Category Archives: Writing

Writing

Bushfires (updated)

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Pretty scary listening to ABC 774:

  • At least 181 166 135 84 25 14 people have been killed according to police, with fears that it might be as many as 200 100 40
  • Over 700 80 homes lost around the state
  • According to the ABC the town of Marysville (where we used to have a house) has been wiped out with as many as 50-100 fatalities according to some sources. (video) only one building is left standing.
  • 7 acute patients were evactuated from Beechworth hospital, but the power issue has now been solved. Beechworth hospital may need to be evacuated as the power is now off there, they’re trying to get generators on
  • Concerns for the communications tower on Mt Stanley
  • Unconfirmed fatalities reported by CFA and the ambulance service, Victoria Police are apparently about to do a press release

ABC Aerial photo of what's left of Marysville
“ABC Aerial photo of what’s left of Marysville

Useful links:

View of bushfires from Doncaster in the north of Melbourne, submitted by Chris Mulherin
View of bushfires from Doncaster in the north of Melbourne, submitted by Chris Mulherin

Melbournes Hottest Day On Record (Updated x 2)

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Wow, what a day, according to the Melbourne Uni graph of the temperatures reported by the Bureau of Met we broke the record of 45.6C set in 1939 on Black Friday by almost another degree, peaking at 46.4C (so far). At least there is a cool change on the way and thankfully no lives lost in the fires (so far).

Melbourne Temperature graph at 17:18 on 9th Feb 2009

Max to now: 46.4°C @ 15:04 | Min to now: 24.0°C @ 6:55

If you think that’s bad Avalon got to 47.9C before then!

Update: The cool change just arrived – the new graph above shows a drop of 15C in 10 minutes!

Update 2: There are now unconfirmed reports of casualties from the CFA, according to a CFA officer on ABC 774. They are trying to verify those reports. The cool change has caused them problems and loss of properties.

Taxing Questions for Liechtenstein

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I was listening to the BBC From Our Own Correspondent Podcast which had a great piece by John Sweeney about murky going ons in Liechtenstein. Part of it made me think that they’ve been going to the same school as Microsoft:

The next morning we heard that there was a banking seminar at the university on openness. This being Liechtenstein, the openness meeting was closed, at least to us.

John also has a wicked sense of humour..

Imagine my disappointment on discovering that Liechtenstein was, in fact, the most boring place on earth. I’m used to boredom – I work for the BBC, for heaven’s sake – but Liechtenstein was as dull as ditchwater, no duller. They bank behind closed doors. They create fuzzy trusts behind close doors. They make false teeth. And then they go to bed. The person who most looked like a ruthless killer was Howard, and he was the BBC producer.

Well worth a listen.. 😉

Happy 1st Australian Birthday to me! ;-)

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Today was Australia Day / Invasion Day (depending on your point of view) and it’s the first anniversary of my becoming an Australia citizen.

Didn’t get to do much to celebrate though as we’re in the middle of a massive backup recovery at work which has been keeping me very busy recently (24+ hours of extra work busy to date) and about which I’ll blog more when I get the chance. For now all I’ll say is don’t trust your hardware RAID controller and boy am I glad we’ve got good backups! 🙁

ENOKOGAN – Kogan Agora is dead (for now)

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Oh well, so much for the dream, this was on the Kogan blog this afternoon:

I’m disappointed to have to tell you that the Kogan Agora has to be delayed indefinitely. This delay comes due to potential future interoperability issues.

Sounds like this was partly due to wanting to keep the device compatible with future Android versions needing better screens:

One of the potential issues is the screen size and resolution. It seems developers will be creating applications that are a higher resolution than the Agora is currently capable of handling. […] In order to fully appreciate the feature-rich applications Android developers will be creating in coming months and years, the Agora must be redesigned.

I hope that whatever they come up with still has a real keyboard..

btrfs for 2.6.29

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This news from Chris Mason on the linux-btrfs mailing list:

Hello everyone,

Just a quick note that Linus merged the btrfs unstable repository into the mainline kernel. I’ll cut a new stable release of btrfs-progs on Monday to go with it (for now the unstable repo is the best choice).

I’d like to thank everyone who contributed to the code, tested, reviewed, documented, helped organize and otherwise helped Btrfs get as far as it has. It wouldn’t have been possible without you.

There is a lot of work to do before we can really declare Btrfs finished, but this is a huge step forward.

Yay! Congratulations Chris.. 🙂

For those who want to know more about btrfs, please check out its wiki page..

Extreme Ironing

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You’ve heard of lots of extreme sports by now and probably the Extreme Games, but you’ve probably not heard of Extreme Ironing..

The sport that is ‘extreme ironing’ is an outdoor activity that combines the danger and excitement of an ‘extreme’ sport with the satisfaction of a well pressed shirt. It involves taking an iron and board to remote locations and ironing a few items of laundry. Our Guinness World Record attempt will be for the most number of divers underwater ironing at the same time.

It’s being done to raise money for the UK’s lifeboat organisation (and registered charity) the RNLI and is on the 10th January 2009 at the UK National Diving & Activity Centre near Chepstow.