Andy McKay's blog

The BBC is supported by the TV license. I am a huge consumer of the BBC, I listen to the radio a lot. Along with the Guardian it's one of the few bright spots of being in UK. But then again I did consume a huge amount of the BBC in Canada, the web site is brilliant and I listened to the radio. In the UK I don't have a television which means I don't have a license.

This means I'm now marked by the BBC and had a chap who knock on my door, wanting to search my house to verify I had a television. It makes me think of a sketch where a comedian went around to Americans and said, "In the US you need a license to own a gun. Did you know in the UK you need a license to own a television?".

First off recently the television license has changed it's definition to:

You need a TV Licence to use any television receiving equipment such as a TV set, set-top boxes, video or DVD recorders, computers or mobile phones to watch or record TV programmes as they are being shown on TV.

What they are trying to say is that any time you watch live TV in any way, you need a license, eg:

But the TV Licensing Authority now says watching the BBC's World Cup coverage over broadband will require a licence. This is to stop people receiving TV programmes for free on their computer when they would have to pay to see them on a regular television.

This move makes sense, yes 98% of the population own TV's and it's going to be a long time before that changes. But still it seems odd that I consume so much of the BBC yet don't pay for it. In some ways I would like to support, I believe in the quality that and independent organisation such as the BBC or my other favourite the CBC brings. But a new pricing structure should be brought in that reflects usage. I'd pay to subscribe to BBC content so I can view it online (and this what the new BBC media player will bring) but I'd pay less to get the BBC radio on my computer or access premium content on line.

Will the TV ever die out, not for a long time, but the idea of a TV license will start to get old quickly. Moving the BBC to either being funded directly from central government or for pay structure are some alternatives.

• 'PC tax' could replace BBC licence fee
• House of commons "The licence fee remains ... the least worst way of funding the BBC

We visited on the weekend and found a lovely garden for the time of year.

This release includes quite a few changes including ones that break backwards compatability, please read the docs. It adds in:

• Support for django's default filters
• Easy access to MEDIA_URL
• A few shortcuts from normal templating like render_to_response

Download: simpletemplate.0.3.zip

Django applications have this thing that is very useful called MEDIA_URL specified in the configuration, that allows you to have a pointer to your static files, your css, js, images and so on. This is nice because it basically assumes that Django won't be responsible for serving your static stuff out to the world. Let Apache, IIS or whatever do that.

So in your templates, you can link to the MEDIA_URL to point to those files. On my development laptop it would be say localhost on my production server www.agmweb.ca/somethingorother. But wait the MEDIA_URL setting isn't available in a template, through a tag or anything. You have to change your views to use RequestContext and use a context preprocessor. If you do this at a beginning of a project its about 5 lines of code as detailed here.

So repeatedly people keep opening bugs on this eg: http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/2532 and http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/1278 and I can understand not having a template tag, or having all the settings exposed. But this is a useful tag, designed for this purpose, but hard to use. Why? There's no real explanation:

"Im marking this as a wontfix due to the slippery slope potential. If we added this, then people would want a context processor for another setting, and for another setting, and for another. We've already ruled out the idea of a "settings" context processor (see [1278]), so I'd recommend that people write their own two-line context processors if they really want this stuff."

People do seem to want it a lot, so it's being added to SimpleTemplate, the advantage of being able to do my own stuff. If there is another way people change the links of their static files, please let me know.

An interview with one of the Twitter developers.

Once you hit a certain threshold of traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that Rails does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both.

If you're looking to deploy a big web application and you're language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big Ruby fans, but I think it's worth being frank that this isn’t one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.

Scaling anything is hard and this seems to be a common payoff, you can get to a good size quickly, but scaling past that is hard - or slow to get there and scale well. I would always, always rather be faced with the former problem.

On the weekend we did the first part of the Penine Way, Edale up and over Kinder Scout. It was a great hike taking about 6 hours to do around 15 miles (we think). Up on to Kinder Scout, along to the road. Next will be Bleaklow.

For a person who hasn't walked that far in a long time and for an old guy, my Dad is a little old than me, we did pretty well. It was beautiful weather up there and so we had a nice time not the:

"Rough walking, absence of views and loss of direction sense all contribute to the hazards of the plateau even on a clear day."

So Paul Graham announces Microsoft is dead, we knew this. It's just never actually going to die. But if you are a new young entrepreneur and looking to start up a business, who do you worry about? Google. I've ditched at least a few ideas knowing that there's no need - Google will turn around and do it soon enough. It used to be Microsoft, build it and sell it before Microsoft notices you and comes a visiting (eg. NCompass).

Think of that idea, build it and get it out before Google come's a looking and hope they buy. The main difference's of course, everyone likes and uses Google's stuff. Apart from UI (come on Limi) they rock, Microsoft, never really.

Most display's are still insanely expensive in this country. I should have bought one in Canada and shipped it over.

Cost in Apple store UK of a 23" display: UK £779 which translates at today's exchange rate to being US $1,538.05 (xe.com's rate of 1 USD = 0.506485 GBP). Cost in Apple store US of a 23" display: US $899.00. Which is around a 70% premium.

Cost in Dell store UK of a 20" display: UK £229 which translates at today's exchange rate to being US $452.171 (xe.com's rate of 1 USD = 0.506485 GBP). Cost in Dell store US of a 20" display: US $229. Which is around a 97% premium.

Must be expensive shipping that monitor all the extra way from China. That's a premium that Sony would be proud to have on their PS3's.

There are a few authors I just have to get every new book. I can re-read the book and find hidden gems and they rarely get tired. This is in contrast to most authors, whom I can tell in a few pages if I've read before and then send back to the library. But there are a few exceptions. Iain Banks, Alastair Reynolds being two of them. And there was a new Iain Banks book out recently, the Steep Approach to Garbadale.

Seeing it I bugged Danae to get it immediately. Her response was "only if I can get the new Carl Hiaasen. I'm not sure how spending more money helps, but I spotted my opportunity - "sure". So she ordered them. This was about a month ago. There I was doing the laundry and what is staring at me? A copy of the book. How long has it been sat there? Days, weeks? Good god, when was she going to tell me. Suffice to say I've been busy the last few evenings.