Hari's Corner

Humour, comics, tech, law, software, reviews, essays, articles and HOWTOs intermingled with random philosophy now and then

Public service television and other random stuff

Filed under: Bits and Bytes by Hari
Posted on Tue, Oct 2, 2007 at 20:09 IST (last updated: Thu, Oct 30, 2008 @ 07:28 IST)

I was watching the national broadcaster of India, Doordarshan for a little while today and I suddenly realized how much of a relief it is to watch something other than fluffy, mind-numbing, noisy, non-stop entertainment. With the explosion of private television channels, we've been flooded 24x7 with mindless crap in the form of music, movies, daily soaps, reality shows, sensationalist news and other assorted bird-droppings. Doordarshan might not be a modern, efficient or glamourous TV network run by an equally flamboyant, jet-setting media moghul, but it certainly does show some interesting, off-beat educational programmes and has the biggest geographic coverage across the country. Their lack of professionalism and quality in production is a real issue, but at least there is some intent to educate and benefit the public.

I think every country needs at least one public broadcaster which is not motivated purely by profits and driven by the need (or greed) of private corporations.

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I know that I've been complaining about the new house where we moved in, but I realized how lucky we were when we inquired about house rents in various areas in our city (we were looking for one temporarily for a friend). Some of those rents make me shudder when I think about it. Land values have blown way out of proportion and I have a feeling that the greed of people is a contributing factor in this inflationary trend.

People who are lucky enough to own houses or plots in prime areas in the city are sitting on virtual gold mines and they're complacently aware of the fact. There will be a bust, one day, folks! As Papa Hari always says, what goes around, comes around. :-P

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I am currently suffering from a creative burnout after I spent the last three or four days working furiously on my WordPress-to-b2evolution importing tool. From what I can see, it looks to work well and all I need is to release it to the b2evolution community so that everybody can benefit.

I have already expressed my dissatisfaction with WordPress in the past and every new upgrade has been a disappointment. The real motivation to create the importing tool was a selfish one, but I have to admit that I felt a surge of pleasure when I could finally ditch WP instead of whining and complaining all the time.

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While on the same subject, Drew has been extremely kind and accommodating when I was furiously trying to make my converter from WordPress to b2evolution work on this server. He has been patient and very obliging in fulfilling my numerous requests during the last few days. Thanks again, Drew! :)

I would also like to take this opportunity to publicly thank François Planque, the maintainer and lead developer of b2evolution who has really been working overtime to ensure that my migration was successful. He also made a few code changes in b2evolution to help me accommodate my old WordPress permalinks. His timely responses to my queries ensured that I didn't lose much time in the process. Wish all FOSS project developers were half as obliging! Thanks, Francois! :)

7 comment(s)

  1. You're very welcome Hari! :)

    Actually, after your contributing of the WordPress importer, I feel that the very least I can do is making sure it actually works for you :)

    Comment by Francois (visitor) on Tue, Oct 2, 2007 @ 22:52 IST #
  2. It looks very cool in the back office. Maybe that will be my next project.... :)

    Comment by Ray (visitor) on Tue, Oct 2, 2007 @ 23:57 IST #
  3. No problem, Francois. I wanted to help test out b2evolution 2.0 alpha and I hope you found my inputs useful!

    Ray, yes. It's backoffice looks a lot more polished than WordPress. And it exposes a lot more options and features too to the end user (where in WP is available only through code in the themes)

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Wed, Oct 3, 2007 @ 07:02 IST #
  4. PBS is the public station in the U.S. It's national and gets a lot of viewers. It's paid for by donations and foundations from sponsors. There are no advertisements within programs.

    Comment by RT Cunningham (visitor) on Thu, Oct 4, 2007 @ 10:18 IST #
  5. Ah, I see. Thanks for the information, RT.

    Actually in India, even in our public broadcaster, there are advertisements, but at some point, they also need some revenue ;)

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Thu, Oct 4, 2007 @ 12:11 IST #
  6. Yeah, PBS is also great for kid shows, like Sesame Street. All the advertisements are basically just the companies that donate and support the program and are only shown at the beginning and end.

    It's also advertisements that aren't targeted to kids to pester their parents to buy them stuff, etc.

    Comment by drew (visitor) on Fri, Oct 5, 2007 @ 01:47 IST #
  7. Drew, earlier I had no idea that the US had a public broadcaster. I thought everything was privatized there in the Land of Free Enterprise. ;)

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Fri, Oct 5, 2007 @ 09:33 IST #

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