London Rants

I love the BBC, it offers a great service with reporters distributed all over the world and some of their research units are developing leading edge technologies to do with video technologies, music and all sorts of things to do with broadcast, HD TV, DVB as well as IPTV (such as BBC iPlayer and the list goes on. The TV License is one of the few taxes that I don’t actually mind paying. For those that are interested in the new technologies that the BBC is playing with I recommend reading the BBC Internet Blog.

One of the cool new features they are developing a new beta product called Sound Index. Details about exactly what it does can be found on the site here. In very basic terms it takes information from various music sites around the net such as iTunes, Amazon, MySpace, YouTube, Bebo, lastFM, and more, they then apply an algorithm which creates a ranking of the top 1000 songs and artists online. Very cool and very interesting!

Mozilla Firefox 3 has finally been released. It has massive speed and security improvements as well as hundreds of general improvements and new features. The only other thing I need to say is get it now as its much more secure and faster for all your facebook and email stuff!

Spring has to be my most hated season of the year. This hatred actually ends up being a hatred of one to two weeks of the season when all the grass is in full flower and the pollen is in full swing. I end up dosing myself up on antihistamine tablets for a couple of weeks to stop my eyes and nose from running and sneezing my head off. The grass seed and Plane tree pollen seem to be the ones that set me off, the later is hell as it makes my throat seriously itchy too and the antihistamine doesn’t seem to have an effect on that.

The hell kicked off over the weekend, lets hope its a short peroid of hell this year! Also lets hope its followed by a nice warm, dry European summer