Archive: 2008-04
Refactoring iplayer-dl
Using Windows? There’s now an easy graphical downloader.
Keeping up with iplayer-dl
I’ve had a productive evening hacking
iplayer-dl. Here’s a short list of improvements:iPlayer cat and mouse
My iPlayer download script had been failing on a number of programmes recently, and I’d assumed that they were just not encoded as MPEG 4 files. Having seen them work on a real iPhone, though, I now know that it’s not the case.
Selenium, Firefox 3, and Mac OS X
The latest Firefox 3 betas are really good, and a big improvement over Firefox 2. The improvement in performance on my Eee PC is enormous, but even on the quad-core Xeon I’ve got at work, the increased snappiness is welcome. There are some good interface tweaks as well; after learning to work with the ‘Awesome Bar’ rather than against it, I’ve come to like it. Unfortunately, there’s a downside: Selenium, which we use for acceptance testing at Reevoo, doesn’t work with Firefox 3.
Princess Diana is still dead
This might not make a lot of sense unless you’re very familiar with the British press, but the Daily Express managed to achieve the perfect front page today:
Xi’an outside the wall
I hadn’t realised just how much of Xi’an lay outside the city walls until my last day there. I walked south from the South Gate of the city in a zig-zag until I reached the Big Wild Goose Pagoda—which turned out to be much further than I’d anticipated from my not-to-any-particular-scale map. On the way, I passed through an electronics district, and paused to listen to some amateur Chinese hip-hop on a Samsung-sponsored stage at the side of the street. I’d definitely have missed that if I’d taken the bus!
Chinese supermarkets
There are plenty of familiar chains in China, including a number of supermarkets such as Wal-Mart and Carrefour. Once you get inside, though, Chinese supermarkets are a little bit different from what you might be used to.