Important Info Re: IT Crowd Series 3 DVD Easter Eggs

I’m writing this as a personal favor to anyone working on decoding the IT Crowd Series 3 DVD Easter Eggs. There’s a lot of incorrect info going around, and although I have no interest in the hidden messages myself, I feel I should point out a few important things.

Firstly, my website www.reynholm.co.uk has NOTHING to do with the DVD. It’s a personal fansite, it’s been around for several years and I have no affiliation with Channel 4 or the IT Crowd. Please don’t email me asking for the password to the intranet, it’s easy to find. In fact I believe it’s on the Wikipedia page. And most of the sequences of numbers on the site (the password file, etc) have no meaning. Either way, nothing on my website will help you with the Series 3 DVD.

Secondly, and this is the most important one, all the IT Crowd sites are hosted on the same web server.

The IP address is 89.16.172.246

If you visit the IP address on it’s own, you get a blank placeholder site that says “The cake is a lie” and “Coming soon…”. http://89.16.172.246/

Here’s a list of the sites that I could find sitting on that server:
http://www.hokerspoker.com
http://www.itsveryblue.com
http://www.friendface.co.uk/
http://www.fiendface.com/ (Yes, FIENDface, without an ‘R’)
http://www.ilovewillies.com/
http://www.howlonghaveyougot.com/
http://www.bluffball.com/
http://www.bluffball.co.uk/
http://www.cuke.me/
http://www.cuke.co.uk/
http://www.reynholmindustries.co.uk/
http://www.ilovewillies.com/
http://www.itcrowd.com/

As with all these sites, if you go to a page that doesn’t exist you’ll get the standard “Coming soon…” and “Cake is a lie” error page. The same thing will happen if you replace “www” with something else. “Coming soon…” should be interpreted as actually meaning “Page Not Found”. I can pretty much guarantee that http://fakefakefake.bluffball.com/ is not just “coming soon”.

I hope this helps, it’s just basic knowledge to anyone who has ever run a web server or setup DNS

Channel Ten are LIARS!

Network Ten in Australia have been airing the TV series “Lie To Me” since it began. This is one of the few shows they “Fasttrack” (ie they air it 1 week after it airs in the USA).

Tonight we saw an episode called “Do No Harm“, it’s episode #6.
It originally aired in the USA on March 11th, we didn’t see it until tonight (March 24th).

At the end of the episode they announced:

“Due to a delay in the States, Lie to Me will return on April 21st”

Now, I understand that the big problem with fasttracking a TV series from the States is that if the show goes on break there, we have to wait for it here as well. Fair enough, I’d be in the same situation if I was downloading the show.

But here’s the list of episodes:

• Do No Harm (Aired March 11)
• The Best Policy (Aired March 18)
• (Break on March 25)
• Life is Priceless (Airing April 1)
• Depraved Heart (Airing April 8 )

So Australia is 2 weeks behind the USA. The States go on break for just 1 week, and Australia has to wait 4 weeks?
Here’s confirmation that Fox is airing “Life is Priceless” on April 1st:
http://www.fox.com/lietome/

The Australian schedule should be as follows:

• Do No Harm (March 24)
• The Best Policy (March 31)
• (Break on April 7)
• Life is Priceless (April 14)
• Depraved Heart (April 21)

Of course it’s entirely possible for Ten to skip the April 7th break and just show the next episode, but that will make it only 6 days after the original airdate and I’m not sure if that would cause any problems. I doubt it given that NCIS is aired 6 days after the USA, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.

It’s an outright lie to say that the reason they aren’t showing it for 4 weeks because a 1 week delay in the USA.

Ironic for Ten to be lying to millions of people who have just finished watching a TV show that teaches them how to spot liars…

Will you crazy people leave me alone?

So as you all know I built www.lcarsdeveloper.com back in 2002, when I used to be a bit of a Star Trek fan (something I lost interest in very quickly).

At the time I was teaching myself Flash, and I wanted to take on a big project to test my Flash skills and improve on them, so I started messing around with the computer interface from Star Trek, which is known as “LCARS”.

In 2005 my site merged with another site called STEngineer.com, a site that was trying to build an operating system called “LOSS” (LCARS Operating System Shell). I gave control over to the STEngineer owners, but after writing their name all over the site and redirecting their domain name to mine (as well as breaking half the pages) they left and never returned.

Eventually I closed down the forum on the site because it was being overrun by spammers and I couldn’t be bothered moderating it. I had offers from people who wanted to take over the forum, I was even prepared to give them all the posts that were made, but nobody had any serious offers (just amateurs who would have given up 2 weeks later).

In the end I just stopped touching the site, uploaded all the source code (Flash FLA files) and said “do what you want with them”.

A lot of people took me up on that offer, the best example is www.lcars.org.uk, which has essentially expanded on my work and built another site out of it. I’m glad to see there’s a decent credit in the footer of the site, although to just say “thanks for designing the menu” is a little bit of an understatement when he’s kept the original logo and all the animations too. I’m embarrassed to see he’s even posted my hideously inaccurate animation here, the one I only made as a placeholder and never got around to finish.  And these:
http://www.lcars.org.uk/lcars_m.htm
http://www.lcars.org.uk/lcars_o.htm
http://www.lcars.org.uk/lcars_p.htm
http://www.lcars.org.uk/lcars_r.htm
http://www.lcars.org.uk/lcars_x.htm (this one he finished)
http://www.lcars.org.uk/lcars_n.htm
http://www.lcars.org.uk/lcars_s.htm (I hated this one)
http://www.lcars.org.uk/lcars_aas.htm (not sure if this is based on mine)
http://www.lcars.org.uk/lcars_u.htm
http://www.lcars.org.uk/lcars_zh.htm (From my LOSS8 demo…I think?)
http://www.lcars.org.uk/lcars_w.htm (Never finished this one)
http://www.lcars.org.uk/lcars_t.htm
http://www.lcars.org.uk/Enterprise.htm (The big animation half way down with the scrolling text, although he finished it)

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled that this guy has gotten so much out of my work, and it’s obvious from the hundreds of animations he’s made on his own that he has his own talent, he’s just used my work as a shortcut for his own. I think that’s fantastic, it’s exactly what I posted the files online for!

But I’m getting very tired of getting emails from…lets face it…morons who think I somehow stole his website.

Like this gem:

Why do you own ADGE’S lcars web site if you are not going to do anything with it.
Some of my friends wanted a new screen save of save trek. but so far there are no new changes. if you are not going to comtrubute to the star Trek then sale the web site to someone who will do something with it.

I mean come on, I don’t OWN his website! I have nothing to do with, aside from the fact that his menu system is 90% my work.
And since when did I make screensavers? I’ve NEVER made a screensaver, and I never even tried to!
If I’m not going to contribute to star trek I should sell my website to someone who will? Well I’ve already given the whole thing away for free, who would possibly want to pay for it when they can do what Adge did and click “DOWNLOAD”?

Anyway that’s my rant for the day. Stop emailing me.

Drunk Programming

Programming is more fun when you’re drunk. I’m actually enjoying it again for the first time in months! And all it took was 2 glasses of bourbon and 2 glasses of Irish Whiskey!

This function I just wrote is so awesome, seriously.

Now I have to fix someone else’s website before I can go back to working on my own. Stupid hosting company has messed up something. Now when you get a UNIX_TIMESTAMP() from the MySQL database it gives you the wrong timezone, so when I convert it back into a date it comes out as 1 day before I wanted!

So it goes into the database table as 2008-10-13, it comes out as 2008-10-14!

They probably changed the timezone on the servers or something stupid, so now I have to rewrite all the functions.

This is why I host my own sites in Texas instead of Australia…

 

Man…Firefly was one hell of a great show. I make sure to watch the whole series and movie at least once a year, half way through it again right now. There should be more sci-fi.

Friendface.co.uk Text Deciphered!

If anyone was watching The IT Crowd last week, you would remember the whole plot revolved around a Facebook style website called “Friendface”.

Well there is a real official website at www.friendface.co.uk!

Except when you load the site you get a Reynholm Industries error message (I had nothing to do with this, I assure you!)

Well I’ve had nothing better to do tonight, so I  deciphered the blurry text on the page for everyone who was curious what it says. This is genuine, I did this by matching the symbols to where they appeared in the rest of the paragraph. The little upside down V with a dot above it is an ‘A’, and so on.

Here you go:

The text from www.friendface.co.uk, deciphered!

Update: I just found out that someone else beat me by 4 hours, it’s on Graham Linehan’s blog

Still, we’re both happy that someone else could confirm we got it right

IT Crowd Office Supplies

Just in case anyone’s wondering where the IT Crowd items on Zazzle are from, here are the originals from Series 3 episode 3:

Original:

Zazzle:

Original:

Zazzle:

Original:

Zazzle:

Buy them from here: http://www.zazzle.com/reynholm/

Reynholm Industries Update!

I’ve just done a major update of www.reynholm.co.uk

There’s now a new “secret” page and an Office Supplies store (near-exact replicas of props on the TV show, all artwork recreated by hand).

And I’ve updated the color scheme too, to fit more with the show’s look.

Feedback welcome!

(I may be updating some of the intranet wallpapers soon too, stay tuned)

Also very happy to see that the staff ID Cards in the intranet are nearly identical to the ones featured in the latest episode of the show.

Training, Servers, TV and Movies!

Today was my last day of a 5 day training course at work to learn the new computer software…very boring!

I was just about to go home when I checked my emails and saw that my server was having a fit. One of the MySQL tables decided to crash itself, so as soon as I got home I contacted my hosting company and they saved it for me. Just as well, I really didn’t want to lose 4 weeks of forum posts!

Luckily this server is almost about to be turned off, it’s been thrashed over the last 2 years and I’ve got a new one now. Most of my sites have been migrated across, and they run great, but there’s still a handful left on the old server. I’ve disabled the forum and I’m in the process of getting everything put onto the new server, just planning out my strategy to make sure it goes well.

Tonight saw Channel 10 launch their brand new series “Friday Night Download”, from the “genius” creators of the “masterpiece” show called “Big Brother”… If you haven’t guessed, I’m being sarcastic. If you watched the show and enjoyed it, then I seriously doubt you know what sarcasm means, let me translate for you.
“Sarcasm like means like that you say something, but you really don’t like mean what you’re like saying, you know?”
I’ll finish that statement by saying “I hate you”.
It’s basically just an hour-long show of three F-List celebrities watching Youtube clips that we all saw 6 months ago. And it’s not like they used the time to track down a high-resolution version, they actually play the tiny blurry videos fullscreen! At least that’s what I got from the commercials. If I watched the show then I’d be too ashamed to show my face in public.

Anyway instead of watching that gigantic pile of trash tonight, I watched 2 hilarious episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (slowly working my way through the whole 16 disc boxed set!). Then I finally got around to watching “Ocean’s 13″, I hadn’t seen it at the movies but recently bought the DVD.
Now for the record I thought “Ocean’s 11″ was fantastic. I enjoyed “Ocean’s 12″, the story may have been a little confusing and at times far-fetched, but the music, the locations, and the characters were amazing! Most of the reviews I read for “Ocean’s 13″ said it was “not as good as 11 but better than 12″. I have to agree in this case, I really enjoyed this movie.
The opening was a little confusing as the plot was setup, and at times you wondered what they were doing, but it all makes sense (just like the first 2 movies). The music, again, worked well (I loved David Holmes’ usage of parts of the score from “Ocean’s 11″). The cast work great together, and you actually care what happens to them, plus they have a great humour about themselves. There was really only a few moments where I thought “that’s impossible!”, and I cringed when they mentioned “Artificial Intelligence” (although seeing the computer in action was much more believable). But just like a James Bond film, I went in knowing what to expect and enjoyed what I got.

Ocean’s 14? Bring it on!

Hacking the IT Crowd Series 2 DVD

Well 2 days ago my copy of the great series “The IT Crowd series 2″ arrived on DVD from the UK (Region 2 DVD).

Series 1 had a whole bunch of cool geeky features, however series 2 has gone above and beyond this time.

When you select “l33t” subtitles and watch episode 1, you see this:

The subtitles are actually a base64 encoded file! This is the same format used for attachments in emails.

Hidden Files
Episode 1 – “EasterEgg1.jpg”
Episode 2 – “Barber.z5″
Episode 3 – “EggDump”
Episode 4 – Not a file, but some programming code (see below)
Episode 5 – “EasterEgg3.part.2″
Episode 6 – Not a file, it is some kind of encoded light pattern in the bottom of the screen.

Programming Code (Episode 4)
Episode 4 contains the following programming code:

10	REM > Sophie's Choice

20	MODE 0

30	*LOAD EggDump ffff3000

40	ENVELOPE 1, 3, 1, -1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 30, -10, 0, -40, 127, 80

50	PROCPLAY2

60	END

70	DEF PROCPLAY2

80	RESTORE 290

90	REPEAT

100	A = 1

110	READ C, N$, D

120	P = 37 + INSTR("A BC D EF G", LEFT$(N$,1)) * 4

130	N2$ = MID$(N$, 2, 1)

140	IF N2$ = "#" THEN P = P + 4

Etc…
It appears to be in BASIC language, a game called “Sophie’s Choice”.

The JPEG image in episode 1 will probably reveal more though.

The main problem with DVD Subtitles is that they are not text, they are images. The only way to convert them to plain text is to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The best program I’ve seen to do this is SubRip, however this unfortunately truncates the subtitles and only translates the first 8 or so lines.
Currently I’m using a program called Avidemux, it’s the only one I’ve found (out of about ten) that works. The drawback is that although it’s accurate, it also takes much longer to train the OCR.

I’ve written a base64 decoder with PHP, so far I’ve only extracted enough of the subtitles to know that the JPEG photo was taken with an Olympus Digital Camera E-10 at 11:15pm on May 4th 2007.

Update: Part 2 Continues here

Shaun Micallef presents Newstopia

Hi all!

Just a quick post about Shaun Micallef’s new series “Newstopia”, which starts on SBS at 10pm on Wednesday.
There’s a great article about it here at The Age:
Micallef rewrites headlines with comedy Newstopia

Some of my favorite quotes:
“It’s strange to have a segment consisting entirely of American newsreaders mentioning our name,” says Shaun Micallef, anchor of upcoming comedy news program Newstopia, on SBS. “With Port Arthur there was almost this sense that we’ve made it; that we’re up there with any number of mass shootings across the world.”

This is pretty spot on, if something big happens they’ll not only cover the incident, but also the press coverage of the incident!

This perverse pride is not the only quirk of our TV news. There’s our tendency to laud disaster victims as heroes even before they’ve demonstrated courage. (”All you have to do is survive,” Micallef says). World news is crammed into a 90-second overview. And how many other countries devote half their bulletins to sport?

Isn’t it amazing how only 10 minutes of newsworthy events happen on the weekend around the entire world? And then at 6:10pm we have to hear about how some football player stubbed his toe and might miss a few games. Or 5 minutes of discussion about some guy’s groin…

It’s not a foul mouth or rampant political bias that polarises viewers. Few actually take umbrage to his jokes. It’s just that a lot a people – if letters to the editor are anything to go by – simply don’t get him. Every new foray prompts another flood of correspondence, all echoing the same refrain: what’s so funny about this guy? To which an equally large number respond: everything. (Micallef seems to inspire a rusted-on loyalty that other comedians only dream of.)Why? Well, his absurdist, Python-esque flourishes are a world away from the f-words and Frankston jokes of most Australian comics. He doesn’t even do stand-up. As producer Gary Reilly once put it, he’s a “come-to-me” comedian.

This is probably the best part of the article. He’s a genius, but his sense of humor is way out of what most people comprehend. You either get it or you don’t. Who else would start their brand new variety show by walking onto the stage, and then taking a look back at the series so far? (Youtube link)
Or who else would call their show “The Micallef Program”, then rename it to “The Micallef Programme” when people complain about the incorrect spelling of the show, then deliberately rename it “The Micallef Pogram” just to annoy those same people…
Who else would invite Tim Rogers on their show to promote his new CD, only to accuse him of plagiarism! (Youtube link)

I hope the country gives Newstopia the chance it deserves, we need more intellectual comedy in this country!