Sherlock

A chance to test out my new TV now with Sunday's episode of Sherlock. From the pen of Steven Moffatt (of Dr Who fame) and Mark Gattis (from the League of Gentlemen - and Dr Who) this is a modern take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous books about Sherlock Holmes. I have to say it's very nice to be watching it on a proper TV for a change but enough about the TV, what about the show?

I was largely optimistic about this to begin with to be honest and perhaps I'm a little biased for it but I really enjoyed it. Despite it being a ninety minute episode, it didn't seem to drag on at all and was a good enough length to get a nice storyline going rather than being too constricted by the pre determined length of an episode.

The other great thing is the actors. I was surprised at how well Martin Freeman took to his role as I've not seen him play a serious part before. I absolutely hated the office and many of the characters I've seen him play seem to be very closely linked to his character Tim. Not so however and he came across as a very promising Dr Watson. Many people have already pointed out that the man portraying Mr Holmes has a wonderful name - Benedict Cumberbatch - and he has done very well to land himself this part given that he is relatively unknown.

Each week it appears that a secret message will be posted onto the Science of Deduction Website. I'm amazed I actually figured out this weeks clue as normally I'm pretty useless at this kind of thing. Thankfully I has a slight fascination with codes and ciphers when I was young and I got the clue straight away. Decoding it took a little longer as I am too lazy to do it by hand and instead decided to put my programming skills to the test. At last, something to try in C++. Maybe not. I've broken my compiler and am still no where near understanding how Visual Studio 2010 works. I'm hoping that the parcel I missed is my book on the 2003 version which should help me somewhat. In the end I gave up and wrote it in python - something I am much happier with and took me just a few minutes.

I was a little bit confused at first when the cipher didn't match its description and I ended up programming it to try all combinations rather than just the one I was expecting. A little look down the list and one of them worked. I won't reveal the answer because you can find it on that web page but if you have a spare few minutes, have a go - it's quite fun.