March « 2008 « Little Storping-in-the-Swuff

March 16th 2008, 10:03am

Or “Law & Order: Nickers and Briefs”. Yes, Law & Order: London is coming to ITV… Great idea, in theory, but what are they up to in the execution?

A Remake?
They’re going to use the original format. This is great, I’ve never really got into the other L&O shows (Dick Wolf, the show’s creator, sees L&O as a brand, each spin off has its own format, unlike CSI which he describes as a franchise, reusing the same format). But they’re also reusing the same scripts from the early shows. Now these are great scripts, for sure (I gave up on L&O around series 8 or 9 and I’m now going back to look at early seasons I missed) but they’ve already made great shows with some really rather good American actors. Why not make some new shows? Why not set it within the L&O universe (an opening episode with an transatlantic crime, crossover a couple of characters like they did with the other shows)?

Kudos
It’s a produced in cooperation with Wolf by Kudos (Spooks, Hustle, Life on Mars, Moving Wallpaper). Kudos have a good track record with high concept shows (though most of them quickly passed their sell by date). But they’ve tended to be anti-realism sort of concepts, whereas the closest thing to the L&O all procedure and no personal life style we’ve had is The Bill of 20 years ago. (In fact, there are a lot of similarities: focused on the job, private lives only ever incidental, stories split between uniform/woodentops and CID/superstars.) Will Kudos gloss it up, add in some time travel, fourth-wall breaking, terrorist threats, clowns and the test-card girl?

Chris Chibnall
The jury’s out here. Torchwood‘s first series was pretty awful generally, but still Chibnall managed to distinguish his episodes as easily the worst. Similarly, his first episode of the second series ensured the only way was up. However, his Doctor Who was a solid effort and although it’s tempting to attribute Torchwood‘s actually becoming good to the fact he hasn’t had any more episodes yet, he is the head writer, so he must have some influence. The verdict will follow the upcoming hat trick of Chibnall episodes that close the series out. In the meantime, Kudus have made him L&O: London showrunner.

Gizmo and Fritz!Box Fon

March 4th 2008, 10:03pm

This is a little esoteric even by Little Storping standards, but partly in recognition that someone else maybe using the above combination of VOIP service and hardware, and mostly so I don’t forget what I just did, I’m going to describe the configuration changes I made to the Fritz!Box to try to improve call quality.

Gizmo generally has good call quality from Mac to Mac or Mac to POTS, but I’ve been dissatisfied when calling from my phone through the ATA router. It’s a Fritz!Box Fon with the British (Annex A) firmware 06.04.24 . Happily it runs an embedded Linux accessible via Telnet which is turned on by dialing #96*7* (and off again by dialing #96*8*). Once in, turn on verbose mode using voipd -s (to stop it) and then voipd -v (for verbose).

When calling I observed:

ar 4 23:10:05 voipd[776]: allowed bandwidth 432000 for sip:xxxxxxxxxxxxxx@proxy01.sipphone.com
Mar 4 23:10:05 voipd[776]: xxxxxxxxxxx@proxy01.sipphone.com: bandwidth left 432000
Mar 4 23:10:05 voipd[776]: audio: 18 (18 G729/8000)
Mar 4 23:10:05 voipd[776]: audio: 18 (18 G729/8000) => (18 (18 G729/8000))
Mar 4 23:10:05 voipd[776]: audio: 97 (97 iLBC/8000)
Mar 4 23:10:05 voipd[776]: audio: 97 (97 iLBC/8000) => (97 (97 iLBC/8000))
Mar 4 23:10:05 voipd[776]: audio: 0 (0 PCMU/8000)
Mar 4 23:10:05 voipd[776]: audio: 0 (0 PCMU/8000) => (0 (0 PCMU/8000))
Mar 4 23:10:05 voipd[776]: audio: 8 (8 PCMA/8000)
Mar 4 23:10:05 voipd[776]: audio: 8 (8 PCMA/8000) => (8 (8 PCMA/8000))
Mar 4 23:10:05 voipd[776]: audio: 101 (101 telephone-event/8000)
Mar 4 23:10:05 voipd[776]: audio: 101 (101 telephone-event/8000) => (101 (101 telephone-event/8000))
Mar 4 23:10:05 voipd[776]: 130.94.88.90 15530 – 7078 audio 18(G729)
Mar 4 23:10:05 voipd[776]: Codec G729 (18) – audio 42400 hold=none (none) (by local)

I don’t know why it’s choosing G729, I already have always use voice coding in fixed-line network quality on the advanced setup page through the web interface. Oh well, the answer’s here.

nvi /var/flash/voip.cfg

The interesting lines are:
use_audiocodecs = no;
audiocodecs = “PCMA”, “PCMU”, “G726-32″;

Changing the no to a yes makes the fritz box use the codecs in a preference order shown in the second line.

Now I make a call and:

Mar 4 23:21:20 voipd[800]: allowed bandwidth 432000 for sip:xxxxxxxxxxxxxx@proxy01.sipphone.com
Mar 4 23:21:20 voipd[800]: xxxxxxxxxxx@proxy01.sipphone.com: bandwidth left 432000
Mar 4 23:21:20 voipd[800]: audio: 0 (0 PCMU/8000)
Mar 4 23:21:20 voipd[800]: audio: 0 (0 PCMU/8000) => (0 (0 PCMU/8000))
Mar 4 23:21:20 voipd[800]: audio: 8 (8 PCMA/8000)
Mar 4 23:21:20 voipd[800]: audio: 8 (8 PCMA/8000) => (8 (8 PCMA/8000))
Mar 4 23:21:20 voipd[800]: audio: 101 (101 telephone-event/8000)
Mar 4 23:21:20 voipd[800]: audio: 101 (101 telephone-event/8000) => (101 (101 telephone-event/8000))
Mar 4 23:21:20 voipd[800]: 198.65.166.147 18090 – 7078 audio 0(PCMU)
Mar 4 23:21:20 voipd[800]: Codec PCMU (0) – audio 106000 hold=none (none) (by local)

I’ll be keeping an eye on it, but it does look like it’s worked.

Don’t forget to turn telnet off (#96*8*)!