I’ve long been a fan of the Melbourne Coffee Review blog but it’s always hard to remember what’s good where when you’re away from a ‘net connection! So I was pleasantly surprised to hear that they’re going to be releasing “Melbourne Coffee Review :The Guide 2010” in the (hopefully) near future! You can even apparently pre-order it on another site.
Category Archives: Writing
Anti-immigrant Facebook group
The ABC is reporting the depressing, but not entirely unsurprising, fact that 65,000 people have joined an anti-immigration Facebook group.
I’d like to make a suggestion to all that groups members – given that you want immigrants to leave Australia perhaps you would do the rest of us the honour of going first given that your ancestors arrived here with the last 1% of the inhabited time of this continent ?
Thank you for your understanding..
T-Mobile compromised – data for sale ?
Apparently someone claims to have pinched all of T-Mobile’s data..
The U.S. T-Mobile network predominately uses the GSM/GPRS/EDGE 1900 MHz frequency-band, making it the largest 1900 MHz network in the United States. Service is available in 98 of the 100 largest markets and 268 million potential customers. Like Checkpoint Tmobile has been owned for some time. We have everything, their databases, confidental documents, scripts and programs from their servers, financial documents up to 2009.
They claim to have hawked it around their competitors (who seem to know better than to buy it) and now are offering it on the open market.. 🙁
(Via ISC)
AF447 lost – thunderstorm/turbulence
From a Google Translation of the official Air France press release:
The aircraft went through a thunderstorm with strong turbulence at 2 am (universal time) or 4:00 GMT. An automated message was received at 2:14 (4:14 GMT) indicating a failure of electrical system in a remote area of the coast.
🙁
North Korea Tests Another Nuclear Bomb (11 kiloton?)
It’s being reported that North Korea has detonated another test nuclear device, and the USGS is showing a magnitude 4.7 quake in North Korea (the previous device test registered as a mag 4.2 one).
Using the code I mentioned when writing about the first test it appears that it was likely to be around an 11 kiloton device, significantly larger than the 2 kt device tested previously.
Mag. Energy Energy TNT TNT TNT Hiroshima
Joules ft-lbs tons megatons equiv. tons bombs
4.2 0.126E+12 0.929E+11 0.301E+02 0.301E-04 0.201E+04 0.134E+00
4.7 0.708E+12 0.522E+12 0.169E+03 0.169E-03 0.113E+05 0.753E+00
USGS image of DPRK nuclear test 2009/05/25
Mandatory Detetion Powers for Australian Government over H1N1 Outbreak
An interesting titbit from the ABC:
The Federal Government has enacted powers to allow for mandatory detention of people in Australia suspected of having swine flu, if the situation was to worsen.
Whilst these are scary powers I suspect it will be necessary in the case of the current outbreak becoming a lethal pandemic, given many peoples inability to to complete a course of drugs for an illness, and thus vastly increasing its risk of becoming resistant. It’s just evolution in action..
Tram Meets Car
Courtesy of Jeremy, a YouTube video of cars trying to turn in front of trams in an unnamed city in America. Most of them are people either turning illegally or just not paying attention, sigh… 🙁
What makes this one more than just a curiosity is that I stumbled across a FOI response about such accidents in Houston, Texas and happened to notice that the dates on the video matched the ones in the PDF, and that the tram numbers and descriptions of the vehicles involved matched too. The document even names the drivers and lists the amount of damage they caused!
PS: Thanks Gary for the (hopefully) XHTML 1.0 Strict way of embedding YouTube videos!
Oracle buys Sun ? (Updated)
Thanks to Chris Dagdigian on the Beowulf list for pointing out:
It’s official:
http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/oracle/index.jsp
That link says:
REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., April 20, 2009 — Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.
First thought – what on earth does that mean for MySQL ?
Update: this appears to be answered (well, as much as you can in a paragraph) in this FAQ document on the Oracle website (PDF):
MySQL will be an addition to Oracle’s existing suite of database products, which already includes Oracle Database 11g, TimesTen, Berkeley DB open source database, and the open source transactional storage engine, InnoDB.
Second thought – what on earth does it mean for the Sun NCI/BoM HPC deal in Australia ? HPC is hardly Oracle’s market..
Update – it appears the Oracle website can’t cope, currently it’s saying:
No Response from Application Web Server There was no response from the application web server for the page you requested. Please notify the site's webmaster and try your request again later.
I wonder if they need a LAMP stack to help them out ? 😉
Update 2 – Joe points out in his take on the deal that Sun employ(ed) a bunch of core PostgreSQL developers too, which could make life even more interesting..
Final thought for the night – what does this mean for btrfs, ZFS and Solaris licensing ? Oracle have said they are still committed to Linux, so perhaps we’ll see them trying to resolve the NetApp/Sun WAFL/ZFS patent lawsuits in a GPL compliant manner and then relicensing Solaris under the GPL – that would be sensible I think from their point of view as they could then use the good points of Solaris (dtrace and ZFS) to help improve the Linux kernel and benefit from a much larger developer community than they could otherwise get their hands on (OpenSolaris being a niche OS). Of course I won’t hold my breath, but it wouldn’t surprise me either..
Microsoft Guilty of Patent Infringement (again)
A patent infringement battle that’s been going on in the US for 6 years between Uniloc and Microsoft over an Australian invention that lies behind the product activation used in Windows and MS Office, etc has been resolved – and Microsoft has lost to the tune of a cool US$388 million – that’s over half a billion Australian dollars…
On Wednesday, the jury found Microsoft wilfully infringed the patent.
Wilful infringement means that Microsoft knew about it and didn’t care, rather than just not knowing it had been patented. Microsoft tried to argue that the patent was invalid, but the jury didn’t buy that argument. All rather ironic after the Tom-Tom issue (they settled as Microsoft were about to get their imports to the US blocked prior to any judgement on whether or not it was a real issue)..
There’s an interview with the CEO of Uniloc, Brad Gibson, about the verdict on the ABC website.
My first art exhibition!
Donna convinced me that I we should do a joint art exhibition with her paintings and sculptures and my photography and ceramic work, and so in my usual timely manner (not) our “Wonderment” exhibition opens tomorrow (Saturday 18th April) at the Jarmbi Gallery, Burrinja Cultural Center, 352 Glenfern Rd, Upwey here in Victoria and runs until the 10th May.
Tomorrow (Saturday 18th April) is our opening event running from 1pm to 3pm – if you can make it we’d love to see you!