This is good news from first pictures of live giant squid in its natural habitat. The article says:
Working with a cheap camera and a fishing boat, the two Japanese researchers have succeeded where millions of dollars and international film crews have failed.
This is pretty cute, it’s a captive portal for wifi access on the same lines as NoCat but intended for running on embedded Linux systems such as the WRT54G, and it’s called WiFiDog. Ahem. Anyway, their site says:
Existing captive portal solutions were either almost impossible to embed (NoCat, which relies on perl, GnuPG , OpenSSL ), or only designed to display disclaimers with no access control at all (NoCatSplash and others). Wifidog is designed to have optional centralized access control, full bandwidth accounting, node heartbeating and local content specific to each hotspot. It does not rely on a javascript window, so it works with any platform with a web browser, including PDAs and cellphones. It is developed in C to make it easy to include in embedded systems (It has been designed for the Linksys WRT54G, but runs on any recent Linux platform). A typical install only takes 30kb on i386, and a fully functionnal install could be made in under 10 kb if necessary.
Here’s an interesting press release from Google – NASA Takes Google on Journey Into Space
NASA and Google have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that outlines plans for cooperation on a variety of areas, including large-scale data management, massively distributed computing, bio-info-nano convergence, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial space industry. The MOU also highlights plans for Google to develop up to one million square feet within the NASA Research Park at Moffett Field.
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Interesting story from the Australian ABC, scientists have found native plant that repels termites, the report says:
The University of Western Sydney says a team studied a fence post that was left standing in a Queensland paddock, where all the others were eaten by the pest.
The university’s Associate Professor Robert Spooner-Hart says an Australian native plant called the desert sandalwood was growing around the fence post.
Given the alternatives are all pretty noxious, this could be really good news!
We’re sitting under a big thunderstorm at the moment, so I went and had a look at the Bureau of Meterology rain radar map of Melbourne, and saw an amazing image of what was going over the top of us.
After months of work (on and off) with my wife Donna and the rest of the Auties.Org committee I’m proud to announce that an innovative new website has just been launched.
Auties.org is for people on the Autistic Spectrum who are ready to dare reach out, open the doors to the community and market their abilities directly to the public and for those interested in supporting these pioneers.
So if you are on the Autistic Spectrum and stagnating whilst waiting for society to create something for you, why not go ahead and look at what you CAN do and CAN manage, what you ARE interested in and ARE doing now, and begin creating your own opportunities. Even more, if you haven’t got a clue where to start, take a look at what others on the Autistic Spectrum are doing in their own self employment and employable hobbies/skills and see if it inspires you to dare such things with your own unique style, in your own unique way.
All you need is a website or an email and the desire to take that leap.
They say the greatest risk in life is taking no risks at all.
Auties.org has two sides to it, the entrpreneurial/self employment side, and the ‘autie-friendly’ establishments side where you can check out all kinds of places, spaces, faces and activities that are advertising themselves for one reason or another as ‘autie-friendly’ establishments… who knows they might even respect us enough to give us jobs if they have any! From accomodation and eating spaces, to entertainments, travel, social opportunities, goods and therapies, we hope, in time you may find these things here.
By using Auties.org and Autie-Friendly establishments you are supporting a vision of equality regardless of difference, celebration of diversity, ability within disABILITY, and of active empowerment of one of the most disempowered and also underemployed communities in society.
Here’s an example reported by the ABC via the AFP of how unexpected acts can preserve delicate remains from the past, in this case using the shoulder blade of a dead mammoth as a shelter for the grave of two very young children, 27,000 years ago.
Woo-hoo, looks like Postgrey does exactly what it says on the tin.
Here’s the graph from this morning after activating it last night (Saturday 24th) at about 11pm; look at the sudden end of spam (grey) and increase in rejected/defered (red) email! Only 2 little blobs of grey after that showing the grand total of 2 spam messages that got through.
I’ve now installed and activated Postgrey, a Postfix policy service that implements “greylisting”.
So any email coming into csamuel.org for any email address hosted here will get a “try again later” message, the sending email server should retry it later. Spammers on the other hand usually try once and then move on because they’ve got so much email to send.
If you see any email rejected from csamuel.org, auties.org or donnawilliams.net because of this please email the user Postmaster, who won’t have this test applied
This is a pretty impressive graph from the guy who wrote Postgrey to show what happened when he activated it for him on the Tuesday.
For those who are watching what’s going on in Iraq at the moment, this article from the BBC History Department on British relations with Iraq will give you a very necessary historical background on the history and creation of what is actually a very young country.
How many people realise that Iraq was created in the dividing up of the Austro-Hungarian empire between the victorious allied powers of the First World War ?
By gluing three separate provinces (Mosul, Baghdad and Basra) of the Ottoman empire together under the Arabic name for part of the region Iraq was created and then handed over to the British under a mandate from the League of Nations. Much the same happened to the area that then became Palestine.
The British made some bad mistakes in Iraq during their mandate, quoting the BBC:
There was immediate resentment amongst Iraq’s inhabitants at what they saw as a charade, and in 1920 a strong revolt spread through the country – a revolt that was put down only with great difficulty and by methods that do not bear close scrutiny. The situation was so bad that the British commander, General Sir Aylmer Haldane, at one time called for supplies of poisonous gas.
Indiscriminate air power was used to quell the revolt of the region’s tribesmen, methods the British admitted did not win them friends and, as one of them said, implanted undying hatred of the British among the people of the area, and a desire for revenge.
There is also a good Wikipedia article on the British Mandate of Iraq which is well worth a read.