The Slap gets nod for small screen

Nicole BradyMay 28, 2009


Latest related coverage
'Blown away' Tsiolkas takes prize
CHRISTOS Tsiolkas' acclaimed novel The Slap is to be made into a television series.
Matchbox Pictures yesterday announced that after a competitive bidding process it had purchased the rights to produce a television adaptation of the novel, which is set in Melbourne.
Tony Ayres, one of five partners at Matchbox, said he hoped the series would be able to unfold over eight episodes just as the novel was told through eight chapters, each from the perspective of a different character.
"We'd like to honour that in terms of our realisation," Mr Ayres said. "We're very keen for Christos to be involved in the making of the show."
Matchbox is now talking to local television networks about investing in the series. The program seems a likely fit for the ABC, which in the recent federal budget received a $70 million funding increase for local drama production.
ABC TV's head of arts and entertainment, Courtney Gibson, could not be reached for comment. The ABC has won good ratings for its screenings of BBC adaptations of tales by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Alan Hollinghurst.
The Slap is mostly set in Northcote and Fitzroy, where Mr Ayres said the series would be shot. Script development was likely to begin soon with production starting early next year, meaning the earliest the series could go to air would be the second half of 2010.
Mr Ayres said the book lent itself to television rather than film.
"The Slap is about intimate human relationships and television is such a fantastic medium for that," he said.
"There is a breadth to the way television drama can cover a topic and bring you intimacy and connection to a whole world, which is much harder to do in a feature film in 90 minutes."
In making the series, Mr Ayres said he would be drawing inspiration from top-shelf American productions such as The Sopranos, The Wire and Mad Men.
"People are talking about television in the way they used to talk about movies and books, it's what seems to be the cultural capital of our age," he said.
Matchbox Pictures is currently filming a feature film Lou, starring John Hurt. Its production Saved recently screened on SBS.
The Slap will be produced by Mr Ayres, Helen Bowden and Michael McMahon, with Penny Chapman as executive producer.

How to (responsibly) dump your old TV

With two million old TVs estimated to be offloaded annually to make room for these, how can the proud owner of a new plasma display ensure their old CRT doesn't join the toxic swamp at the local tip?

Louisa Hearn
May 25, 2009

Carrying a poisonous cargo of almost 2kgs of lead and other heavy metals, millions of old televisions are finding their way into Australian landfills each year, rather than being recycled.

Around three million new televisions hit our shores last year as the popularity of flat screen technology and the looming 2010 switchover from analogue to digital drove a blistering pace of consumption.

With two million old TVs estimated to be offloaded annually to make room for these, how can the proud owner of a new plasma display ensure their old CRT doesn't join the toxic swamp at the local tip?

In the absence of a unified television recycling program, options for conscientious consumers are little more than a patchwork of local government initiatives, says Fraser Brindley, production and consumption campaigner at Environment Victoria.

"I get so many calls per week from people saying 'I have got all these TVs to get rid of'. If there does happen to be a recycling collection point near them they generally have to pay to offload them".

On Friday, Australia's state and federal environment ministers agreed to set up a national electronic waste recycling scheme.

Details of the scheme won't be in place for another six months but it is expected to involved a levy of about $35 on new TVs to help pay for the cost of collecting and recycling the old ones.

Product Stewardship Australia, an organisation representing TV manufacturers, has been working with Government to develop the framework for such a scheme since 2006.

Executive officer John Gertsakis, says: "Australia is a laggard in the area of television recycling.

"In spite of the whole switch over to digital there seems to be this resistance and indifference to deal with a recycling scheme that would support it".

Instead of the cost of recycling falling to the television manufacturers as it does in other countries, the financial and logistical burden rests largely on local governments who must either transport the thousands of discarded or dumped televisions to landfill or, in rare cases, take matters into their own hands by establishing expensive recycling schemes.

Melbourne's Boroondara council has recycled 19 tonnes of electronic waste for local residents since establishing a central drop-off point, and a spokesman says residents now demand the service.

The City of Sydney council recently set up its own quarterly e-waste collection day where 95-98 per cent of the raw material in electronic items are recovered and reused in manufacturing.

But such initiatives are still thin on the ground, especially in regional areas where there are no electronics recycling companies nearby to deal with collected waste.

"There are only a handful of councils running recycling programs and it is a hell of an operation for any individual organisation to get up and going. What we need is a Federal scheme that funds local collection points across the country or at the point of sale," says Mr Brindley.

To lessen the burden on the environment, the City of Sydney recommends looking at other options before throwing equipment away such as passing it on to friends or family, or hosting a garage sale.

"There are also a range of reuse organisations such as The Bower Bird and Reverse Garbage and charity organisations who accept second hand goods," a spokesman says.

Both the Salvation Army and St Vincent de Paul say they will accept used televisions which are working and meet certain criteria, and a number of websites such as freecycle.org and ozrecycle.com have also sprung up in recent years for passing unwanted household items to others who desire them.

Consumers also have the option of taking old equipment to e-waste recycling operations such as SIMS and MRI, however these centres are only based in larger metropolitan areas, and will charge a small fee for recycling old CRT televisions.

What you can do:

:: Pass on old equipment on to family or friends, or even strangers through an online recycling group such as http://www.freecycle.org.

:: Give old equipment to a charity shop or host a garage sale.

:: Check out whether your local council is running an e-waste recycling program at: http://www.recyclingnearyou.com.au/

:: Take your computer directly to an e-waste recycling depot such as SIMS, MRI or TIC Group for a small fee

:: Ask the Federal Government to set up a national TV recycling scheme at http://www.reborn.org.au

You tube gets 20 hours of video added per minute

Twenty hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube every minute.Illustration: Jo Gay
May 22, 2009 - 3:30PM
YouTube just keeps getting bigger.
The Google-owned video-sharing site said in a blog post that 20 hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube every minute.
It said that in mid-2007, six hours of video were being uploaded to the site every minute. It grew to 15 hours in January of this year and now stands at 20 hours a minute, YouTube said.
"Let's see if we can get to 24 hours - a full day's worth of video uploaded every minute," wrote Ryan Junee, a YouTube product manager.
Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $US1.65 billion but the California-based internet search and advertising giant has not yet managed to turn a profit with the site despite its massive global popularity.
YouTube has been gradually adding professional content such as full-length television shows and movies to its vast trove of amateur video offerings in a bid to attract advertisers.
It recently announced partnerships with Sony Pictures and other Hollywood studios and rolled out new platforms for watching television shows and movies.

Mozilla'd out

So, working under stress here, using w's laptop as since a Mozilla /Firefox update last week on webwillys pc it has spat the dummy,crashing continually and not being user friendly @ all. So the IT help desk, W, has copied all my stuff, to 4 discs, my life reduced to 4 discs and is wiping the slate clean, formatting the hard drive, and reinstalling xp, watch this space.

Newspapers online a fast track to history

The National Library of Australia aims to collate 4 million regional and metropolitan newspaper pages into a single searchable internet portal by 2011.


Louisa HearnMay 21, 2009 - 10:08AM


The Hawkesbury river boatmen who ferried wheat into Sydney in the early 1800s hold a unique place in Australian history.
Complaints of their "vexacious conduct" which caused untold damage to grain stocks leads the front page of Australia's first newspaper, and is now among millions of articles from our pioneering past available at the click of a button.
The National Library of Australia is the driver of this ambitious project, which aims to collate 4 million regional and metropolitan newspaper pages into a single searchable internet portal by 2011.
With 3.5 million news stories already live in the system, historians are hailing the Australian Newspapers beta search service as a fast track into our heritage.
"Newspapers were not inaccessible before but often you would have to travel from state to state for newspapers from capital city or rural areas," said Richard Waterhouse, professor of Australian History at the University of Sydney.
"This is not only going to make sources more accessible to academic historians but also for family historians who will be able to flesh out the story of their own family by finding references in local newspapers."
The process of transferring news from old-world library microfilm into digital format was no simple undertaking, said Cathy Pilgrim, NLA's director of Australian Newspapers Digitisation.
Firstly, the microfilm had to be scanned and sent overseas where optical character recognition software converted the image to text - essential for enabling keyword searches, she said.
With the NLA's core focus on material that is out of copyright, newspaper print quality can vary dramatically, often yielding less-than accurate results from character recognition software.
To complete the editing process, Ms Pilgrim said the NLA had leaned heavily on public goodwill, with users of its digital newspaper service already correcting more than 2 million lines of text in more than 100,000 articles and adding tens of thousands of tags.
"The human eye is much better than a machine and some of our correctors have been doing an amazing amount of work. Some find the work addictive or compulsive, and they are enhancing and enriching the service for future users," she said.
The public is also proving integral to search and rescue campaigns to find newspaper issues missing from the national archives. The NLA makes regular appeals to the public to check under their floor boards or sift through their attics for issues of newspapers missing from collections in libraries around the country.
Ms Pilgrim said that a user of the beta search service recently found reference in the Brisbane Courier to a newspaper called the Braidwood Liberal that was not even previously known to exist.
As it continues to grapple with the challenge of capturing the past, the NLA is also looking into the future in a separate project called Pandora, which seeks to capture a permanent record of significant digital publications and websites that are no longer publicly available.
"More publishing is being done online and less in traditional hard copy so the National Library really wants to be preserving online publishing as well. It's important to be storing and maintaining it so we can provide access to it in the future.
"The Sydney 2000 Olympics website was decommissioned a few weeks after the Games and is no longer available publicly, but through Pandora we managed to archive it," she said.

Have a go @ Wolfram and get addicted

Is Google afraid of the big, bad Wolfram?
Conrad Walters
May 18, 2009
HOW long would it take an auctioneer to speak 6000 words? What was the weather in Beijing on the day Kevin Rudd was born? How many Americans are named Andrew?
Google and Wikipedia flounder with such questions, but an ambitious new search engine called Wolfram Alpha has the tech world abuzz with the promise of being able to do more than link to countless web pages or canvass a broad topic.
Named after its creator, British physicist and mathematician Stephen Wolfram, the free site went public over the weekend and officially launches tonight amid high expectations.
What separates it from everything else is an ability to interpret complex questions in everyday language and then answer those questions by consulting disparate pieces of information.
For example, Google can identify the nearest place for pizza; Wolfram Alpha is designed to tell you where to get the best pizza, explains Sydney technology author and futurist Mark Pesce.
While it may be some time before wolframalpha.com tackles culinary debates, the example does reflect the site's ability to interpret data from unrelated sources.
"It's going to have enough natural language guts to be able to look at a whole bunch of articles and judge them," Mr Pesce said.
The fledgling site is heavily biased towards the sciences, but its ability to infer conclusions from its data is where the potential lies.
For the record, Wolfram Alpha's answers to the questions posed above are: 24 minutes; 21 degrees and clear skies; and 1.06 million Americans.

Electronic Wizardry

How to recover data from a corrupt hard drive

Dave Thompson
May 13, 2009 - 12:19PM

Although all seems lost, there is a chance that data on a corrupt hard drive can be recovered.

Barely a day goes by without someone accosting me and demanding (with menaces) that I divulge everything I know about the black arts of data recovery.

To save me the hassle of explaining that, as an Aikido instructor, I can probably run much faster than they can, I will instead use this forum to share what I know about the subject.

Joking aside, data recovery is a serious and fast-growing global industry; besides the obvious emotional attachment we have with our data, it raises the age-old riddle of what monetary value we put on it.

In the past, data recovery houses have charged pretty much what they liked because people knew so little about it.

Most of us assume that once a drive dies, our data dies with it, although this is only partly true; those in the know can, with equal amounts of skill, good fortune, theatrics and jiggery-pokery, pull the virtual rabbit out of the hat and recover the seemingly unrecoverable.

To know more about data recovery, we need to know how a computer stores information at a raw level and how binary file collaboration results in sector variations of the allocation tables and subsequent cone and cylinder manipulation and fghtyuijnfdmnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn. Oops! Sorry, I nodded off there; the fact is we don't need to know that stuff to grasp how data recovery works.

We can get by knowing a few simpler facts.

Data is stored on our drives using a seemingly old-fangled system involving magnetism and a machine language called binary.

Before you crack open a cup of hemlock, binary is simply a way so- called analogue information can be digitised by using groups of zeros (0) and ones (1). For example, how2 in binary is written 01101000011011110111011100110010.

Hard drives contain one or more highly polished metallic disks called platters, over which passes a "head".

Picture an old-style record player; instead of a plastic disk we use metal and instead of a needle, an electro- magnetic head that reads and writes magnetically polarised 1s and 0s.

When data is written to the disk, the head skips very closely over the spinning disk surface, altering the magnetic state under any given area (called sectors) of the drive.

This data remains there until overwritten by other data, wiped or the platter is physically damaged - as happens when a drive develops "bad sectors", which can be likened to a terminal cancer; once affected, the drive will become increasingly unstable and develop more bad sectors until it fails completely with the loss of any data written to the affected sectors.

As you can see, drives are sensitive and fragile devices; mishandling (dropping) them or bumping them while working is courting disaster.

Drives consist of several separate- but-interconnected systems.

One is the electronically controlled brushless motor that spins the platters.

Then we have some memory (RAM) and other electronic wizardry that controls both the position of the head and when and where data is written by it. On the platters is the file system, which is the specific way data is structured on the drive.

Most file systems utilise an index at the start of the drive denoting where any given file dwells on the platters.

Finally we have a boot sector, which contains information needed for the hardware to find and load our Operating System.

When one, (or more), of these systems gets corrupted or fails, our drive "dies".

If the motor stops, or the bearings seize, the platters won't turn. If the electronics fizzle, then the platters may still spin but the head won't move properly.

If the file system or boot sector gets scrambled, the electronics don't know where anything is.

Either way, the result is that our computer won't boot and we get nasty error messages.

However, unless the platter is physically damaged, by bad sectors, a fire or by having a pickaxe driven through it, the data is still tantalisingly present and, with the right kung-fu, recovery is often possible.

The issue is that many computer "repair" people aren't up with data recovery and file this sort of thing in the "too hard" basket.

They either arbitrarily replace the drive or wipe the contents and start again, claiming recovery is impossible.

My advice, if you are very attached to the "lost" data, is do nothing with the drive and seek a second opinion, preferably from someone who advertises "data recovery" services.

Ask about methods used and go for those who sound like they know what they are doing.

Avoid running the drive as this can make things worse, and resist the temptation to "have a go" yourself; data recovery is a specialist field and the best option is to let them work their mojo. You'll find many operate a no data/no charge policy and really, by that stage what have you got to lose?