Category Archives: Writing

Writing

WordPress 2.0.5 is out

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WordPress have just announced the release of WordPress 2.0.5, you can see the changes at the Trac page for the release.

It’s new release time. The latest in our venerable 2.0 series, which now counts over 1.2 million downloads, is available for download immediately, and we suggest everyone upgrade as this includes security fixes.

Congratulations to Ryan Boren on his new baby, Ronan, after whom this release is named!

Update: The upgrade here was painless, nice work folks!. There’s also some more details in this blog post.

Update 2: Brian Layman has asked me to point out that this fixes some serious security problems.

Vegemite and the US FDA

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There’s been a fair bit of discussion around the web about the US FDA banning the import of Vegemite (( Alec Muffett – US govt bans Vegemite )) (( Andrew Pollock – Egad. They’ve banned Vegemite! )) (( BoingBoing – US govt bans Vegemite )) ((News.com.au – US bans Vegemite )).

Well I went digging around because this sounded a little too odd and because the only source was a tiny news story that gave no details. Wikipedia’s Vegemite entry mentions the ban but is equivocal about the veracity of the reports and if you check the history and the discussion page there’s quite a debate about whether or not its real.

So I went to the horses mouth – I left a feedback message on the Vegemite website asking about whether this was real or not and (to my suprise) got a rapid response from Kraft Foods, which I’m waiting to see if they’ll give me permission to quote.

The summary is that the news story is pretty much accurate, if a little old, Kraft Foods haven’t been exporting Vegemite to the US for 12 months now because of the US FDA’s regulations on what foods are allowed to have folate fortification.

Todays Prize

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Today’s prize is for excessive political hyperbole and goes to John Cobb of the National Party.

He criticised the Australia Institute’s statement that perhaps assuming that being able to farm anywhere in a naturally drought stricken country isn’t such a bright idea by describing their attitude as:

agrarian genocide

I’m not quite sure how reconsidering our attitudes to farming in this country equates with mass murder.

How Big Was North Korea’s Bomb ?

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My good friend Alec wrote on hearing about the DPRK nuclear test:

One presumes that there is a small chance it’ll have been staged with conventionals;

That got me thinking – how large a bomb was it ? We know the USGS detected a mag 4.2 shock so I went hunting around to see if there was an algorithm for converting magnitudes on the Richter Scale into energy, and, hopefully, into kilotons or megatons. It turns out J.C. Lahr wrote up a method for the “Comparison of earthquake energy to nuclear explosion energy” and helpfully included a piece of Fortran code to create a table of comparisons.

A quick “apt-get install gfortran” and a bit of mucking around with the code and I had an approximate answer:

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

So a magnitude 4.2 earthquake is (roughly) equivalent to a 2 kiloton device, less than one fifth of the size of Hiroshima bomb. This means it’s probably unlikely to have been a conventional device.

So what North Korea tested was fairly small in these days of megaton devices but certainly nothing you’d want to be anywhere near..

USGS Reports Mag 4.2 Quake in North Korea

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Here’s possible confirmation of the nuclear test in North Korea, the USGS has a report of a magnitude 4.2 quake near Chongjin, North Korea. Capture of the map is below.

North Korean

Update 2014-09-30: Please note that the above links no longer work, thanks to Sharon Thornton (Research Coordinator at The International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics) for pointing that out. Instead here is an alternative URL with information about the quake and also a PDF report on it from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies and the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

LUV (Melbourne Chapter) October General Meeting: Intel Architecture and Hacked Slugs

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Paraphrased from the original.

Start: Oct 3 2006 – 19:00
End: Oct 3 2006 – 21:00

Location: The Buzzard Lecture Theatre. Evan Burge Building. Trinity College Main Campus. The University of Melbourne. Parkville. Melways Map: 2B C5.

Intel’s Core Architecture by David Jones

David Jones is a Solutions Specialist with Intel Australia specialising in Server Architecture, working directly with end users such as Westpac Bank, Ludwig Cancer Research, VPAC and others advising on latest technologies available from Intel. David has been with Intel for 10 years and in IT for 20 years, coming from a UNIX background. Today David will introduce Intel’s latest Architecture (Core Architecture) and explain the differences between Hyperthreading and Dual Core technologies.

Hacked slugs, solving all your problems with little NAS boxes by Michael Still

This talk will discuss how to get your own version of Linux running on a Linksys NSLU2, known to the Linux community as a slug. This is a consumer grade network attached storage (NAS) system. These devices are quite inexpensive, are physically small, and run on low voltage DC power. I also discuss how to handle having your firmware flash go bad, and provide some thoughts on projects made possible by these devices. The presentation will also include extra demonstrations of the process of flashing and setting up one of these devices.

Ed: as usual there will be a pre-meeting curry at 6pm

Default ATM Passwords

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Dear gods, it’s the 80’s all over again, only this time with ATM’s..

In the operator manual freely available on the Web site of a Canadian reseller, a section titled “Programming” provides the specific key sequence that will pop up a screen on the ATM that asks for the master password. It then lists three default passwords – master, service and operator – that could be used to hijack and possibly rig a machine. (emphasis added)

Lets try this again – default passwords are bad, OK ? Sheesh…