In case you haven’t been paying attention, two American guys claim to have discovered Bigfoot. Unfortunately Bigfoot was dead, so they took some photos, and stuffed him in a freezer.

They aren’t letting many people actually look at the body, but at a press conference they did show some photos. One of these photos was of Bigfoot’s mouth.

Bigfoot's Mouth

Just check out those teeth – they look better than most humans. In fact, they look better than the discoverer’s teeth seen in the same photo. How does Bigfoot, who we suppose is a wild creature without a toothbrush, keep his teeth in such great condition?

Most people feel the evidence for this Bigfoot find looks a little dodgy. Bigfoot looks like a costume stuck in a freezer. And the teeth are too perfect it seems for a wild animal.

But then, ask yourself this: if you were going to devise a Bigfoot hoax, wouldn’t you have made sure the teeth looked a little worn and dirty or decayed? Just to add some realism? Why didn’t these guys do that? Maybe it is real after all!

But then, maybe they thought about that. Maybe they figured that by making it look fake, people would think “that’s so fake, no one could be this incompetent at creating a hoax, so it must be real”. So their hoax looks more real by looking more fake.

Mind blowing I know. But it is similar to my now famous “Perfect Disguise for an Armed Robbery”¹. For those who haven’t heard this before (you need to pay more attention to me), it goes like this. You’re a criminal, about to perform a non-violent armed robbery. You are a generally clean shaven person, with dark hair. So, you go to great trouble to give yourself a very realistic looking red goatee and moustache. You then put on a very fake looking black beard and moustache, one that is so dodgy that the people you are robbing can see that you have a fake beard. In fact, they can clearly see you have a red moustache and goatee under the fake beard.

So, the victims of this crime report the robbery to the police and insist that the person who robbed them had a red goatee and moustache that they tried to cover up with a fake black beard. When the police come around to your door, you are clean shaven. And obviously do not have and never had a red moustache and goatee. Your neighbours also know you to never have had a red moustache and goatee. The case is thrown out of court.

The perfect crime.

So is this the perfect hoax?

¹ I do not condone armed robbery, or robbery in general. It’s a joke. Don’t send me hate mail.

Hang on a minute. Widescreen? Wasn’t the X-Files TV series created in 1993?

Channel Ten in Australia have started showing the X-Files TV series from the beginning. On their HD channel (Ten HD).

Great news if you like the series. But when you watch it, you may find something doesn’t quite feel right. Everyone seems to be a little too close, like they are encroaching in to your personal space. There seem to be a lot of extreme close-ups in the show and at times the stars have parts of their heads cut off.

So, what’s going on?

Well, Channel Ten, in their ultimate wisdom, have decided that people won’t watch the show in HD unless it is widescreen. So, they’ve taken the 4:3 show (the first few seasons were filmed in 4:3), and chopped off the tops and bottoms, stretching it out to give the appearance of a widescreen programme.

Here’s a clip from the episode last week:

And here’s that same scene from the original broadcast:

No wonder everything seems so close.

You’ll notice though that it isn’t fully widescreen – it looks like even Channel Ten staff noticed the clipping if they made it fully widescreen, so they cut it back just a little.

So why am I complaining? I’m offended when people mess with original content. And the point is that Channel Ten don’t get technology.

Widescreen TVs come with a button you can push to tell it to zoom a 4:3 programme to fit a widescreen TV, if that is what you want. So why force everyone to view a bastardised version of the programme when you can offer people choice?

But then it’s the same issue all the TV stations have with technology. I can work out what channel I’m on by pushing the “info” button on my remote – yet they continue to ruin the viewing experience by putting the station identifier on the screen and saying it helps people to know what station they are watching. That Ten HD watermark is huge!

It seems there isn’t a single network with any respect for TV programmes anymore. Revoke all their Free To Air licences!

Trac is an issue tracking system for software development projects. It integrates with Subversion (SVN), and is considered one of the better issue trackers out there because it is light weight and doesn’t bog down issue tracking with huge numbers of options that confuse the user.

Getting Trac running on OS X Leopard Server is quite simple, though it does require some use of the Terminal application. The following is a tutorial on installing Trac, with an emphasis on doing so in the most OS X way possible, and integrating with Open Directory for authentication (the standard user authentication method used by Leopard Server).
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Last week, Channel 9 gave all Australian viewers a sneak peak at “Hole in the Wall” – a new celebrity game show based on a segment from a Japanese game show called “Tonneruzu no Minasan no Okage deshita“. It was a sneak peak, as apparently we will be seeing more of it once the Olympics are over.

I love my Japanese game shows. Probably the highlight of every trip I make to Japan. And for years I’ve been saying on these trips: “We should take some of these shows to Australia – people will love them!”. So when I heard we were getting this show I was excited.

And then I realised we weren’t getting an entire show. Instead we were getting a segment of a show (Brain Wall), stretched out to make an entire show. Mistake number one.

So, the idea of the show is that contestants (celebrities) stand on the “Play Area”, and walls come toward them with shapes cut out – and they have to fit through the shapes, or get pushed in to a pool. You can’t really get that wrong…can you?

Well, here is an example of a “Hole” in a wall.

And now let’s take a look at the male celebrities Channel 9 chose for the first episode.

Notice anything (apart from the fact that the male body in spandex is rarely a good look)? Yes, at least two of these guys (Jacko and Tim) are obese. And look at the hole in the wall. No matter how hard you try, those guys will NOT fit through that hole.

And there is the second problem. It is only funny the first time you present the contestants with holes they can’t fit through. If you continue to do that, it just isn’t funny. And half an hour later the guys had scored a big fat zero.

So Channel 9, you need to actually do a bit of work if you want something to work in Australia. You can’t just buy all the props from Japan, slap it all together and hope it will work. You may not have noticed, but generally Japanese blokes are much skinnier than your average Aussie blokes. So you have to build new props (with cut out stomachs for Jacko and Tim to fit through apparently), or only choose skinny women as contestants (don’t get me started on the sexist comments the host made about the women in the show).

As usual, Channel 9 are idiots. They don’t deserve rights to the show. They don’t deserve a free to air TV licence. And that watermark is still annoying.

I should point out though that the show rated very well. Perhaps like me people were expecting more. I can’t see it lasting as is.