Awesome Nutterdom

If you had never been convinced that Steve Jackson Games knew about the forthcoming 9/11 tragedy in 1995 and decided to warn the world by embedding the information in their highly successful Illuminati: New World Order (INWO) card game (rather than issue a press release or something equally as boring) then read this absolutely fabulous page (warning: Geocities quality web design)!

Subtitle: In nine pertinent playing cards of the “Illuminati New World Order” Game, how did the inventor know — in 1995 — the three events comprising the 9/11 attacks? How did he know also the correct plan in the near future? Why do his cards predict the appearance of Antichrist and the Rapture as the last two events of the Illuminati Plan?

They argue that the real cause of the Secret Service raid on SJG in 1990 (5 years before INWO) was not over GURPS Cyberpunk and Phrack but instead to put them out of business before they could think about producing INWO! You have to read the whole thing, I still can’t work out if it’s a clever spoof or if the author really means it.. 😉

Hat tip to Chris Borthwick for the tip off of another loony page on the same site that led me to this..

I can see the fnords!

MPI-3 Forum Seeks Feedback from Fortran MPI Developers

In a posting to the Open-MPI development list Jeff Squyres has requested feedback from Fortran MPI developers on proposed changes to the bindings of MPI functions in MPI-3. He writes:

In the MPI-3 Forum, we’re working on revamping the Fortran bindings to be “better” (for a variety of definitions of “better”). There’s at least one question that we really need some feedback from the MPI Fortran developer community before proceeding. Craig Rasmussen from Los Alamos National Laboratory, chair of the MPI-3 Fortran Working Group, asked me to post a “request for information” to my blog and pass on the URL to every Fortran MPI programmer that I know

The URL of Jeff’s blog is http://blogs.cisco.com/ciscotalk/performance/comments/mpi-3_fortran_community_feedback_needed/. Please pass this on if you do know other Fortran MPI developers.

More Global Warming Evidence

Hot off the press from the University of Colorado via Futurity.org – an analysis of 200,000 years of climate evidence from a lake on Baffin Island in the arctic shows that whilst the temperature should be getting cooler due to natural effects it’s actually going the other way:

While environmental changes at the lake over the past millennia have been shown to be tightly linked with natural causes of climate change—like periodic, well-understood wobbles in Earth’s orbit—changes seen in the sediment cores since about 1950 indicate expected climate cooling is being overridden by human activity like greenhouse gas emissions.

The sediments here go way back:

The lake sediment cores go back 80,000 years beyond the oldest reliable ice cores from Greenland and capture the environmental conditions of two previous ice ages and three interglacial periods.

WordPress 2.8.5 released – security fix and hardening work

WordPress 2.8.5 has just been released:

As you know over the past couple of months we have been working on the new features for WordPress 2.9. We have also been working on trying to make WordPress as secure as possible and during this process we have identified a number of security hardening changes that we thought were worth back-porting to the 2.8 branch so as to get these improvements out there and make all your sites as secure as possible.

It includes a fix for a trackback DoS attack that’s apparently going on at the moment. I’ve updated the 3 blogs I look after with a quick svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.8.5.

Microsoft Silently Installs Firefox Plugins, Introduces Security Vulnerabilities

Oh joy, Microsoft have managed to introduce security problems into Firefox through a plugin for it that they silently install without your knowledge! 🙁

Along with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, Microsoft have been silently installing a Windows Presentation Foundation Plugin that allows the embedding of XAML applications (an XML-based UI technology) in web pages, called XBAP (XAML Web App). The exploit is drive-by, meaning that the victim only needs to be lured onto a web-page for the attack to be effective. The only safe thing to do until a patch is issued, is to open Firefox’s AddOn Manager and disable the WPF plugin.

Mozilla might already have reacted to this, my brother (who alerted me to the above story) said:

Firefox popped up saying it’s blocking 2 Microsoft add-ons so they must be cracking down on them

Dear Microsoft – please do not stuff about with peoples web browsers that don’t belong to you, you’re just not qualified..

Quake 3 Arena – on the Nokia N900 ?

Wow, this is pretty impressive, there is a WIP port of Q3A to the Nokia N900 using the accelerometers to control movement and there are some videos up to see using the TV-out on the phone:

Someone even video’d a multi-player demo at the Maemo summit.. 😉

It’s not publicly available (for the moment at least) from what I can tell, a comment on YouTube says:

Currently not (“yet” I’d guess) – but remember that this is just a work in progress / feasability study – this is only a developer version that got distributed over the weekend during the Maemo Summit 2009 in Amsterdam.

Still, looks fun! 🙂