Chris Northwood on his personal blog, gave some insights into “How we applied Continuous Delivery for iWonder Timelines”:
"One thing we didn’t want to do is continuously deliver low quality code… so we took a step back and came up with a few ideas of what that means in a Continuous Delivery world. One key practice was to tackle bugs as soon as we find them. With monthly release cycles, you could leave them until later, but with a continuous flow, there’s no “later” to leave them to. We want to get a single feature through our pipeline quickly, rather than batching up multiple features or improvements into bigger, monthly, releases."
The BBC’s Genome project went live last week. As well as Andy Armstrong’s post you can read this overview from Hilary Bishop on the About the BBC blog.
The Guardian’s angle on Genome was “What was on TV on the day you were born?”
Andy Mabbut via Twitter:
A tweet about Genome from Andy Mabbett
Here's the link to the Wikidata page.
The BBC Research and Development blog featured some work on binaural effects: “Tommies in 3D”:
"...it aims to recreate the complex effect that the human body has on a sound reaching the auditory system to create a more realistic spatial impression for the listener. This effect can be created in recordings with dummy head microphone techniques and also in post-production using digital signal processing, which is the approach we have taken here."
The R&D team have also been running experiments with surround sound on Radio 4’s production last weekend of Under Milk Wood:
“The new headphone surround sound feature is possible thanks to a web technology called the Web Audio API. This client-side script API introduces capabilities for audio signal processing in web applications. It has a range of applications, such as music creation and games, or even recreating the sounds of the Radiophonic Workshop. BBC R&D's Matthew Paradis is co-chairing with the W3C's Audio Working Group, which is working on the specification.”
Doctor and the Dalek poster
If you want to know more about “The Doctor and the Dalek” CBBC game after Paul Bennun's post, you can read a Q&A with Ralph Rivera and Danny Cohen on the About the BBC blog.
There's also a story on the BBC News website and an interview on YouTube with games producer Richard Jenkins and John Howard of Make It Digital.
The gave the game a good review, sensibly testing it on a ten year old:
He had no problem driving it, saying “It was surprisingly good, despite my dad’s warnings about the BBC – though it did crash twice... Since it was aimed at people below the Scratch mark I thought they would do more programming,” continued Alexander, “though you could skip all the blowing up stuff to just the programming and it had basic variables in it. It would be better at the end if you could copy the programs you made so that you learnt that you could use it like a proper programming language.”
Nick Reynolds is Assistant Editor, BBC Online
