Category Archives: Writing

Writing

Know Your Rights – Satellites Crashing Onto Your Property

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After a bit of stochastic web-enabled research (( i.e. random searching looking for the conclusion of this case triggered by catching up on a story of Rich’s. )) I found this little piece of information from the UNSW Law Journal that everyone should bookmark away just in case they need it..

There’s A Satellite In My Backyard! – Mir And The Convention On International Liability For Damage Caused By Space Objects.

But what is the legal position in relation to damage caused by the return to Earth of a space object such as Mir? Are there any rules in place to cover such an eventuality? Under what circumstances would Russia have been responsible at international law for any such damage? What would be the extent of its liability? How is damage to be measured and what procedures (if any) are in place to facilitate compensation claims and to arrive at a determination of responsibility and its consequences? Once a determination is made, is it a legally binding and enforceable decision?

Just remember where you read it when you need it.. 😎

More Scarey Australian Copyright Braindeadness..

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The Association for Progressive Communications has a really interesting summary of the possible implications of new copyright legislation in Australia. They have a set of PDF’s there that give a “risk matrix” for teens, families, small businesses and industry.

If you’ve ever wondered how a bunch of kids singing in a restaurant can turn into a criminal offence under copyright law then this is for you (especially if you own an iPod). Read ’em and weep..

(Via)

Chillies are old news..

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..about 6,000 year old news in fact!

Archaeologists in Ecuador have found evidence that chillies were used in cooking more than 6,000 years ago. […] The team of scientists who made the discovery in a tropical lowland area say the spice must have been transported over the Andes to what is now Ecuador as the chillies only grew naturally to the east of the mountain range.

The BBC also has a nice chilli recipe site which includes recipes for chocolate and chilli ice cream and chocolate chilli crème brûlée!

Water Usage – Compare and Contrast

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In January 2007 Melbourne used a grand total of just over 35 million litres of water, down 24% from January 2006.

Each day in South Australia BHP uses over 32 million litres, all extracted from the Great Artesian Basin, and doesn’t pay a cent for it. Still, at least they didn’t increase it to the 150+ million litres a day they wanted to..

NB: BHP’s water use does not impinge on Melbourne, so don’t think I’m saying I don’t believe in the water savings that are so necessary here!

Ex post facto

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It appears that our prime minister believes it would be inappropriate to bring retrospective legislation in to charge David Hicks with offences in an Australian court, but does think it is OK for the USA to do so, even though some prominent US citizens don’t think too highly of ex post facto legislation:

“The sentiment that ex post facto laws are against natural right, is so strong in the United States, that few, if any, of the State constitutions have failed to proscribe them. The federal constitution indeed interdicts them in criminal cases only; but they are equally unjust in civil as in criminal cases, and the omission of a caution which would have been right, does not justify the doing what is wrong. Nor ought it to be presumed that the legislature meant to use a phrase in an unjustifiable sense, if by rules of construction it can be ever strained to what is just.”

(Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13th, 1813)

Vacation 1.2.6.3 released

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This is a minor bugfix release to the 1.2.6 series of Vacation inspired by looking at the sorts of things Linux distros patch for their own usage.

Vacation no longer builds as -m486 by default, though it will build as 32-bit on AMD64/EM64T because GDBM is not 32/64-bit portable and trying to run a 64-bit version against a 32-bit created GDBM causes it to fail and syslog a success message. This is sub-optimal.

The Makefiles CFLAGS handling has been tidied up a fair bit as a consequence and will hopefully make life a little easier for distributors and it no longer tries to strip the vaclook Perl script on install, which was very silly.

Vacation also now accepts the -i option as well as -I to initialise its database.

Download from SourceForge here.

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Vacation 1.2.7.0 beta 3 released

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Another quick release, this time changing the address parsing for From: and Reply-To: headers to use Eric Raymonds rfc822.c library from his Unix Cookbook and fetchmail rather than the old homebrew code which couldn’t parse many RFC2822 addresses. You can enable the old behaviour by compiling with the -DOLD compiler option (though you probably won’t want to).

It also fixes the bug that broke the -r option, there was a stray “:” in the getopt(3) call that meant it expected an (unnecessary) argument.

There’s a couple of trivial tweaks too.

Please report successful and unsuccessful uses!

Available here.

Vacation 1.2.7.0 beta 2 released

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This new beta may be more on the alpha side of beta as it includes a substantial number of changes to improve security. Rather than using the standard strcpy, strcat, etc it now uses the OpenBSD secure string handling functions strlcat and strlcpy and use of sprintf has been changed to snprintf to try and avoid possible buffer overruns. I’m not actually aware of any attacks but this is quite old code so you never know your luck.

I’ve also changed the implementation of the nsearch() function to use strcasestr() which makes it much simpler.

You can download the release from Sourceforge.

Please test and comment!

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