Everyone is reporting the death of Yasser Arafat at 75, with the cause of death still being kept secret. World leaders are either sending condolonces or speaking ill of the dead depending on their political persuasion. I just hope the strong emotions from this passing at such a painful time for the region don’t trigger yet another downward spiral of violence, death and hatred.
Monthly Archives: November 2004
Aurora possibilities tonight ? (updated)
Update: Been outside whilst it’s clear, but can’t see anything. There’s some high cloud so that may not help, but looking at the auroral oval maps below it looks like reporters may have been a little over-optimistic on this unless you’re in Tasmania.. Hey ho, another time..
Apparently there is the possibility of Aurora tonight, courtesy of a large solar storm going on at the moment.
Details in these links:
New Top 500 List out – IBM now number 1, Earth Simulator down to 3!
Well after a 2.5 year run at the top of the Top 500 the Earth Simulator has been toppled by not one but two new clusters!
SGI overtook it with a cluster at NASA and has already been doing useful modelling of hurricanes.
But even that beast is dwarfed by IBM’s Blue Gene which has taken the No.1 spot by almost doubling the Earth Simulators Linpack measure of Rmax when it’s only part built!
Dell breaches a patent by selling computers abroad ?
More patent stupidity reported by the Register, apparently Dell are being sued for breaching a patent on automatically working out international shipping charges on a website.
Personally I’d have thought it obvious that if you’re selling things overseas the customer needs to know that this before they commit to paying. Apparently Amazon were doing this well before the patent was filed in 1997 which will be handy prior art.
US F-16 Pilot Mistakes School for Firing Range
ABC News is reporting that an F-16 pilot thought a US school was a firing range and fired 25 rounds at it, putting holes in the roof and tarmac. Fortunately there were no children present, only a single caretaker, and he was unhurt.
Arafat in coma ?
The BBC is reporting that Palestinian sources in Paris say Arafat is in a coma, which is denied by officials in the West Bank.
Public liability crisis means saying “You Can’t Do That” is all you can do
The rise and rise of the premiums for public liability insurance has been going on for a long time now (that article was written in 2002) and now it’s getting even further out of hand.
The Tasmanian town of Maydena has had to close all recreational facilities because of a doubling in premiums for public liability insurance.
So no town hall, swimming pool, playground, garden centre and tennis courts..
There goes the neighbourhood..
The problem with political jokes is they get elected.
– Henry Cate VII
So now we have another 4 years of Bush and another 3 years of Bonsai (aka Howard).
I think I need a stiff drink..
Automatic RSS feed detection
The following caught my eye when reading the release notes for the preview release of Firefox:
Live Bookmarks
You can now subscribe to and read RSS feeds in your Bookmarks. When you visit a page that advertises a RSS feed by using a tag, a icon will appear in the status bar. Click it to view a list of feeds the page is offering. Click one to subscribe – this adds a Bookmark Folder that contains all the recent posts from the feed.
This of course begs the question, how do you create one of these links ?
The answer is suprisingly easy, the best answer I found (or at least the first useful one :-)) said to do:
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS” href=”url/to/rss/file”>
So, for my site, it looks like:
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS” href=”backend.php”>
If you’re using the latest Firefox to view my page you should see a little tag in your status bar (normally bottom left) that says 
which you can click on to subscribe to the RSS feed from this site.
This strikes me as a really useful little hack with HTML and I encourage others who are producing RSS feeds to consider using this!
The state of Victoria stops for a horse race
For those outside of Australia it’s probably hard to grasp that pretty much the entire state of Victoria stops on the first Tuesday of each November for a horse race!
The Melbourne Cup has been running for an unbroken spell of 143 years since 1861, which is pretty good going considering the first horses weren’t introduced to Australia until 1788 by the First Fleet.
We didn’t watch the race, it was wet and windy so we were working on rearranging the Nobody Nowhere site.
There is an ABC report on the race if you’re interested..