Mac and x86 Linux). Yay – DRM on a Linux box. Anyway, AIR apps are actually ZIP files chock full of webby things assembled with a bit of metadata so that… you get the idea. And with that, there's the possibility of more code to snoop around in.

I did a little w00t on Twitter, mainly because I like AIR (hey, I'm a Flash developer – of course I'm going to like it) and I know what's going on in the industry and how AIR works. But only a little w00t because I'm a fan of open source, and AIR is nothing like that, bringing, as it does, DRM to a nice, open OS like Linux. Anyway, the Beeb's internet blog lists it as a review of the announcement, which is kinda cool – not least because they link to this blog, which includes me describing the Windows-only, Kontiki-based iPlayer as a "foetid turd". Yay me =) (I've got an unpublished draft of a post sat looking at me at the moment describing it as "a foetid turd hanging from the sphincter of technology" which makes me smile each time I see it!)

So, erm, yeah. iPlayer.

Mackerel Anderson, 1994-2008

If you're someone who keeps up with my Flickr postings, you'll probably be aware that last Saturday (20th September) Mackerel died quite suddenly. She was 14 years old and was being treated for hyperthyroidism.

On Thursday 18th I took her to the vets for a check-up and for blood tests. She's – sorry, keep referring to her in present tense – she was known by the vets for being difficult to get blood from. She would put up a massive fight. The vet said that it would be better to not put her through sedation every month or two because she needed so much to knock her out enough to take blood, and suggested that we left it for a few months and just continued on the medication she was on. There was a vast improvement in her from the medication and she'd gone from being a skinny cat to a less skinny cat who was behaving far more normally than before.

On Friday 19th, Jayney rang me at work because she'd been sick and there was blood in it. Earlier in the treatment she'd had diahorrea with blood in it but that had been cured by medication for her kidneys and the vet said then that there might be bits and bobs coming to light now that the thyroid was being brought under control. I decided we'd keep an eye on her over the next 24 hours to see if it stabilised before dashing to the vets again.

Sadly, between 3:30 and 7am on Saturday 20th, she died.

I'm heartbroken. I've had her – sorry again, I still can't get used to talking about her in the past tense – I'd had her virtually all her life and getting on for half of mine; through shitty houses, a failed relationship, borderline anorexia, the lot. Seven houses, eight cat companions along the way (some she loved, some she hated, some she put up with). Not having her around just feels wrong. As far as Jack's concerned, she's now gone to live with Aubrey, her closest cat friend who we lost two years back, but he wants to see both of them again. We're all heartbroken.

I realised I couldn't continue without a cat in my life. I couldn't even mourn Mackerel properly without having a mewling companion. So, from the Bridgend Cats Protection shelter came Clarissa, a stocky,feisty little thing, in our hour of darkness.

She's lovely and friendly and likes to play; I do so wish we'd met under less fraught circumstances, but there you go. The main thing is she's there for us and we're there for her and, given that she was brought in as a stray with an abscess on her head and hadn't been neutered, she'd been through it all a bit. I can understand how she felt and how she must feel now that there's a bit of stability for her. The sleepy picture sums it up.