Daily Archives: 22 January 2011

Available from all good record shops now :)

Posted on by

Over the past few months, I’ve been working on an orchestral soundtrack for Cuddington Youth Drama for their next production, “Search for Odysseus” by Charles Way.  It’s a play based around Homer’s Odyssey, but from the son’s (Telemachus) point of view, in the search for his father.  It’s taken a while to get it done – 22 tracks in all, and nothing but the song words to go on, so it’s been a bit of challenge (especially as it’s also the first play score I’ve composed!).  Anyway, the score is all done and recorded now, apart from the obligatory tidying up and necessary spit and polish, and actually finished a week ahead of schedule!

So, if you’re local, don’t forget to come and see it – details on the CYD web site.

Christmas Present Review

Posted on by

Got a great pile of Christmas presents this year – mainly DVDs of classic children’s TV programmes!  The French and Japanese versions were made in 1982, and first shown in English in 1986/87 on Children’s BBC, then repeated again in 1990, the Mysterious Cities of Gold was a 39-part series made jointly by NHK/RTL loosely based around Scott O’Dell’s book The King’s Fifth, and charts the adventures of three 11/12-year old based children – Esteban, Zia and Tao, along with their Spanish companions Mendoza, Pedro and Sancho (who mainly seem to be interested in getting rich), around South America looking for the Cities of Gold.  It’s amazing how well this series has stood the test of time, and I’ve got to say it was great to be able to watch it again (and only the third time in my life I’ve seen it!).  Although the DVD set was released in the early 2000s, it was never released in English at the time and the English dubbed version finally appeared on DVD last year!

Some info about the series: Wikipedia and a unofficial fan site (in English and French).

The other DVDs were the complete first and second series of Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds.  Produced by BRB Internacional SA in Spain in 1981 (so actually predating MCoG by a year), this was a cartoon animation series based on the Alexandre Dumas story The Three Musketeers.  26 episodes were produced for the first series, and the English version was shown on Children’s BBC in 1985.  I’ve got to say, I don’t think I ever saw every episode when I was a kid, so it took a little while to get the story this time round, but definitely a children’s TV classic.  The second series (‘Return of Dogtanian’) was not shown on the BBC, but shown on ITV in 1990 instead as it was a BRB Internacional/Thames Television co-production.  Having never seen the second series the first time round, I was unsure what to expect, although I remember people saying at the time that it wasn’t as good.  Having watched the first five episodes, I think I have to agree with that – many of the voices have changed, the characters don’t seem quite as well-drawn, and the theme music (a rearrangement of the original) is frankly horrible.  However, I’m beginning to warm to it – so perhaps I’d better watch the rest of the series before I go passing judgment on it.  The second series appears to be based on “The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later”, also by Dumas.

More information on Dogtanian can be found at the Wikipedia entry or at this fan site

Still, I enjoyed watching the first series again, and the second series is growing on me slowly, so I can safely say lots of fun was had watching those!  Here’s hoping for Around the World with Willy Fog next Christmas then :)

Posted in TV | Tagged

IPv4 should be all gone, except that it isn’t…

Posted on by

Those of you that have been watching the various “IPv4 exhaustion sites” (including Geoff Huston’s Potaroo site and Stephan Lagerholm’s IPv4Depletion site, as well as the official graph page at APNIC) will know that IANA should have run out of IPv4 addresses last weekend, under normal circumstances.  However this hasn’t happened, and it appears that no-one has “pushed the button”, that is, the day when a RIR asks for the last 2 /8s available for allocation, and thereby triggering a distribution of the remaining 5 /8s one each to each of the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs).

According to comments made from people who should know, the reason this hasn’t happened is that someone, no idea whether IANA, APNIC, or IANA plus all the RIRs, wants to turn this into a massive PR stunt.  So it appears there is an exhaustion day, but it’s a secret.  And that irritates me.  It’s not as if IANA didn’t know this was coming, they could have had the press releases written months ago.

APNIC’s pool is getting lower by the day (at the time of writing this was 1.67 /8s, or 28,017,950 addresses, and the usual threshold for asking for more addresses is about 2.0 /8s.  There are a number of dates it could be, for example, there’s January 31st, Feb 14th, or even the ICANN meeting in March when it is rumoured that Bill Clinton will be coming to speak (but personally I don’t think they can last that long).  It could be today (except that today is a weekend).

I really just wish everyone would stop stalling for time and push the button to start Stage 2.  Whatever day or time it happens, the press are going to be all over it, there’s going to be mass panic in some quarters of the industry, and it wouldn’t surprise me if one or more ISPs or service providers disappear in the next year or two because they just weren’t ready in time and got caught out.  So let’s just push the button now, please IANA? (Well, okay, when you get up!)

28,017,950.72