Back in January 2006 some clueful person came up with the idea of creating a Google Earth overlay to monitor bushfires in Victoria.
It pulls in the latest image from the Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) from their current incidents page about fires and overlays it on the satellite imagery.
Red circles are controlled fires, red stars are contained fires and red fires are “going” (i.e. not controlled or contained).
Congratulations to Shane Jacobsen for winning the AFI 2006 Best Actor award for Kenny!
This wonderful email was sent to me by a great friend of mine, Graham, telling the tale of unexpected happenings on a late night drive home.
For overseas readers : ute = utility = pickup truck.
The ABC is reporting that a section of the Great Wall in Inner Mongolia was blasted to make way for a highway.
The company responsible, Hongji Landbridge, was warned not to go ahead with construction. According to government officials, it not only ignored the warnings but went on to demolish three nearby ancient villages.
LWN has a pre-test of Emacs 22 in which Jon Corbet confirms that all is well with the world when he writes:
The addition of an IRC client would have been useful, but this is Emacs, so they added two different ones.
It’s nice to know that in a time of chaos there is a touchstone that you can rely on for consistency. 🙂
I’m here at SuperComputing 2006 (SC06, booth #1938) and whilst wandering around during the exhibition setup yesterday (Sunday) spotted that the folks running the NOC (( Network Operations Center )) for the conference (called SCinet) are running Bro to capture passwords that are going across the network in the clear and publishing them on a set of screens on their booth.
They’re also up on the web here:
https://scinet.supercomp.org/security/passwords06.html
I like these folks style.. 🙂
The ABC is reporting that there is draft Australian copyright legislation (( legislation here thanks to KatteKrab )) that could make it a requirement for all commercial search engines to contact the copyright holder of every web page/site in Australia and obtain permission for their site to be spidered for indexing.
This is because apparently the proposed legislation will only
protect libraries, archives and research institutions but leave commercial entities like Google out in the cold.
Google’s submission is quoted as saying:
“Given the vast size of the Internet it is impossible for a search engine to contact personally each owner of a web page to determine whether the owner desires its web page to be searched, indexed or cached,” Google submitted.
“If such advanced permission was required, the Internet would promptly grind to a halt.”
I disagree, the Internet wouldn’t grind to a halt, but we might find that Australian based sites would drop off the larger worlds radar as they were expunged from search engines. I don’t know how the legislation would impact sites like mine which whilst being written by someone in Australia (( OK, I’m in LA at the moment, but I’ll be back soon )) are hosted overseas ?
OK, so global warming is going to bleach most of the Great Barrier Reef if business as usual carries on in the world. So the Australian Liberal Party (currently in power) has come up with a really great idea to protect part of it – the Federal Tourism minister wants to cover part of it with a shade cloth!
Federal Tourism Minister Fran Bailey says using “shade cloth” over parts of the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland could protect it from the harmful effects of global warming.
This is based upon the fact that a scientist noticed that shaded areas of the reef currently have more vibrant colours. However, my guess is that this won’t be enough to save the polyps from the rising water temperatures which will be the main issue. Sure, the shade will reduce local temperatures relative to exposed areas, but that won’t stop a general trend in temperature rise from the effects of the surrounding water.
A really nice quote from Harssidhi, our finance person here at VPAC:
If money is the means to an end then the world should have ended.
Should the past tense of “rsync” be “rsunk” ?