Category Archives: Writing

Writing

CSIRO & BOM report – “Drought: Exceptional Circumstances” (not)

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For those looking for the joint assessment by the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO that’s all over the news at the moment, you can find it on the MAFF website. There is also a web page listed for the data and analysis in the report, but it’s not working yet (I guess they forgot the webmaster doesn’t work on weekends).

It’s about 35 pages long and is fairly technical, but not overly daunting. The content, however, is pretty scary. For us in Victoria is it predicting:

  • by 2010-2040, exceptionally hot years are likely to affect about 75% of the region, and occur every 1.3 years on average;
  • by 2010-2040, exceptionally low rainfall years are likely to affect about 10% of the region and occur about once every 12 years on average;
  • by 2030, exceptionally low soil moisture years are likely to affect about 11% of the region and occur about once every 9 years on average.

Historically it says that Victoria and Tasmania are down 109 mm in rainfall since 1950 and average temperature is up by almost 0.8C over the same 50 year timescale.

The most worrying thing is that these predictions are based on a lower level of CO2e emissions than we are currently tracking towards.

Observations since 1990 show that we are tracking the highest IPCC emission scenario, called A1F1, but climate simulations have not been performed using the A1FI scenario. Most climate research institutes around the world did simulations using the mid-range emission scenarios, called A1B and A2. Hence, in this report, projections for the next 20 to 30 years are based on simulations using mid-range emission scenarios.

So if we carry on how we’re doing now, then the reality could be much worse..

Melbourne’s Water (or lack of it)

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From todays Weekly Water Update:

Storages are now 29.6% full (524,546 million litres) compared with 31.5% (558,019 million litres) for the same period last year. This is the first time in 2008 that storages have dipped below 2007 levels and coincides with a one-in-30 year storm in late June 2007, when reservoirs saw some of their largest one-day gains on record.

So we’re now the bottom line on their graph..

Vacation 1.2.7.0 Released!

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I’m happy to announce the release of Vacation 1.2.7.0.

This is a complete rebase of the current Vacation code base from the closely related version at http://savannah.nongnu.org/cvs/?group=vacation which had been released under the two clause BSD license (no advertising clause).

This means Vacation finally links legally with the GPL’d GDBM (something I don’t believe people previously realised)!

New features in this version are:

  • Vacation will not reply to emails that have the SpamAssassin “X-Spam-Status: Yes” header, thanks to Roberto Piola.
  • It uses the OpenBSD secure string handling functions strlcat and strlcpy and use of sprintf has been changed to snprintf to enhance resilience.
  • Vacation now uses Eric Raymonds rfc822.c library from his Unix Cookbook for much better parsing RFC2822 email addresses.
  • Should (hopefully!) compile on FreeBSD thanks to Marshal Newrock.
  • Vacation will silently create its database if it is missing (previously it just crashed!).
  • Lots of bug fixes!

This version (still) does not implement support for folded headers for those headers it worries about (From:, Reply-To:, etc), that requires a major reworking of the code that is currently underway in the trunk of the Subversion repository.

Thanks to all those who’ve submitted bug fixes, requested enhancements and sent patches, especially Roberto Piola, Marshal Newrock and Daniel Pittman.

You can download the program from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3852&package_id=3820&release_id=611078.

World Petrol Prices

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If, like me, you’re curious about how petrol prices vary across the world then this handy site has a nice table made up from information from contributors around the world (and they want more). The figures are normalised to USD per gallon and Indian Rupees per litre (and be aware of the caveats at the end).

Interesting to see that whilst Americans complain about the cost of petrol they still pay less for it than Australians were in 2005 and presently the UK pays 2.5 times the price of gas in the USA.

How Not to Handle Sensitive Documents (Updated)

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According to the the UK Government’s Cabinet Office:

Top secret – The compromise of this information or material would be likely: to threaten directly the internal stability of the UK or friendly countries; to lead directly to widespread loss of life; to cause exceptionally grave damage to the effectiveness or security of UK or allied forces or to the continuing effectiveness of extremely valuable security or intelligence operations; to cause exceptionally grave damage to relations with friendly Governments; to cause severe long-term damage to the UK economy.

So it’s not very clever to have one of your employees leave such a document on a train..

Our correspondent said that across several departments in Whitehall on Wednesday evening there is said to be “horror” that top-secret documents could have been so casually mislaid.

I’ll say! Apparently the culprit has been suspended from his job.

Update: It happened again, though this time it’s not as clear what the actual classification was.

Large Earthquake in Japan (Mag 6.8) (updated)

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The USGS is reporting a mag 6.8 quake on the Japanese island of Honshu:

80 km (50 miles) SW of Morioka, Honshu, Japan
85 km (50 miles) SSE of Akita, Honshu, Japan
100 km (60 miles) NNW of Sendai, Honshu, Japan
390 km (240 miles) N of TOKYO, Japan

Update: The BBC says the current death toll is 4, and the USGS has downgraded the magnitude to 6.8 from 6.9.

Update 2: Death toll is now 9, and the news services persist in reporting it as a magnitude 7.2 quake even though the USGS page still shows it as 6.8.

The War on Photography

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Bruce Schneier has a great blog article on “The War on Photography” that is causing problems for photographers in formerly free countries around the world. If you are into photography (and/or freedom) it’s well worth a read. One part I will reproduce here is a paragraph with some useful links for us photographers (I’ve added the link for “photographers rights” which wasn’t in the original).

This is worth fighting. Search “photographer rights” on Google and download one of the several wallet documents that can help you if you get harassed; I found one for the UK, US, and Australia. Don’t cede your right to photograph in public. Don’t propagate the terrorist photographer story. Remind them that prohibiting photography was something we used to ridicule about the USSR. Eventually sanity will be restored, but it may take a while.

The Aussie version is already printed and in my camera bag, and remember that:

The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid.

It’s just security theatre..

Links to useful documents: