<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
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+ <item>
+ <title>Graphing the Norwegian company ownership structure</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Graphing_the_Norwegian_company_ownership_structure.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Graphing_the_Norwegian_company_ownership_structure.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 15 Jun 2015 14:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>It is a bit work to figure out the ownership structure of companies
+in Norway. The information is publicly available, but one need to
+recursively look up ownership for all owners to figure out the complete
+ownership graph of a given set of companies. To save me the work in
+the future, I wrote a script to do this automatically, outputting the
+ownership structure using the Graphviz/dotty format. The data source
+is web scraping from <a href="http://www.proff.no/">Proff</a>, because
+I failed to find a useful source directly from the official keepers of
+the ownership data, <a href="http://www.brreg.no/">Brønnøysundsregistrene</a>.</p>
+
+<p>To get an owner ship graph for a set of companies, fetch
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/brreg-norway-ownership-graph">the code from git</a> and run it using the organisation number. I'm
+using the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet as an example here, as its
+ownership structure is very simple:</p>
+
+<pre>
+% time ./bin/eierskap-dotty 958033540 > dagbladet.dot
+
+real 0m2.841s
+user 0m0.184s
+sys 0m0.036s
+%
+</pre>
+
+<p>The script accept several organisation numbers on the command line,
+allowing a cluster of companies to be graphed in the same image. The
+resulting dot file for the example above look like this. The edges
+are labeled with the ownership percentage, and the nodes uses the
+organisation number as their name and the name as the label:</p>
+
+<pre>
+digraph ownership {
+rankdir = LR;
+"Aller Holding A/s" -> "910119877" [label="100%"]
+"910119877" -> "998689015" [label="100%"]
+"998689015" -> "958033540" [label="99%"]
+"974530600" -> "958033540" [label="1%"]
+"958033540" [label="AS DAGBLADET"]
+"998689015" [label="Berner Media Holding AS"]
+"974530600" [label="Dagbladets Stiftelse"]
+"910119877" [label="Aller Media AS"]
+}
+</pre>
+
+<p>To view the ownership graph, run "<tt>dotty dagbladet.dot</tt>" or
+convert it to a PNG using "<tt>dot -T png dagbladet.dot >
+dagbladet.png</tt>". This is the result can be seen below:</p>
+
+<img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-06-15-ownership-graphs-norway-dagbladet.png" width="80%">
+
+<p>Note that I suspect the "Aller Holding A/S" entry to be incorrect
+data in the official ownership register, as that name is not
+registered in the official company register for Norway. The ownership
+register is sensitive to typos and there seem to be no strict checking
+of the ownership links.</p>
+
+<p>Let me know if you improve the script or find better data sources.
+The code is licensed according to GPL 2 or newer.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Measuring and adjusting the loudness of a TV channel using bs1770gain</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2015 13:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Television loudness is the source of frustration for viewers
+everywhere. Some channels are very load, others are less loud, and
+ads tend to shout very high to get the attention of the viewers, and
+the viewers do not like this. This fact is well known to the TV
+channels. See for example the BBC white paper
+"<a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP202.pdf">Terminology
+for loudness and level dBTP, LU, and all that</a>" from 2011 for a
+summary of the problem domain. To better address the need for even
+loadness, the TV channels got together several years ago to agree on a
+new way to measure loudness in digital files as one step in
+standardizing loudness. From this came the ITU-R standard BS.1770,
+"<a href="http://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BS.1770/en">Algorithms to
+measure audio programme loudness and true-peak audio level</a>".</p>
+
+<p>The ITU-R BS.1770 specification describe an algorithm to measure
+loadness in LUFS (Loudness Units, referenced to Full Scale). But
+having a way to measure is not enough. To get the same loudness
+across TV channels, one also need to decide which value to standardize
+on. For European TV channels, this was done in the EBU Recommondaton
+R128, "<a href="https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf">Loudness
+normalisation and permitted maximum level of audio signals</a>", which
+specifies a recommended level of -23 LUFS. In Norway, I have been
+told that NRK, TV2, MTG and SBS have decided among themselves to
+follow the R128 recommondation for playout from 2016-03-01.</p>
+
+<p>There are free software available to measure and adjust the loudness
+level using the LUFS. In Debian, I am aware of a library named
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libebur128">libebur128</a>
+able to measure the loudness and since yesterday morning a new binary
+named <a href="http://bs1770gain.sourceforge.net">bs1770gain</a>
+capable of both measuring and adjusting was uploaded and is waiting
+for NEW processing. I plan to maintain the latter in Debian under the
+<a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=pkg-multimedia-maintainers%40lists.alioth.debian.org">Debian
+multimedia</a> umbrella.</p>
+
+<p>The free software based TV channel I am involved in,
+<a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, plan to follow the
+R128 recommondation ourself as soon as we can adjust the software to
+do so, and the bs1770gain tool seem like a good fit for that part of
+the puzzle to measure loudness on new video uploaded to Frikanalen.
+Personally, I plan to use bs1770gain to adjust the loudness of videos
+I upload to Frikanalen on behalf of <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
+NUUG member organisation</a>. The program seem to be able to measure
+the LUFS value of any media file handled by ffmpeg, but I've only
+successfully adjusted the LUFS value of WAV files. I suspect it
+should be able to adjust it for all the formats handled by ffmpeg.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
<item>
<title>Hva gjør at NRK kan distribuere H.264-video uten patentavtale med MPEG LA?</title>
<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Hva_gj_r_at_NRK_kan_distribuere_H_264_video_uten_patentavtale_med_MPEG_LA_.html</link>
</description>
</item>
- <item>
- <title>Frikanalen, Norwegian TV channel for technical topics</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Mon, 9 Mar 2015 11:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
- <description><p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a>,
-where I am a member, and where people interested in free software,
-open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs
-come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video.
-The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider
-audience. For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel
-<a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is a useful venue.
-Since a few days ago, when I figured out the
-<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/api/">REST API</a> to program the
-<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/guide/">channel time schedule</a>,
-the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and
-some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org). I fill
-all "leftover bits" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at
-the moment is almost 17 of 24 hours every day.</p>
-
-<p>The list of NUUG videos
-<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/organization/82">uploaded so far</a>
-include things like a
-<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/625090">one hour talk by John
-Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo</a>, a presentation of
-<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624275">Haiku, the BeOS
-re-implementation</a>, the
-<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624493">history of FiksGataMi,
-the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet</a>, the good old
-<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/623566">Warriors of the net
-video</A> and many others.</p>
-
-<p>We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to
-Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to
-spread the word there. I also hope to find useful recordings from the
-Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the
-channel as well. But this require locating the videos and their meta
-information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the
-recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to
-focus on this. Perhaps you want to help. Please join us on IRC,
-<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
-if you want to help make this happen.</p>
-
-<p>But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively
-filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new
-today, check out the <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">Ogg Theora
-web stream</a> or use one of the other ways to get access to the
-channel. Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still
-do not properly sync the video and sound. It is generated by recoding
-a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to
-Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that
-produces acceptable quality. Help needed, please get in touch if you
-know how to fix it using free software.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
- <item>
- <title>The Citizenfour documentary on the Snowden confirmations to Norway</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Citizenfour_documentary_on_the_Snowden_confirmations_to_Norway.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Citizenfour_documentary_on_the_Snowden_confirmations_to_Norway.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2015 22:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
- <description><p>Today I was happy to learn that the documentary
-<a href="https://citizenfourfilm.com/">Citizenfour</a> by
-<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras">Laura Poitras</a>
-finally will show up in Norway. According to the magazine
-<a href="http://montages.no/">Montages</a>, a deal has finally been
-made for
-<a href="http://montages.no/nyheter/snowden-dokumentaren-citizenfour-far-norsk-kinodistribusjon/">Cinema
-distribution in Norway</a> and the movie will have its premiere soon.
-This is great news. As part of my involvement with
-<a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User Group</a>, me and
-a friend have
-<a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_til_Norge_.shtml">tried
-to get the movie to Norway</a> ourselves, but obviously
-<a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_endelig_til_Norge_.shtml">we
-were too late</a> and Tor Fosse beat us to it. I am happy he did, as
-the movie will make its way to the public and we do not have to make
-it happen ourselves.
-<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM">The trailer</a>
-can be seen on youtube, if you are curious what kind of film this
-is.</p>
-
-<p>The whistle blower Edward Snowden really deserve political asylum
-here in Norway, but I am afraid he would not be safe.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
</channel>
</rss>
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