The Canadian Public | Public access television with an attitude.

Happy Holidays!

Posted on December 25, 2011 by François Caron

Happy Holidays everyone!

All of us at The Canadian Public would like to wish everyone plenty of health and prosperity in the new year!

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The Star Wars Holiday Special – REQUEST DENIED

Posted on December 19, 2011 by François Caron

We’ve received an answer from LucasFilms concerning our request to broadcast The Star Wars Holiday Special.

It was rejected.

On a more positive note, the rejection letter was short, very diplomatic, and to the point. In a world where rudeness is becoming more commonplace in the business sector, it’s nice to know there are people out there who still know how to be civil.

The broadcast has been cancelled. We’ll put alternate programming on the air.

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The Star Wars Holiday Special

Posted on December 12, 2011 by François Caron

According to Wikipedia,

The Star Wars Holiday Special was ranked at #3 in “The Five Goofiest Moments Of The Star Wars Mythos”, in the 62nd issue of UK’s Star Wars Magazine.

TV Guide ranked this special at number 11 on their “25 Most Hilarious Holiday TV Moments”, mentioning that it was “unintentionally hilarious”.

TV Guide and TV Land ranked The Star Wars Holiday Special at number 59 on their “Top 100 Unexpected Television Moments” in a five part special that aired from December 5 until December 9 in 2005.

In a 2008 online poll on Christmas specials by the Paley Center for Media, The Star Wars Holiday Special was selected by 59% of the voters (who selected 5 titles each).^{[clarification needed]} It beat out A Charlie Brown Christmas (34.6%), How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (31.3%), and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (28.4%), among others.^[9]

Hated by Christmas special enthusiasts, Star Wars fans, and George Lucas himself, The Star Wars Holiday Special might be the most vilified Christmas special ever broadcast on North American television. It’s a special that so bad, even the author of the highly popular Webcomic XKCD sees it as possibly the worst of the worst in terms of modern entertainment.

And we’re considering showing it every day during the Holiday season starting the week of December 19 ~~without first asking permission from the rights holders!~~ Strike that. We’ll first ask for permission from the rights holders if we can locate them. There’s no need to be hasty, or nasty.

Let’s face it. It’s highly doubtful that this horrendous Christmas special will ever be legitimately released to the general public any time soon. Even the people responsible for its production might deny ever having anything to do with it despite having their names in the credits.

And yet, we can’t deny that this feature actually exists. In fact, it’s vitally important that future generations be made aware of this travesty, otherwise they might produce their own Sci-Fi based Christmas special and achieve the same results! A Star Trek Holiday Special? A Babylon 5 Christmas Special? A Battlestar Galactica New Year’s Cylon Extravaganza? Yikes!

The only science fiction based Christmas specials that seem to work are the ones produced by the current Doctor Who franchise, and it might be best to leave it at that. If any other science fiction series tries to produce their own Christmas special with plenty of indecipherable song and dance and a cast of aging actors, we might as well start holding a competition for the year’s worst Sci-Fi Christmas special!

So what do you think? Should we broadcast The Star Wars Holiday Special as a warning to future generations? Or should we put something else on the air so as not to offend lovers of Christmas, fans of Star Wars, or the original rights holders who will probably never release this horrendous Christmas special in their lifetime?

Should we broadcast "The Star Wars Holiday Special?"

Yes! I'm very curious to see it! (70%, 7 Votes)
NO! DON'T SHOW IT! (30%, 3 Votes)

Total Voters: 10

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Sidebar – IBM Open Class Library

Posted on December 8, 2011 by François Caron

To supplement our income, the owner of this channel does contractual software development work for his old employer. One job involved porting over the source code from the IBM Open Class Library that was included with the long discontinued IBM VisualAge C++ software development platform to the Microsoft Visual Studio software development platform.

Although the converted library is still in beta, it does work! Even under Windows 7!

And very soon, a licensed version of the converted library will be available for purchase.

However, be advised that the old IBM VisualAge C++ package had a nasty habit of breaking many basic coding rules. As a result, your legacy code might need to be adjusted to take into account such essential elements such as function prototypes, external references for global variables, and proper sequencing of class declarations.

In other words, you’ll need to modify your legacy C++ code so that it complies with established C++ coding rules.

Now we’re not suggesting you should create new software using this library, although its GUI scaling capabilities are still pretty forward thinking even to this day. But if you absolutely need to port over some old IBM VisualAge C++ developed code to the Microsoft Visual Studio platform without having to rewrite the entire code from scratch (imagine the bugs), this new library will help ease your porting nightmares as well as make your old code work properly with the latest Windows technologies.

If you’re interested in purchasing a license for this product, please contact us.

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New Live Feeds Available

Posted on November 15, 2011 by François Caron

Along with our existing Eastern broadcast feed, we’ve now added a Pacific broadcast feed. The difference between the two feeds is three hours. The content remains the same.

Next project: Video-On-Demand.

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We Remember

Posted on November 11, 2011 by François Caron

Red poppie To our friends, our comrades, and our heroes.

Thank you.

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Teaser – Amazon Kindle Fire – Dining Room Table Reviews

Posted on September 28, 2011 by François Caron

I want to review an Amazon Kindle Fire!

I’ll need some help! Please sign my petition!

Posted in Programming, Sneak peeks, Technology | Leave a comment

The Digital TV Transition Fiasco

Posted on September 3, 2011 by François Caron

On August 31st 2011, nearly all Canadian television broadcasters were required to shut down their old analog television transmitters, and permanently switch over to their new digital transmitters, bringing Canada into a new era of high definition digital television broadcasts.

The Canadian news media however did such a horrendous job of reporting the upcoming Digital TV Transition, presenting it more as an upcoming television broadcast apocalypse, I felt the need to produce a series of public service announcements to counteract what I now consider as a deliberate campaign of misinformation led by the Canadian television broadcast industry.

This video includes all the individual videos previously released on our YouTube channel during the week of the Digital TV Transition, repackaged in a convenient and entertaining two minute presentation featuring:

How to get the best possible digital television experience at minimal or no cost,
The truth about old rabbit ears and new “digital” antennas,
What to expect from a very basic home-built television antenna.

This information should help alleviate people’s fears over the digital transition, and show the benefits one can expect in this new era of free, crystal-clear high definition television. Unfortunately, the video could also reveal how some people might have been led down the wrong path to digital television in the form of unnecessary equipment purchases and monthly fees.

The fact that much of the misinformation about the Digital TV Transition was propagated by television news reporters has left me wondering if these reporters had any malicious intent over the subject matter, or were simply incompetent. They work in the television industry. How could their information possibly be so wrong?

Regardless of the reasons, I now know I can no longer trust these reporters and their employers to present the facts in an unbiased and reasonably accurate manner, not only on the Digital TV Transition, but also on other subjects.

If you know a Canadian print, radio or television reporter who you believe presented the Digital TV Transition in a false and misleading fashion, please send us a link to a Web page that demonstrates how the reporter has allegedly misrepresented the facts. We’re currently preparing a “Worst Of” list.

“Off to Osaka” and “Fluffing a Duck” by Kevin MacLeod.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Canada 2.5 License.

Download the video!

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